Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Oy, an Extreme Bummer!

Another blogging light has gone out: MSFTextrememakeover has put up one last post, Eight Years of Wrongness.

Now that's how to go out in style! So take a moment to grab your favorite drink and put some time aside and give it one, long slow read. The kick-off:

It's sobering to realize that during Ballmer's term as CEO, MSFT has underperformed almost all of its top tech peers (including AAPL, IBM, HPQ, SAP, INTC, CSCO, SYMC, NOK, ORCL, ADBE, RIMM, QCOM, Ebay, and AMZN), and badly lagged the major averages. We may even see our third plunge to test the 2000 lows during his watch. Unbelievable.

...wait for it...

So it's time for me to listen to the fat lady who has been singing for years now, and finally pull the plug. I can't keep waiting another 11 years for MSFT's leadership to deliver the returns that say AAPL's have in just the past 12 months, despite struggling (and that's on top of 2000+% this decade).

...leading to the send-off:

So with that, I announce the end of my MSFTextrememakeover blogging career. The timing seems right as this is my 100th post. Good luck to all those who continue to hold MSFT.

...

Damn. Well, all good things, right? I'll certainly miss the analysis that went beyond anything I ever pulled together. Cheers to you, Extreme, and thanks for the posts.


Thursday, June 05, 2008

Administrivia - Hardware Induced Mini Break

Looks like it's an early summer break here. The wonderful Mini-Laptop, my bud the four years of Mini-Microsoft writing and planning, has given up what I think is its last ghost. It's my isolated, centralized hub of posting and comment approval, and while I weigh repair vs. replacement, things are going to have to go dark here for a bit.

Which is fine. I think a number of folks didn't much care for the three fingered nature of the comments in the last post. While there was some discussion of how to fix the problems, it got overwhelmed by grinded axes swinging wildly against certain personalities in Microsoft India leadership.

While I take a hardware induced break here, I'll be thinking about future topics. Please take a moment to consider what sounds like good, interesting paths of productive discussion. Drop me a line, if you like. Sorry if it takes a bit to respond. I thought about opening up comments while I'm cut-off (sorry, I'm just not comfortable lurking in the library on public computers to approve comments), but decided that without engaging news open comments just lead to noise and comment spam.

So, I'm off to light a candle for the Mini-Laptop. See you soon. Mini.