Analysts Comment That Ballmer Should Have Left Years Ago

With Steve Ballmer set to depart Microsoft’s CEO position, industry leading analysts have had time to reflect and comment upon his departure. The general consensus, as reported by the Telegraph, seems to be that the move is a beneficial one for Microsoft and that it should of happened earlier.

“To be successful in a technology company, first and foremost, you need to earn the respect of software developers and engineers. And Ballmer failed to do that in the past 15 years. Ballmer should have left Microsoft at least 8 years back.” Said Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research.

“A change is definitely needed. Since he took over in 2000, it is fair to say he missed a number of transitions: mobile, tablets, cloud. And Microsoft was very slow with virtualization, it has no place in the software defined data center” Said Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research

However, there are some analysts that have come to the defence of Ballmer arguing that it wasn’t necessarily his fault.

“I think the numbers sway the board. The PC market peaked in the absolute sense in September 2011. The No. 1 PC maker sold more smartphones than PCs last quarter – Lenovo.” Stated Colin Gillis of BGC Partners.

“As much as people would like to blame Steve Ballmer for the fortunes of the company, I think it’s the silos. I thought they had great products, but they should have worked better together and leveraged common foundations.

“One can argue that Ballmer as CEO was in part responsible for that failure. Then again it is a broad, systematic one. Though Microsoft has been doing better than others (in dealing with the PC decline), where Ballmer does not get sufficient credit for is the other divisions. Servers, xBox, Bing products in general have shown some success. The problem for Microsoft is its revenue primarily comes from sales to business. It should be viewed more like IBM, but is viewed as consumer like Apple.Maybe that is his problem that they did it that way. But Ray Ozzie had been brought in to span across the products and that kind of flopped.” Says Andrew Bartels Forrester Research.

Image courtesy of ZUMA / Rex Features