I'm saying your business consists of having tea parties with Mr. Bear and Dr. Panda.

It was a joke. I'm still trying to figure out what your business is. I've looked up your name before but it was only recently that google started showing kowenicki gurnsey and richard kowenicki, etc etc. Hard to figure something out based on a forum name.

Anyway, if anything I'm just interested in seeing what kind of business it is since I'm an entrepreneur myself.

It is amazing you entrepreneurs find so much time post on these forums.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you are not what you say you are.

I have a couple close friends who can just about find time to go to the toilet because of running their own businesses. I just thought it was the same for all you guys unless you are extremely rich and therefore have a hands-off approach.

I actually work in an office as my full time job, so I have a lot of free time, so to speak.

But I have created some positions with other businesses that I work for. For example, I created a social media management position with two businesses, and created a teaching position at an after school program, and do trading on ebay from some artists I know.

However, there are 2 to 3 really big projects that I want to tackle but I have no idea where to start. We're talking funding in the hundreds of thousands...(if not millions) facebook and gamestop level business models.

I think the best way to show how passionate he is, is the email he wrote to all MS employees 3 years ago when MS had to cut their workforce by 2k.

    From: Steve Ballmer
    To: All Microsoft FTE
    Subject: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs

In response to the realities of a deteriorating economy, we’re taking important steps to realign Microsoft’s business. I want to tell you about what we’re doing and why.

Today we announced second quarter revenue of $16.6 billion. This number is an increase of just 2 percent compared with the second quarter of last year and it is approximately $900 million below our earlier expectations.

The fact that we are growing at all during the worst recession in two generations reflects our strong business fundamentals and is a testament to your hard work. Our products provide great value to our customers. Our financial position is solid. We have made long-term investments that continue to pay off.

But it is also clear that we are not immune to the effects of the economy. Consumers and businesses have reined in spending, which is affecting PC shipments and IT expenditures.

Our response to this environment must combine a commitment to long-term investments in innovation with prompt action to reduce our costs.

During the second quarter we started down the right path. As the economy deteriorated, we acted quickly. As a result, we reduced operating expenses during the quarter by $600 million. I appreciate the agility you have shown in enabling us to achieve this result.

Now we need to do more. We must make adjustments to ensure that our investments are tightly aligned with current and future revenue opportunities. The current environment requires that we continue to increase our efficiency.

As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We’ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.

 Our leaders all have specific goals to manage costs prudently and thoughtfully. They have the flexibility to adjust the size of their teams so they are appropriately matched to revenue potential, to add headcount where they need to increase investments in order to ensure future success, and to drive efficiency.

 To increase efficiency, we’re taking a series of aggressive steps. We’ll cut travel expenditures 20 percent and make significant reductions in spending on vendors and contingent staff. We’ve scaled back Puget Sound campus expansion and reduced marketing budgets. We’ll also reduce costs by eliminating merit increases for FY10 that would have taken effect in September of this calendar year.

Each of these steps will be difficult. Our priority remains doing right by our customers and our employees. For employees who are directly affected, I know this will be a difficult time for you and I want to assure you that we will provide help and support during this transition. We have established an outplacement center in the Puget Sound region and we’ll provide outplacement services in many other locations to help you find new jobs. Some of you may find jobs internally. For those who don’t, we will also offer severance pay and other benefits.

The decision to eliminate jobs is a very difficult one. Our people are the foundation of everything we have achieved and we place the highest value on the commitment and hard work that you have dedicated to building this company. But we believe these job eliminations are crucial to our ability to adjust the company’s cost structure so that we have the resources to drive future profitable growth.

I encourage you to attend tomorrow’s Town Hall at 9am PST in Café 34 or watch the webcast.

While this is the most challenging economic climate we have ever faced, I want to reiterate my confidence in the strength of our competitive position and soundness of our approach.

 With these changes in place, I feel confident that we will have the resources we need to continue to invest in long-term computing trends that offer the greatest opportunity to deliver value to our customers and shareholders, benefit to society, and growth for Microsoft.

With our approach to investing for the long term and managing our expenses, I know Microsoft will emerge an even stronger industry leader than it is today.

Thank you for your continued commitment and hard work.

Steve

---> I remember working as a trainee in a bank and all the mails from the top were signed by "assistance of the CEO" or something along those lines.

Not amazing CEO? I agree. The worst? Hyperbolic. They have not managed to expand beyond windows&office cash cows expect Xbox and even that took billions and billions of dollars and market leader completely screwing its product(Sony) so in that reagrd Ballmer has failed. Still when company makes billions of profit each year you really can't say he is the worst CEO there is.

Good point!

LUCK? I didn't like Jobs very much, but he didn't what he did just because he was LUCKY.

What I can call lucky is Bill Gates getting the chance of his life with IBM just because Gary Kildall had wasted it some days before.

And extremely lucky (the alternative is having done something illegal) that some years later MS repeatedly got away with anti-competitive behaviour far worse than IBM's one just paying ridiculous fines and being even let continue such behaviours almost unchanged, while IBM instead, for its faults, was threatened of splitting by the antitrust and had to thwart its own OS, OS/2, in its competition with Windows, to avoid that fate.

But back on topic:

Ballmer may be ridiculous sometimes, but he isn't the worst CEO, and he isn't alone in deciding strategies. But often greed blinds him, as firing and/or cutting benefits, like he did, to some of the most productive employees of America, that managed to keep your company profitable, despite less than in better times, even when almost all the others were losing money isn't very bright or farsighted, it's just greedy and shortsighted. Suggesting that America should pay less engineers, scientists and technicians is plain stupid, had he said they pay too much marketers, I could agree, most of them are just good to repeat some clichés learned in self-proclaimed good training programs, but technically and scientifically skilled and talented people are the most precious human resource of developed countries, you don't want them to look for a better paid job in another country, you should want instead to attract the skilled ones from other countries that pay them less.

Finally. MS won't die and won't disappear. It will grow. But the risk is that it grows less than competitors in other markets growing more than the ones dominated by MS. A near monopolist doesn't fall easily if it doesn't commit horrible mistakes or if disruption of its market doesn't happen. But its monopoly can become marginal (even if still growing) compared to bigger markets growing outside of the ones it dominates. In the past, competing OS' tried to attack MS in the PC market and they failed. Now they dominate some markets already or soon to become bigger than PC, where Windows has no previous monopoly or strong legacy or other advantages. And PC-like devices can be derived from this bigger market, running OS' that totally bypass the need to attack Windows to succeed and creating a new, non-Wintel PC market (non-Wintel tablets, born from smartphones and multimedia readers, are the first step, while more expensive and less efficient Wintel tablets derived from the classic PCs and notebooks, but they remained a niche). In these new markets MS arrived quite late. Was it TOO late? Time will tell.

Cool. All the very best with that.

hahaha love those haters.

Dont worry Stevie, as long as MS keeps showing insane profits and they keep no worries... also Xbox went Big with him and Bing and WP will be big aswell.

But at the same time, wall street expects a 5% yearly growth, so some other companies if ambitious and aggressive enough, might be able to take msft's lunch.