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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

The thought of the CEO of Ford taking over Microsoft just seems crazy to me.

I'm sure he's a competent manager, as Balmer seemed to be, but is he a tech visionary?

Bear in mind Mulally not only saved Ford, but saved the Taurus:

"I arrive here, and the first day I say, 'Let's go look at the product lineup.' And they lay it out, and I said, 'Where's the Taurus?' They said, 'Well, we killed it.' I said, 'What do you mean, you killed it?' 'Well, we made a couple that looked like a football. They didn't sell very well, so we stopped it.' 'You stopped the Taurus?' I said. 'How many billions of dollars does it cost to build brand loyalty around a name?' 'Well, we thought it was so damaged that we named it the Five Hundred.' I said, 'Well, you've got until tomorrow to find a vehicle to put the Taurus name on because that's why I'm here. Then you have two years to make the coolest vehicle that you can possibly make.'?" - http://www.fastcompany.com/1573670/what-other-automakers-can...

As the driver of a sixth-generation (2011) Ford Taurus, which is in fact a pretty cool car, somehow it doesn't seem so crazy that Mulally could save Microsoft as well...

That's a very interesting comparison. For a while there the Taurus was the laughing stock of the company, and now they're pretty damn nice.

So... we gonna back FrontPage now?

Yes, that's interesting. I think the decision to keep the Taurus brand was a mistake, since Ford tarnished it with too many shitty cars over the years. They have some really good brands (Fiesta, Raptor SVT, even Focus) but I would consider Taurus irreparable, just like FrontPage.

The company logo needs an update too, IMO.

And they have an incredible iconic brand, "Model T", I think they would do well to use it again.

Some new innovation in trucks would certainly be interesting. As a driver with over 200k on my F-150, I could see some sort of T-150 being a pretty sweet redesign.

In the world of branding, tarnished but ubiquitously known is better than greenfield.

Tarnished can be polished back into good silver.

It's enormous on the outside and tiny on the inside... not a good car.

I have had the pleasure of seeing Alan Mulally give a couple of talks on leadership, and I can say that he is one of the most inspiring leaders I have ever seen (good video below of a talk he gave). Not because he drives people, but because he empowers them. Microsoft is a company with over 100,000 FTEs and honestly I don't think you need a great tech visionary leading as much as you need someone at the top to empower the tech visionaries running their products, and get out of their way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIwz1KlKXP4

He does seem to be quite the leader, but there are very strong correlations between aircraft development and production (where Mulally came from) and car development and production. For Ford, Mulally is a person with deep background in design and physical manufacturing in addition to having great leadership qualities. Is it enough to just have leadership capabilities and weak roots in the core skills of the company?

Even if you say that Microsoft wants a strong future presence in hardware manufacture - building phones and tablets is a very different game than building planes and cars.

I still don't think one has to be the subject matter expert in everything a business does. Mulally should be an expert in building teams to make complex manufactured devices, and he should be hiring (or empowering) experts who understand services or tech functionality better than him. We can't hope that every leader can be a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk :)

Perhaps hardware design is exactly what MS needs. They have certainly been fumbling in the area, despite a strong push.

Mulally is at least as qualified to lead Microsoft as Lou Gerstner was to lead IBM.

He can't possibly be worse-qualified than Ballmer.

This is great, but I can't hear the student's. Any transcript of this?

Sorry, don't have one :(

A Nabisco guy did pretty well for IBM. It could work out.

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