Microsoft needs a new CEO who probably doesn’t exist
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Not at all true. Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, EMC, Netapp are strong in the enterprise with virtually zero consumer presence. Or am I missing something?
To manage for innovation, one has to be willing to say "wow, compared to that new thing, our stuff sucks." It just never seemed like Ballmer thought that way. He seems like the type of guy who perceive a thought like that as disloyalty or something.
Take Windows Phone. It's a great OS. The only problem is that it came too late and had poor marketing (and was associated with the uncool Windows brand). Technically, it's awesome and in the same league as Android and iOS.
The same is true for Xbox, Windows 8, C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET MVC/API, Azure, etc.
Google or Apple would build the exact same products, and people would probably love them.
So no, I don't believe that Ballmer's love for Microsoft (especially recently) was unjustified. He simply failed to account for the negative popular perception of Microsoft and its brands.
The same inertia that keeps Windows popular is preventing Windows Phone from gaining significant marketshare.
You would think that, of all companies, Microsoft, the abuser of platform lockin, would grok this.
If Mayer could be plucked from Google to engineer a revolution at Yahoo, and Forstall was in the running to be Apple CEO ... I think its worth a thought, the question is ... would he accept?
http://www.fastcompany.com/3007336/creative-conversations/wh...
To the extent they are similar, I think there is something to be said about faith in leadership. If the workers don't trust the leaders and vice versa, that has an immediate impact in this sort of thing, but beyond that, it is the interpersonal connections that have developed that define corporate culture.
As to losing focus, part of this is because the re-orgs and company policy changes accelerated. At least every two years in the last decade there has been a major shift in branding or focus. This is something decided by the management team, and Ballmer was directly responsible for these constant shifts in direction.
Second, the role of SDE and senior SDE was even more marginalized. I am sure this had been going on, but for a data point note that BillG reviews were run by PMs. The engineering culture was gone and replaced by a business culture. PMs and MBAs ruled every org; they talked about their resources and looked at the SDE-L and SDE-M as line managers whose were there to make their designs reality. This served to push out the more motivated engineers.
And speaking of BillG reviews, these were real and helpful. After a review, we would talk about it for days. Products would be re-aligned, schedules would change, and we would be focused on shipping a great product. When these were gone, Ballmer's business strategy approach failed to motivate or align the teams and that had a drastic affect on quality.
MS might not need much of an employee culture turnaround. It's the company's image that needs fixing.
Microsoft has never lacked an astute understanding of the market. They have rarely been behind the curve in their domains. They had purchased hotmail before Gmail was even on the drawing board. They had been trying to market tablets for a long time before the iPad. But what they lack is a fresh perspective. The corporate culture is relatively ingrown and I think that's the big problem. Long story short that means their executions of plans tends to be... somewhat... problematic.
Microsoft has what it needs, namely a lot of very talented people (some of which I still am in contact with). What it lacks is an ability to get those people in charge of getting all the little problems solved so that people will find the solutions useful. They have largely coasted through on momentum, using spare cash to purchase promising companies.
To turn this around you have to turn the entire corporate culture around. You have to start encouraging cross training. Get the developers working front line tech support a week a year or something. Have the main developers do stints at Critical Problem Resolution or similar groups. Get folks in touch with the problems of the customers and what they are solving.
More importantly, encourage Microsoft employees to use and study competing products.
When I was at Microsoft the problem was an island mentality and this killed their early tablet efforts. That has to be turned around and it won't be easy.
This reminds me when I mentioned on HN that "I wonder what would be good professional management that is as close to general purpose as the old MBAs."
Interesting. Where is he now? His MSR page hasn't been updated - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/
I thought only Simon Marlow left recently.
The co-CEO idea is great in theory, but obviously lacks real-world backing, for obvious reasons.
There's more to life than feature parity but really TFS lacks some basic should haves and almost no one realizes this at Microsoft because they've never used any of the alternatives.
For a fun time try suggesting the team use Git or an Atlassian product and see how far things get. *this might almost actually work on the entertainment division. Most other divisions probably not.
When it comes to consumer tech, I don't think Microsoft's products are bad. The Xbox is amazing, the Zune HD was amazing, Windows Phone is a great product, and I'm sure Windows 8 has its strengths (I've never used it).
I'm not in the position to say so, but I believe Microsoft's problem is either one of leadership or culture. Microsoft doesn't innovate, its a "me too" company in the consumer space. Zune, Windows Phone, and to a lesser extent, Xbox are all "me too" products. Even worse, there doesn't seem to be any incentive to switch. What does WP have that the iPhone doesn't? Now What does Android have that the iPhone doesn't? You can argue that Android copied iPhone, but Google didn't just copy it, they made a conscious effort to take risks and go one step above. I haven't seen that with Microsoft.
It seems to me any consumer decision that doesn't either 1.) Make more money for an existing product or 2.) Attempts to step into a well known, fast rising space gets killed. The biggest example in my mind for this was the Courier. The Courier was first hinted at in 2008, 2 years before the iPad. Someone at Microsoft had a hunch (because Microsoft has a ton of smart people), that this wave was coming and created a brand new experience. It wasn't me too, and it wasn't a proven market. It was innovation and vision. And we all know how it turned out, it was killed because it couldn't sell more copies of office[1], and instead we got the HP Slate, which was lackluster, and then the Surface, 4 years later which ended up being written down.
At the end of the day, I don't see Microsoft taking any real risks in the consumer space (aside from Xbox).
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-sto...