Time for Gates to go, some top Microsoft investors tell board | Hacker News Reader

Time for Gates to go, some top Microsoft investors tell board

reuters.com

100 pointscoloneltcb60 comments

I didn't realize that Gates would be 100% divested 2018 (per a long-planned sell off of his shares)... Interesting. I know his main emphasis is elsewhere (the foundation), but I suppose that just strengthens the investors' opinion: "You're getting out of your stake, so get out of the way."

This is of course only three of the top 20 investors making that argument. It's almost meaningless at this point.

They seem to make a big deal out of him selling and it was quoted in another article that one of the complaining investors would like to see the chairman retain a larger stake. It's an absurd statement. It's exceptionally rare for companies a fraction of Microsoft's size to have a chairman sitting on 4.5% of the company (even more so with a company nearly 40 years old).

Gates is sitting on $12 billion in stock. The number of people that have that much stock in any one company, is a very short list. That position all by itself would rank roughly in the top 90 in the world on the rich list. If you further narrowed it down to how many people hold that much stock in one company, I'd bet it's down to a few dozen.

I can see arguments over Ballmer having been allowed to poorly steer the company for so long (and the chairman not replacing him sooner), but complaints about Gates' holdings are just stupid. Gates has about $61 billion outside of Microsoft, he can throw around $5 billion without much concern, and it certainly wouldn't be a big deal for him to hold onto shares in MSFT worth that much just for influence sake. I'd argue it's very unlikely he'll divest all of his shares in his baby.

Of course you're right re:equity. Very few non-founder chairmen hold equivalent equity (in percent), and very few founder chairmen hold equivalent equity (in dollars).

But it's impossible to know Bill's level of commitment. If we use Ballmer's tenure as an indicator of Gates' direction from above... then asking Bill to step down is as obvious as a (forced) resignation by Ballmer. I think the investors (who own 1/20th of the company as well) are rightfully concerned. Didn't Gates pick Ballmer as his successor?

Indeed. I was very surprised when I read Gates owns about 4.5 percent of the $277 billion company and is its largest individual shareholder. I thought he still had most of his personal fortune in MSFT. It probably helps him that he didn't.

If he has other agendas and interests, it could be time to move on. Then again, wouldn't it help to have him buy in to any big strategic moves?

4.5 percent of $277 billion is 12.4 billion.

Bill Gates is worth $72 billion, so, yes, most of his personal fortune is not in MSFT.

If he had only the MSFT stock, however, he would be somewhere around the 34th or 35th richest American.

IMHO If Microsoft executives really want to begin turning things around for their company, they need to take a step back and really refocus their philosophy towards becoming an innovative software company again.

again?

and not just a bunch of predatory [people who lack warmth and depth] who do things differently from everyone else in search of an illusory competitive advantage.

Maybe a bad thread for this....

if I wanted to diversify my skill set beyond C#, what would you recommend? I've played with Java, python, clojure, ruby, and objective-C but i've been writing C#, and C++ for the past i think 7 years now.. that I never really seem to gravitate to far away from it, and i find myself wanting to use these languages like i use C#.

Frankly, I find one of the biggest issues I had moving away from C# for the first time was learning how to code without IntelliSense.

Once you get into that mindset, I find that the real way to figure out a language is to use it for something "real" (but not mission-critical), such as an assignment for school or a personal project.

Possibly give Typescript a go, or javascript, but you have to accept that you'll be going through the 5 stages after knowing and loving C#, I recommend "Secrets of the Javascript ninja" has a very good pace and it shows you a lot of the good of javascript, and how some of the bad can be used for good ;)

Try writing some IL :).

So three investors out of the top twenty that collectively own just slightly more shares than Gates himself want him out?

Stop the presses.

Ballmer may be the face of problems and there is no denying that he is clueless, but we all know that Gates has been making all the major decisions for him.

Microsoft's recent failures as are much Gates' failures as they are Ballmer's. It is only fair that they get the same treatment.

This is in fact completely wrong.

According to both of them, Ballmer has been fully in charge of Microsoft in all respects for more than a decade. Further, Gates has been completely retired from any decision making role in operations at Microsoft for five years. For years before that he was a glorified software opinion giver ("chief software architect"), and by his own statements he was heavily ignored in the role.

If you have something that proves otherwise, given we have their public statements (over and over again) on the matter, I'd love to see it.

That view would also line up with Pirates of Silicon Valley (that Gates stated was reasonably close to the truth). Gates was a "wheeler and dealer" rather than being a geek. The way he played Apple and IBM was the sign of a business genius.

Think again about what you are saying. I am sure Ballmer would hold a press release admitting he is clueless about technology and relies on Gates to make those kind of decisions for him. :)

See my response to previous comment for one such example where Ballmer deferred a really important decision to Gates.

