Yes -- and no. While CEO Steve Ballmer has clearly retooled some parts of Microsoft to more closely mesh with his hard-driving style, the world's largest software maker still faces many of the same challenges: Open source, legal skirmishes, and slowing growth in some of its core businesses.
The eventual shift of power to longtime friend and colleague Ballmer was expected, but the announcement itself, five years ago on Jan. 13, 2000, was something of a shock.
The ever-boisterous Ballmer presents a decidedly different face for the company than that of Gates, the more introverted techie who had headed the company since founding it with Paul Allen in 1975.
Ballmer reorganised the company into separate business units, changed the way workers are compensated and moved toward a broad strategy to expand on Microsoft's core products by slicing and dicing them in new ways.
"It's clearly Ballmer's company from a business perspective," said Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff. "The seven business units were largely his deal. It probably wouldn't have happened under Gates."
Ballmer tackled Microsoft's image problems almost from day one. In one of his first public appearances after taking over the CEO reins, he talked about the company's dilemma. "Microsoft is a company that, in my opinion, is not very well-understood. For some people, we're the Windows company ... we're known mostly by our stock market success. We're also, I think, to some extent viewed as the scourge of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately ... we're known as a legal defendant," he told the Commonwealth Club of California back in February of 2000.
Gates, meanwhile, has become the brain trust behind some of Microsoft's most complex -- and risky -- product strategies, such as the new Longhorn release of Windows and the company's move into home entertainment.
Trying to measure the success of the Ballmer era is tricky. Since the announcement, Microsoft has seen its fortunes fluctuate. Sales have grown from just less than US$23 billion in fiscal 2000 to US$36.8 billion in fiscal 2004, and the company's cash balance has more than tripled. At the same time, Microsoft' stock has foundered, dropping from US$47.80 on the day Gates announced his plans to around US$27 a share.
Many of the issues, though, that Microsoft has faced in recent years -- security issues, slowing tech spending and the rising popularity of open-source software, are things that any Microsoft CEO would have had to face.
"It's a little hard to separate the changes that would have happened anyway from the changes that happened specifically from Ballmer becoming CEO," Rosoff said. "There's a lot of stuff that would have happened anyway that Microsoft would have had to react to regardless of who was CEO."
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I used to be a big fan of MS products back in the day. Since Ballmer has taken over nothing but lies comes from MS. I instead of spending their money to improve their product to make it worth what they are charging they spend their money spreading FUD about their competition.
It too bad that in this day and age we value the honor in truth. We put value in marketing hype. Just because you offer a lemon in 7 differant colors complete with dancing girls and marketing hype doesn't change the fact it is still a lemon!