Ballmer Memo Outlines Challenges

In a memo sent to all Microsoft employees and quickly picked up by the media, CEO Steve Ballmer expressed concerns about changing IT priorities, customer satisfaction, and the company’s near-term financial performance and suggested steps the company should take to address these issues. However, although Ballmer appears to understand many of the problems Microsoft faces, fixing these problems will take time and require some structural changes that may not be easy for the company to make.

Internal Consumption Only?

Executive memos to Microsoft employees are often intended as rallying calls to get employees moving in the right direction, such as then-CEO Bill Gates’s famous Dec. 1995 memo urging employees to get “hardcore” about the Internet, or Ballmer’s Dec. 2000 memo outlining Microsoft’s seven core businesses.

However, given the fact that any e-mail sent to more than 50,000 employees will inevitably be circulated outside the company, executive memos can also contain messages for the outside world. Ballmer’s June 2003 memo seemed as much intended to reassure customers and partners that Microsoft understands their complaints as to rally employees.