Microsoft Corp. has today announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, the quite energetic and
developer-friendly figurehead of Microsoft, will be resigning as CEO within the next 12 months, upon the completion of the process for a successor.
Ballmer has said that he will continue as CEO until the process has completed, leading Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a more devices and services orientated company.
“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Ballmer said. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.”
According to the official press release, a special committee has been appointed by the Board of Directors for the process, which includes John Thompson, the board’s lead independent director, and includes Chairman of the Board Bill Gates, Chairman of the Audit Committee Chuck Noski and Chairman of the Compensation Committee Steve Luczo.
“The board is committed to the effective transformation of Microsoft to a successful devices and services company,” Thompson said. “As this work continues, we are focused on selecting a new CEO to work with the company’s senior leadership team to chart the company’s course and execute on it in a highly competitive industry.”
“As a member of the succession planning committee, I’ll work closely with the other members of the board to identify a great new CEO,” said Gates. “We’re fortunate to have Steve in his role until the new CEO assumes these duties.”
Posted 10:13am 24/8/13
Posted 10:13am 24/8/13
Posted 10:42am 24/8/13
Excellent news anyhow, here's hoping MS stops their trend of ridiculously stupid design/product decisions over the last few years.
Posted 01:20pm 24/8/13
Posted 01:37pm 24/8/13
Posted 01:56pm 24/8/13
Posted 02:34pm 24/8/13
I am waiting for the MS share price to drop to $15 again to buy in.
Posted 02:35pm 24/8/13
Why would you buy in if, as you say, "MS is dying off" ?
Posted 03:09pm 24/8/13
Posted 10:02pm 24/8/13
Whereas previously for a monopoly I actually quite liked the way they did things.
But now the things that have left a sour taste in my mouth are :-
MS Office is becoming more and more expesive whereas the OS is getting cheaper and cheaper. In recent years you could buy a copy of office 2010 where it be either pro or adademic or home and student and it coule be activated on 3 computers for less than $300 or less than $100 per pc.
Now Pro is like $500 and you can only actiuvate it on 1 pc.
Compare that to the Operating system where it used to cost upwards of $150 for Home premium and now it's around the $100 per pc.
Then there is windows 8 forced metro start menu
Then there is the cancellation of technet.
MS is seriously starting to blow chunks and if they don't start fixing up there stuff I hope they start seeing the reprocusions much like EA is now and they start shedding customers.
Posted 10:08pm 24/8/13
Posted 11:19pm 24/8/13
nothing wrong with a monopoly - so long as the economy is doing well enough for the rest of us not to care or notice
but here we are...
I ran into someone who's kid goes to Sommerville House School the other day... I was uber impressed with how they lay out their IBM lappies for their girls.
Windows running on top of a Ubuntu base OS.. it's so obvious now that a kids could do it.. yet it was the first time I've seen a higher end school implement the tech in that platform... most other schools are going cheap and doing nothing at all - or a tablet.
Posted 11:02am 25/8/13
Posted 01:12am 26/8/13
RT was a terrible idea and hope they've learned all the associated lessons.
Posted 02:41am 26/8/13
Posted 09:48am 26/8/13
I have however read some really positive comments from people with the Surface Pro. I dunno about the Xbox One, but I've read some comments from "analysts" that "Xbox" as a product within Microsoft has never been profitable. I haven't really seen anything conclusive - the numbers are hard because it's part of their Entertainment and Devices group, and it's not clear that they're taking the benefits of the whole Xbox ecosystem into account - but certainly there's pressure from MS to split that off into a different entity (there was even idle speculation that they might want to sell it off, but all this analyst s*** never seems to be worth the HTML it's written in).
Posted 10:28am 26/8/13
Microsoft's tech and design decisions over the last 5 years haven't been all that bad. The transitions to the WinRT platform through Silverlight/WPF & Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8 were a little rocky though.
Their marketing and communications strategists need to be all lined up and shot though.
Posted 03:58am 27/8/13
Posted 07:54am 27/8/13
True, it is ridiculously priced (why I haven't even bothered and just went straight to Open Office) but I was just pointing out that you now get five activations instead of needing to pay for more after the first.