The Microsoft High-Profile Exodus Continues

snydeq writes "Bing principal Scott Prevost is the latest of several high-profile exits from Microsoft in the wake of Bob Muglia's departure, causing some to question the long-term outlook for Redmond, InfoWorld reports. While the departures have spanned the company's business divisions, the concern centers square on the Microsoft core: 'Microsoft's numbers are looking good in the short term, but the future of core products remains unclear, and so far, Redmond's cloud and mobile strategies don't seem to be paying off.'"

Mayeb Not a Bad Thing?

[hduff]

Given how Microsoft has faltered in the marketplace, has failed to innovate and continues to misunderstand its customers, perhaps the old guys need to go.

Simple explanation

[Locke2005]

If you are fully vested in your lucrative stock options and the share price can't go anyplace but down in the future, you'd be crazy not to cash out.

Microsoft can't be all things to all people

[hilldog]

I still don't get why Microsoft feels they need to be a player in every category? Why Bling, smart phones, mp3 players, games, cloud computing, tablets and all the rest? Why not be a focused company with the leading office suite? Or an innovate O/S? Yeah yeah I know the investors must be kept at bay like howling wolves at the corporate door but how many missteps can a company make before they and we realize they are just followers and no longer leaders?

Re:Mayeb Not a Bad Thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

BillG? What does Gates have to do with this? Microsoft has been Ballmer's show for a while now.

Re:Vote of no-confidence?

[Sponge Bath]

Or it could be a case of the old guard being very wealthy and tired of the rat race. Past a certain point of wealth you should be concentrating on fulfilling some exotic desire and not being a product manager filling out paperwork.

The person who needs to leave

[Required Snark]

is Balmer.

Re:Microsoft can't be all things to all people

[oracleguy01]

I think part of Microsoft's problem is that in the Office and OS markets in particular, their biggest competitor is themselves. They've made their products good enough where people don't bother upgrading when the new version comes out.

They could intentionally break backwards compatibility with former products to try and get people to upgrade but that doesn't really work for them. Case and point: they ended up releasing the backwards compatibility add-on so Office 2003 could read and write the 2007/2010 file formats.

I doubt they will really give up trying to break into new markets, they have their huge install base of core products to fall back on. It isn't like they are hurting for cash.

Re:Mayeb Not a Bad Thing?

[h4rr4r]

Copying is not innovation. Releasing an AV to correct problems in your own OS is not innovation. They allow streaming? As opposed to what, denying it?

It is your computer slick.

Re:Mayeb Not a Bad Thing?

[Dr. Spork]

What's the most innovative product of 2010? The Kinect. It's not even a contest.

Re:The person who needs to leave

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft brought computing to the masses. They had some shoddy products over the years, but they also had an equal number of great products. Overall, I like Microsoft. What ever "harm" they have supposedly done hasn't affected me or most people at all.

Re:The person who needs to leave

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Everything old is new again. Some big companies get founded (or expanded way beyond their original size/scope) by famous entrepreneurs (Gates, the Watsons, Westinghouse, Ford(s), etc, etc.) and then are followed by nameless/faceless people who could never live up to the savvy or inspiration of the founders. Your post applies word-for-word to IBM in the late 70s; they'd lost all the big names and the big new innovations, the magic had just worn off, leaving only a whole lot of ugly underneath showing through. Microsoft will weather this. They'll go on to become just another large software company with uninspiring products, like any other - think Computer Associates. You don't criticize General Motors for not making Ferraris, why criticize Microsoft for not making OS X? Also, it's really kind of funny that Slashdot still uses the Bill Gates Borg icon for Microsoft, it hasn't been remotely true for years.

Apple (almost) went through this (voluntarily) once already with John Scully, it's about to happen again when Steve Jobs dies "suddenly". I expect a lot of "Apple loses their mojo" stories following that.

And before anyone says I'm some kind of Microsoft asrtoturfer, let me say that I'm a Gentoo-using Microsoft hater of long, long standing. I'm just saying that none of this should be surprising.

Re:Microsoft can't be all things to all people

[ejtttje]

It's an outgrowth of their core strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish. If there is a category using non-Microsoft products, it is a potential breeding ground for competitive technologies to take hold and spread into other markets where it could displace Microsoft. I interpret their faltering steps whenever they try to do something new as a result of being focused on simply blocking competitors as opposed to actually having any innovative insights of their own. (i.e. they decide to move into a market based on strategic value, not because they have any idea what they're going to contribute to that market.)

Re:The person who needs to leave

[Anonymous Coward]

You are delusional.

Are you honestly trying to say that there were as many Commodore and Atari computer owners as there are Windows PC owners?

What bait and switch? Even when I got my first PC (a Kaypro 8086) I knew that I didn't have to use MS-DOS. In fact I used PC-DOS for some time, switched to MS-DOS, switched to DR-DOS, never bought Windows 3.x, switched to OS/2, switched to Windows 95 and FreeBSD, switched to BeOS, switched back to Windows 2K and decided to stick with MS ever since because every time I give some Linux distro a go, I end up not liking it. How was that in any way preventing me from having a choice or baiting and switching?

Re:Mayeb Not a Bad Thing?

[Kenshin]

Kinect is the most innovative product?

By Kinect, you mean the more advanced version of the EyeToy [wikipedia.org], right?

Re:Ex-Microsoftie

[ArundelCastle]

Maybe I'm stuck in the 80s, but it seems like you just described IBM.
Quick, what's the Microsoft Company Song?

Re:The person who needs to leave

[Yvanhoe]

Microsoft has made software development loose something like 20 years of progress. Their main innovations are virus and anti-competitive strategies. Too much of the developers' brain power of these last years has been used to adapt software to new versions of bug-ridden software from Redmond. Maybe is it good that this madness comes to an end and that we can innovate a bit in software insteand of doing reverse-engineering of poorly documented technologies.