I really get tired of this sentiment because it’s become a lazy stereotype.
Activist investors come around because of bad management. Bad management is irrespective of the MBA.
Satya Nadella of Microsoft is a much better CEO than Sundar Pichai, and both happen to have an MBA.
For reference, over the last 5 years, Microsoft stock has grown over 150% (not counting dividends) while Google has grown about 70%.
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, has a degree in Math with a concentration in CS, but no MBA and has only grown the stock by about 12% before dividends.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, studied CS at Harvard, but Never graduated. He has lost about 25% for investors over the past 5 years.
I choose stock returns because they are what fund most people’s retirement accounts (usually via a mutual fund owning them). The companies are all significant tech companies of roughly $200 billion or greater.
> I really get tired of this sentiment because it’s become a lazy stereotype.
To me, the comment was presented as general evidence that MBAs run companies better than people with non-business educational backgrounds. Otherwise, what's the point?
Yeah, If you zoom out on Microsoft stock, it's always been going steadily up. It never went to the moon but it also never had any major long term dips.
Which is why I'm bullish on Microsoft. They seem to be taking very good strategic decisions. Their focus on linux and WSL, data centers, cloud and services, VSCode, swooping up heavy gaming IPs, now ChatGPT.
Same with Apple.
If only they could remove the suck from Windows 11 and Teams that would be great.
Google on the other hand, seems like it's heading to become the next Yahoo! looking on how the quality of most of its products has declined or they have cancelled.
Google Meet is the only videoconferencing system I've used that works reliably almost like a phone call. I've used Zoom and WhatsApp extensively too and those both suck in comparison. Like not just "worse quality" but painful to use.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has customers that pay with cold hard cash for their Office 365 subscriptions, even if some of their products suck, they still make plenty of money.
Whereas, if any major regulatory body from EU or the US were to crack down on Google's ad tracking empire, a lot of their products would collapse as there's nobody paying for them with actual money.
At least my company does. And my girlfriend's. I think gapps is quite popular. (Yes I know Meet is free, but it's well integrated into Google's paid ecosystem.)
As someone who held it from 2001 to 2011 I beg to differ.
Apple rose a lot in that period but because they were nearly broke right before Jobs introduced the first iPod.
I guess in that period everyone though Microsoft will be running out of steam with their Windows & Office products and had no future.
It sure is, but just as "googling something" means searching it, the zeitgeist doesn't care. I think this should severely worry MBA programs, and those with the degree.
People quote the successful leaders who hold MBAs, while simultaneously ignoring the many who don't, or the many who have it but have failed. It's almost like it doesn't matter; because it genuinely isn't correlative beyond "I'm interested in business, let's get an MBA" (meaning, there is a pipeline bias in the statistics, but that doesn't independently validate the incremental impact of the degree).
MBA programs have no need to be worried, because the people who generally control businesses know better.
If one has an MBA but still flexible enough to change their mind and not rigidly stick to their models they'll be fine. Satya has an MBA but his notions of value don't seem rigid or short-term, so he's very successful.
The ones that will do well for the coming economic cycle are the ones that are the IBM/Oracle/Cisco tier.
Microsoft and Amazon have never had operating losses, not ever.
Google and Facebook did. But they are the product of a very blue ocean for their respective markets. The first people who did it will were going to absolutely clean up, and both of their current strategies are focused on finding the next market that works that way and get there first.
That business model isn't plausible in a high rate environment.
https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/amzn-wo-...
Microsoft: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/tech...
Apple is the odd-man-out right now amongst tech giants with no layoffs. They also didn't spend like drunken sailors on new hires for the past two years though.