> Ballmer may be the face of problems and there is no denying that he is clueless, but we all know that Gates has been making all the major decisions for him.

Can you back this assertion up?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-sto...

As an example, it was Gates who killed Courier not Ballmer.

I get the impression from that article that Gates intervening is rare, hence it's sort of shock value, and why it was taken seriously.

Ousting the founder-founder from the company and leaving it to non-founders, that's the worst decision any investor, co-founder, board member can make for a company. Good luck.

Not necessarily. It was probably a good idea in Jerry Yang's case, for instance

Time will tell.

Let us remember that every situation is different. While what you say may be true for many cases, we cannot blindly apply it everywhere.

Indeed. Just because a founder helped get something off the ground doesn't mean they'll be particularly effective at a latter stage of company. Nor should we assume non-founders can't be effective at righting ships.

Hmm I just thinking of some examples, always good to have some data. When did a non-founder make a failing company successful again. I can think of Porsche with Wiedeking, however it´s a bit different there, since the founders are already dead I think.

IBM with Gerstner? But I think that's similar to Porsche.

GM with Sloan would be a big one I think.

It often works out well. Not every company is Apple.

Many companies are at the end of their life cycle where the best thing they could do is manage the business well and return capital to shareholders.

Often founders act like it's their baby and don't want to let it die instead of fulfilling their fiduciary duties. You don't see many articles about how GE can't make anything new since Thomas Edison left.

It'd send a powerful message the shareholders really want to shake things up. Gates enabled Ballmer for far too long.

That's nice of them. I bet they just want Bill Gates to have more time available for eradicating diseases in poor countries.

If an outside CEO is coming, it makes sense to clear the decks for him or her to have complete freedom of action. CEO candidates must be wary of having their hands tied.

I'm a little surprised the Nokia deal was allowed to go through. It is the last great act of Ballmer's Windows on everything everywhere plan, and the last prop holding up Windows Phone. And Elop is Ballmer's mini-me. CEO candidates must see it as an element of strategic lock-in.

I doubt it would matter much to Microsoft if he leaves. It's not that he had a say in the day to day operations and even when it comes to long term strategy I think Steve needed him because Steve himself was not a technologist. If another CEO like Mulally takes over then he would benefit from a Bill's inputs but if they get a tech savvy CEO which I think they should then Bill would be more of a hindrance than help.

The arguments made in the article seem logical too. He's an icon and it'd be sad to see him step down but nothing that's impact the company.

heh. i just watched Pirates of Silicon Valley the other day. Such a good movie. Gave me a lot of perspective on both Microsoft and Apple.

would suck to see Bill go. But I guess it will have to happen sooner or later. Idk how much he influences direction any more anyway.

I second your comments on Pirates of Silicon Valley. I always thought it was a spoof, but it's actually quite a good film - it's definitely a lot better than the new Jobs movie ... it gives you much better insight to what sort of man Steve Jobs was (good and bad).

One of the things that stood out from the movie was just how much Microsoft "stole" from Apple. I'm not making that comment as flame bait - it's common knowledge that Microsoft copied Apple ... but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all.. It gives you an understanding of just how much copying actually happened.

Two sides to the same coin: Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills - he bested Steve Jobs who was much more of a visionary, but let his guard down with Bill Gates, and paid the penalty.

Gates, who kickstarted Microsoft by personally implementing a full BASIC interpreter in 1024 bytes of ROM, had infinitely more tech skills than Jobs, who if recent biographies are to be believed went to his deathbed still believing the Apple II invented the switch-mode computer power supply.

I believe Paul Allen had a much larger role in Microsoft's BASIC development than you imply.

I'm also unaware of any 1024-byte full BASIC interpreter.

Sorry, I did not mean for it to sound so much like it was a one-man show.

And yes, I misremembered, it was more like 4096 bytes. http://web.archive.org/web/20011211233332/www.rjh.org.uk/alt...

what's often overlooked is that jobs copied a lot from xerox parc. jobs undoubtedly was a visionary who knew how to package technology and appeal to the masses, but let's also fairly state how much of apple's initial innovations originated from elsewhere.

Xerox made a lot of money in pre-IPO investment in Apple, which is why Jobs was given a tour o PARC. If you ever have the chance o playing with a Star and compare it to a Lisa or a Mac, you'll clearly see how much Apple improved over the original ideas.

no question. this is why the Star never succeeded -- much like tablets from microsoft. the macro point is that jobs, like gates, often found tech inspiration from elsewhere. jobs' superpower was infusing geeky products (potentially pioneered elsewhere) with mass market appeal.

> Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills -

Did you just really say that Bill Gates had little tech skills?

That might be the first time I've ever seen someone make that claim. he's widely recognized as being someone whose "tech skills" dominated practically everyone else.

See "My first BillG review" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

> _but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all_

Microsoft was by far the biggest software developer for Mac OS and had more programmers working on it than Apple (and feeding stuff back to Apple). Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch to promote it, and Gates and Jeff Raikes (ex Apple) tried to get Apple to license Mac OS with Microsoft's support.

Like Apple, Microsoft also hired ex-Xerox programmers, so the two companies were both collaborating closely and drawing on a common source.

Otherwise, as others have noted. Gates was a nerd and had vastly better technical skills than Jobs, who basically had none at all. Jobs was a marketeer who capitalized on Woz's technical skills.

I liked Gates' quote about both of them getting stealing from their rich neighbor Xerox. To be fair, that's all Apple really ever did -- take existing ideas and refine the hell out of them.

I would also recommend you to watch Triumph of the Nerds.

I am a bug fan of this three-episode documentary. Also I would recommend Accidental Empires which was the book on what the documentary was based.

It kind of sounds like the sort of move you'd read about in a novella about power struggles... makes me think the board members in question here are plotting something, not simply trying to give the new CEO "breathing room".

Gates has for sure been propping up Ballmer for far too long. That has kept the status quo going long past effectiveness. The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released. The whole industry ceded "desktops" and invented new cheese Microsoft entirely failed to chase.

> The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released.

This is a bit of historical revisionism. Without the DOJ settlement, I think Microsoft wouldn't have played ball by licensing ActiveSync to Apple (and later, Google).

This single event (2008, I think) drove many people to the iPhone from Blackberry and sealed RIM's fate. iPhone+Exchange wasn't better than Blackberry+BES+(exchange/domino/groupwise), but it sure was cheaper and easier to maintain.

IBM came under a similar consent decree (European, late 80's IIRC) requiring them to document all their mainframe protocols to enable with 3rd party vendors to produce interoperable peripherials. I think it ultimately saved their business.

Except that Microsoft was doing phones and tablets long before the iPhone.

What were they missing?

As a previous windows mobile device owner I would have to say: the touchscreen devices needed a pen to dial properly (no-go), the keyboard-driven devices were painful to do email on and had tiny screens, and both classes had horrible browsers (roughly IE4-level before the release of the iphone).

They also suffered from being too early in the smartphone / tablet market, having to make hardware/software trade-offs that precluded bringing a proper (desktop-like) OS to the mobile devices. Apple as a late entrant could reuse OS X and have developer API's with good forwards compatibility. Microsoft's only option was to ditch the whole OS and start over based on a new architecture, and it took them too long to swallow that bitter pill.

I think it is a symptom of MS being a software company. They lived with the hardware they had and supported any old crap compaq wanted to put into an iPAQ. Since Apple controlled the hardware their low end hardware was much better than MS's lowest supported hardware. It allowed Apple to do more in software, and jump past where MS was. MS's big problem is that they let that kind of thing continue for far too long.

TLDR Embedded systems need tight integration between HW and SW MS doesn't have it because they only do the SW and let others do HW.

They key change they dragged their heels was creating a new UI toolkit centered around touch interaction. That created a huge third party software gap vs iOS and made their devices look hampered.

A consumer focus.

Makes me think they are trying to pull off a HP or a Yahoo.

Time to split Microsoft into pieces to unlock shareholder value.

I totally agree. Microsoft basically stopped innovating around 2000, when they began catering less to the consumer and more to the enterprise, because that's where the money was.

IMHO, the merging of Win 98/ME and Win NT/2000 took the life out of both. XP and every release since have been torn between the incompatible goals of pleasing both enterprises and consumers.

I think splitting Microsoft into two companies, one focused on consumers and the other on enterprises, makes a lot of sense. These two new companies should both get full access to the current Microsoft technology stack. And they can take it in different directions based on the needs of their respective target market.

We can again have a consumer Windows focusing on competing with Mac OS X/iOS and Android, leaving the boring enterprise market to the other company.

"Microsoft basically stopped innovating around 2000"

Microsoft never innovated in the first place. The BASIC compilers, the command line, word processor, the spreadsheet, the graphical OS, the visual compiler, the browser, the graphics drivers... all were invented outside Microsoft.

Microsoft strength was not inventing tech, but on adopting tech made by others and riding the wave of hundreds of millions of people getting access to computers.

"Stopped innovating around 2000" is wrong in every way that matters.

Splitting up the company is a tired refrain brought up by people either unwilling or unable to see Microsoft's strategy, its value, or its successes.

I would split Microsoft into far more pieces, 1 for each product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com