Steve Ballmer Should Leave, Says Microsoft Partner

Steve Ballmer has had a bit of a mixed start to the year. Microsoft’s CEO has been under fire from many technology circles, analysts, journalists, former employees, even corporate partners.

Izenda is one of the firms that sell software to Microsoft. The CEO of the company believes that an upper management change is necessary, and could go a long way in reshaping the Redmond technology giant’s success. It already has great products and services, but a distinct lack of intensity.

Talking to FoxBusiness, Izenda CEO Sanjay Bhatia was of the view:

“Microsoft is moving too slow. They are doing the right thing, but they don’t have a sense of urgency. I think somebody needs to go in to realize like they did in Bill Gates’ days that the time is now and you can’t wait years to embrace these new ideas and new products.”

Not just slow, but too slow according to Bhatia.

While the Redmond of old was almost always one step ahead of other technology companies, Microsoft under Ballmer has missed the boat on a lot of things — mobile and cloud computing being the two most vital beats the company skipped.

Hence it has to play the catch up game after conceding the lead to others.

But this lack of urgency was plain evident in the recent rollout of Surface RT, the company’s first tablet. Microsoft probably thought they had more than enough brand value behind the tablet that imitating Apple (in distribution and pricing, at least) was the way to go.

The results are out for all to see, even though the Surface RT is a quality product all around and few tablets on the market can match it in hardware and overall feature set.

Ballmer has already made public his plans of remaining Microsoft CEO until 2017 or 2018.

It remains to be seen how and in what state Mr. B leaves the company when he does — a resurgent Microsoft back to winning ways or a marred technology giant still lost in the ever changing and unforgiving technology world.