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Comment by dmk23 | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure why this is considered news. Guess just because this guy went on the record to state the obvious?

Every large company develops internal politics with various degrees of harm to itself and its performance. If the business is led by a non-founder, non-technical, non-performing CEO it is a given that he will always feel like an insecure usurper/impostor more concerned about protecting their job from rivals than actually leading.

This is yet another data point in support of Andressen Horowitz's thesis about backing founding CEOs. I might add that's also a strike against promoting a head of sales to CEO.

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It's news because Joachim Kempin has got a book to sell and he or his publishers have hired sufficient PR talent to make it news.

  > I am not sure why this is considered news.

In what I'm sure is purely coincidence, the former exec speaking out against Ballmer has a book coming out today on this very topic.

Internal politics are one thing but I've yet to hear a story of anyone attempting to overtake Ballmer as CEO when he has Gates' backing. There were stories about the usually tight-lipped Apple and how Forstall was fired while attempting to gather more power within the software division.

The story that comes across to me is of a CEO that knows he's not doing a good enough job transitioning MS into a new era. His insecurity gets the better of him and he fires anyone who is conceived, by the media, of being a potential threat while losing major talent in the process.

This is not just some sort of non-innovative company well know for it's vicious internal fighting like EMC. This is Microsoft, an extremely important and, yes, innovative company.

I think that this really is news - peeling back the covers to see the mess going on at Microsoft seems to my mind quite interesting.

You can find/replace Microsoft with Oracle and many other companies though. Oracle is led by one of the founders and in many ways it's even a bigger mess there.

> Every large company develops internal politics with various degrees of harm to itself and its performance. If the business is led by a non-founder, non-technical, non-performing CEO it is a given that he will always feel like an insecure usurper/impostor more concerned about protecting their job from rivals than actually leading.

Not just large companies, but also small businesses, even open source software projects, and even those projects building a programming language.

There was a lot of speculation as to the reasons for Sinofsky's departure a few months back. For me, at least, this item provides a likely explanation from someone who was in a position to know.

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