Steve Ballmer announces his retirement

It’s no secret that we haven’t been fans of Steve Ballmer’s tenure at Microsoft. Steve is a manager, and a competent one, but “visionary” should not be in his LinkedIn description. Despite owning the desktop, giving the company envious depth in the corporate world, Microsoft has stumbled along in the past decade, only recently figuring out the cloud and finding its way into search with Bing. Missteps like the Windows phone, and Windows 8 rollout didn’t encourage confidence, although I can now see the future is looking brighter for those products. For the new CEO (and that can’t come soon enough) I’m hoping for a renewed effort to penetrate the market instead of further stratifying products like Office and the Surface device. Integration, ease of use, and ease of purchase (might I suggest reading this before pricing any new products) should be the mantra. One thing you don’t need to worry about is the Microsoft staff. We’ve worked with many of the groups for years and they have always impressed our analysts as competent professionals (that’s an honest analyst assessment, there are no gratuitous complements from us). With Steve’s pending departure we’re now bullish on Microsoft.