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Comment by motvbi | Hacker News Reader

With that reasoning Ballmer should also be gone. The bottom line for MS may look good but after a decade of him not being able to come up with a game plan for mobile devices, which is where the future is, I am surprised the board hasn't shown the door for him. Clearly at this point their usual approach to licensing their OS to mobile devices in large quantities for cheap isn't going work (Android is free) but they still seem to be pursuing the same strategy. Pretty soon it might be hard to keep MS relevant. With all the talent they have a strong leader is what they need to turn them around, I don't see that being Ballmer.

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Ballmer is in an odd position. You may be able to justify firing based on the stock price. But if you look at earnings/profit the man has delivered good growth.

Now you can say, "MS has missed the big trends like mobile devices and search". This is true, but at the same time they've really nailed the enterprise. Not sexy, but they went from people saying, "MS is a desktop OS, not a server" to them being one of the dominant server software providers. From Windows Server to SQL Server to Sharepoint to BizTalk.

If I were Ballmer and my head was on the chopping block my argument would be, "I've made us essential in the enterprise. This is revenue that we will see for decades. Sure, the consumer market I didn't do as well, but given a choice I'll take the less glamorous enterprise market. Why? In the consumer market you can go from market leader to struggling to make a profit in one product cycle (see Nintendo and Sony in the past decade)."

I'm no Ballmer apologist, but I just think there's an argument. Although really the stock price is hard to argue against.

Do you have a breakdown of their net profits? My understanding is that the majority of their profits are still from Windows and Office.

Definitely they make most of their money from Windows and Office. But they have found an additional profit stream.

In 3Q FY10 their breakdown was: Windows 3.0B Office 2.6B Server 1.3B

And note, this is profit for the quarter, not revenue. So their server division (which also includes VS -- which makes good revenue, but not great income) is about half of Office income. And I believe Sharepoint is counted in the Office income, although I'd consider it a server product and it brings in more than $1B revenue (not sure about the margins on it though).

Sharepoint is part of Office division.

This is probably not the best breakdown but just for a record (or to give a picture on their profits)... I talked to one of the Visio SDE in 2007 and he said Visio alone can deliver almost $1B annually.

Their team is about 26 people (26 of probably bottom line, not including Product managers, PMU, and everything all the way up).

>Now you can say, "MS has missed the big trends like mobile devices and search".

And the Internet.

They should have fired Ballmer when they saw his Windows 1.0 ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

A used car salesman running Microsoft is out of his depth. Is it really any surprise the company has floundered for years?

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