We've
seen it before. A small company cares about its customers until it becomes
a big company. Then profits and stock shareholders matter more than
satisfied customers or employees. Then the company becomes a monopoly
and stops listening to its customers entirely. This is what happened
to Microsoft, a company always ready to use the marketing department to
ruin almost any product.
Windows 7 was a very popular product but
it did TOO much. You could buy and run all kinds of programs and Microsoft
wouldn't make any money on them as it had no "Itunes Apple Store"
type closed market. So they wrote Windows 8 which totally confused
everyone, had not much online help and forced people into an MS marketplace
where they were supposed to buy "apps" for and love it.
Nobody did and the whole thing fell apart. A shiny bit of lipstick
on Windows 7, Windows 8 sales were so bad that the company had to give away
copies of Windows 10 in order to maintain it's market share. What
about Windows 9? Ugh, see below. Not only did the company not listen
to it's customers it told them what they were going to like.
The
architect of this stupid nonsense was executive
Steve
Ballmer. He is rich. So rich he makes Beverly Hills 1 percenters seem
broke by comparison. In 2015 his net worth was about $22 BILLION dollars.
Hired in 1980 as Microsoft's 30th employee he pretty much kept putting more
zeros on his paycheck every year. Now he is the 21st most wealthy person
on Earth.
That kind of power, combined with being in the same work
environment for years, makes it unlikely anybody is going to criticize you.
Although known for his high energy product demos he apparently forgot everything
about sales and marketing. His massive attempt to make Windows 8 work
on everything was a huge flop and and he was eventually ousted from the
company in 2013. Oh, sorry, he "retired." I would
be forced out too if I had let the Apple Iphone become a huge hit, let my
stock price stagnate, lost billions of my companies dollars in bad acquisitions
and produced the poor selling Surface tablet. In 2012 Forbes magazine
called him "The worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company."
On news of his "retirement" Microsoft's stock price rebounded!
Ballmer was forced to slink away, fighting with MS founder Bill Gates and
leaving bad blood at the company. With nothing going for him other
than billions upon billions of dollars, Ballmer spent $2 billion to buy
basketball team the L.A. Clippers. The previous own was hideous racist
scumbag
Donald Sterling
who was forced to give up the team due to anti-Black and other comments.
Ballmer brought fresh energy to the team and the players and coaches love
him. He is doing a very good job and no doubt having a lot of fun
in this new role.
Have a Ball, Ballmer, just stay away from Windows!
