Seeing that Cisco is on Wallstrip and I am talking about the old Nasdaq “Four Horsemen”, it seems fitting to look at the other ‘Horses’ – NOW DOGS.
Jeff Matthews lays the perfect Moniker on Microsoft in this great post .
I have written off Microsoft a long time ago as an investment option. It is a value trap. The homebuilders will enter this trap in a few years. They have more downside before that argument takes hold. But i digress…
Here is a segment of Jeff’s post:
And the more Mr. Ballmer protests otherwise, the more it makes me wonder how much longer the shareholders of Microsoft will put up with a CEO who won’t allow his children to use an iPod or do a Google search.
Such a blinders-on, head-in-the-sand, not-invented-here mindset has heretofore been more closely associated with Detroit, where auto executives drive only their own company’s best cars. Small wonder the bigs at GM, Ford and Chrysler failed to grasp, before it was too late, the quality and innovation that allowed Toyota and other imports to eat their collective lunch.
Apparently, Redmond is now the New Detroit.
How else to take Ballmer’s dismissive comments about the folks at Google, who not for nothing have done more than any other organization in the world—IBM, HP, and Oracle included—to neuter the Colossus of Redmond?
The Wall Street Journal’s full quote on the subject is this:
He [Ballmer] went on to criticize Internet competitor Google Inc. for failing to achieve significant traction in ventures beyond its online search business. The company has been trying to double its staff in a year, he added.
“That’s insane in my opinion,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing has created value.”
Now, the last quarter I saw, Microsoft had 71,000 employees, whose efforts generated about $3.5 billion in operating income.
Meanwhile, Google’s “random” collection of not quite 11,000 employees generated $1 billion in operating income in the same quarter.
Sharp-eyed readers will have already done the math, which is this: Microsoft generated only slightly more than three times the profit of Google despite having almost seven times as many employees as Google’s random collection of hipster do-good engineers.
Go read the full post – it’s great.
There is no answers for Microsoft other than splitting up the behemoth and attaking the web with a more focused approach.
It’s not really how long Ballmer will last, more like WHO WOULD WANT THE JOB. Under the current structure, there is no way to turn around the business. The stock is a value trap and the CEO role is a career trap (ender).