Anyone who describes outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s tenure as a “failure” is wrong. An annualized growth rate of 16 percent in a large, established company, selling into mature markets, is nothing to scoff at. Revenue tripled under his leadership; profits doubled. That’s some failure.
It’s also not the case that Ballmer was simply riding high on the Windows and Office monopolies he inherited. They played a part, certainly, but they’re not the whole story. During Ballmer’s time as CEO, Microsoft Dynamics (its suite of CRM and ERP software) went from non-existent to a billion-dollar-a-year business. So too did SharePoint. So did Xbox. So did the System Center suite. So did Lync (formerly Office Communicator). So did Office 365. So did the Windows Azure cloud platform.
Concurrent with this, established products such as Windows Server, Exchange Server, and SQL Server continued to show strong growth. This growth includes the introduction of new features such as Hyper-V that have enabled Microsoft to go toe-to-toe with market leader VMware.
During Ballmer’s time as Microsoft’s CEO, the company grew. It diversified. It expanded into new markets, and it did so successfully. Ballmer enthusiastically promoted new directions like cloud computing, investing money to expand new businesses and giving the technical people the freedom and flexibility to implement the right solutions.
Ballmer worked to actively expand Microsoft’s reach, to strengthen its position and broaden its revenue base.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course. Xbox has had a rocky road. The first model was cripplingly expensive to make, and it sold at a loss, as Microsoft worked to establish a beachhead in the console market. The second model suffered the Red Ring of Death reliability problem. The messaging and PR surrounding the imminent Xbox One has been nothing short of incompetent.
Online, Microsoft still has many challenges ahead. Bing has become a credible search engine, but Online Services Division still loses money (though it’s heading in the right direction). The $6 billion purchase of advertising and marketing firm aQuantive in 2007 turned into a $6 billion write-off in 2012.
Even in enterprise there are anomalies. The rise of BlackBerry (or RIM, as it then was) is remarkable. With Exchange, Microsoft had a strong position in corporate mail and related technologies. With the variously named iterations of Windows Mobile and Pocket PC, Microsoft had a mobile, smartphone operating system. The components were all there. And yet it wasn’t Microsoft who provided a way for busy executives to have reliable, instant access to their Exchange mail wherever they went: it was BlackBerry.
This was an enterprise market through and through, one concerned with remote management and security, one where Microsoft strengths such as support for Office documents could have been brought to bear. It was a market Microsoft should have completely owned. But it didn’t.
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