I only want to be in enterprise e-mail

[rousutt]

As He Heads For The Exits. The news that Steve Ballmer is retiring as CEO is the best thing to happen to the company and its shareholders in a long time. Microsoft Microsoft has badly botched its entry into the fast-growing tablet and smartphone markets, is busy trying to prop up an imploding PC industry with a product few care about, and has seen its value fall by a third since Ballmer took over more than a decade ago. Once upon a time, Ballmer helped Bill Gates build Microsoft from the ground up. Lately, he’s build slowly watching it fall into decay. So long Steve, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Where Microsoft goes from here is uncertain at best. Ballmer says replacing him could take a year. Internally, two candidates seem head and shoulders above the pack. One, Tony Bates, has an enterprise background from Cisco and also ran Skype for a time. The other,Satya Nadella has experience in many of Microsoft’s businesses yet isn’t overly tied to any one of them. That narrow focus is why Tami Reller, who has been with the Windows group for 6 years, seems a bad fit, unlikely to break with the recent past. And what a past it has been. Microsoft continues to market its products to everyone and no one at the same time. It has spent hundreds of millions touting that its tablet has a keyboard (and recently tried to excite people about the fact you can shove a memory card into it). This, despite the fact that most people buy tablets to use them without keyboards, especially consumers. Here, Ballmer never was able to draw the distinction between the customers he was selling to and when Cnet’s Mary Jo Foley got him for an interview today, it was clear he still wanted Microsoft to satisfy both groups. “The key isn’t are you in consumer or are you in enterprise,” Ballmer said. “If you’re going to be in e-mail … You can’t say, okay, I only want to be in enterprise e-mail. If you’re in real time communications, rs gold what, you only want to let enterprise people talk to enterprise people but never talk to consumers? Similarly, if you’re in devices … nobody has ever managed to figure out how to build a device for a user that was just enterprise or just consumer. ” And in one paragraph, you get what he’s been missing all along. Microsoft is in e-mail, but Exchange and its web-based Outlook are entirely different products. It sells Windows to PC makers, but Dell Dell and others make machines that clearly would onlybe at home either in home or in the office. Yes, Steve, there is crossover. Some law firms are using iPads in place of PCs, not just to play Candy Crush. But what made the iPad an object of desire was by showing what it does off the clock. Apple Apple leaves sales on the table yet still makes more profit than Microsoft. Its other competitors adopt different strategies than Apple, but each has a specific goal.