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Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft?
theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"
Bill Gates is not the answer for Microsoft, but changing leadership is. They have become sloth-like in their old age and have become a market follower rather than a market leader.
MS probably needs to remove one or two levels of management to allow things to speed up again. Ideas and progress are slowed by too many filters.
Honestly if companies like Microsoft and Apple can't do without their great leaders then they need to sink forever in to the abyss. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren't going to live forever no matter how much money they have to get human parts to replace things like Jobs did. You can't even stick their heads in jars like Futurama did. Although I would be highly be amused if they ever did manage that one for real.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
For me, Bill Gates is the symbol of the junk-microsoft: DOS, windows 3.1; 95; 98; Me. As far as I see the history of Microsoft, since Gates left the CEO chair, things are slightly better. And, finally, the problem isn't Ballmer, but the fact that a company can't be the only big player in the entire sector forever.
Its overly simplistic to put the blame on Ballmer since it was Bill Gates that got Microsoft under close scrutiny from monopoly enforcement agencies all over the world. Bill Gates was also the one that won Microsoft the biggest EU fine in history for Bills predatory practices.
What Ballmer has done is followed in Bill Gates footstep with so-so products sold by extremely hard marketing and very shoddy business practices. If anything Ballmer is just a bleaker version of Bill. The return of Bill Gates would just be about more pressure on OEMs, more underhanded deals and more of using the monopoly again.
Personally i would love it if Bill Gates took the helm as it would make Microsoft become irrelevant even faster than today. The mobile and computing industry at large is right now liquid mercury and the tighter Microsoft squeezes the sooner it will slip.
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I don't think you're getting what you think you are asking for.
These are large crude parallels being drawn here: "Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved it" is an interesting story, but Apple's story is certainly exceedingly unique.
Not many companies crawl back from hasbeens to dominance. Apple was a joke in the 1990s, a shell of its former '80s self. The natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen. This is Microsoft's fate. Google's. Facebook's. etc. Apple is the weird exception, not the rule, and I wouldn't let its experience try to teach us anything. It's like seeing someone hit the lottery and trying to figure out how they did and repeat that. No, Apple is a pretty unique story in technology and business. Microsoft can't find their Steve Jobs in Bill Gates.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bing actually has a good market share in US now - 30%. And by market demographics those who use Bing tend to be richer, better educated people.
You mean the kind of people who could afford to buy a computer or laptop but could not afford the time to change from the default MS recommended one?
Bing has about 8% in the US and about 3% worldwide according to statcounter and most other sources. 30% is a dream number bing hasnt even been close to. I have never ever heard of seodesignsolutions before but as their numbers are very different from the established players i call bullshit on their statistics until correlated from more respected sources.
For all we know seodesignsolutions might just be a shell setup by Bing PHBs trying to get atleast one payment for good performance in their lifetime.
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I'd rather they just go out of business. It is long overdue.
I vote for Mark! He is an excellent and awesome technical fellow that has impressed me a number of times. It's time for Microsoft to learn from Google; let the engineers take control again.
MicroSoft sold Basic to all the computer companies you name and pretty much all others. MS was already a pretty significant software company before they released MS-DOS, in fact they had released OS's before MS-DOS. MS didn't get lucky by picking the right company; they picked all companies, including the right one.
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I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.
Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team (commodore) and disappeared off the planet.
Had they chosen IBM PC instead, maybe we'd all be using Berkeley Windows instead of MS windows. And Bill Gates would be in the same camp as Nolan Bushnell or Jack Tramel.
Selling MS-DOS to IBM and riding it was indeed a streak of luck, of having a vision that could be worked, and having it at the right place and the right time. But to assume that such a streak of luck is the only thing that propelled MS to its position of dominance is as bad an oversimplification of things as one can make. Removing the typical moral overtones we at /. like to put on things, Gates did a hell of a lot more (as one of the few people that can be geek/technocrat and businessman at the same time) in driving MS's direction. Getting a streak of luck is great. Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
I'm not a fan of MS products, and I've always prefer to work in predominantly Unix/Linux systems and development environments (for practical and ideological reasons). But even I can find some objective neurons left to give credit where credit is due.
From what I understand, the Kin is an indicator of what's wrong with MS. MS bought Danger with the idea of making feature phones. Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks that was popular with teenagers. The initial plan was to launch new products 6 months after the purchase. It was ambitious but workable plan.
Then MS executives started making a series of decisions that doomed it. First of all Danger used Java. That was never going to be allowed at MS. Project Pink would have to use CE. This would seriously delay any launch plans.
At the same time, there were feudal wars. See MS already has a phone division. While Windows Mobile was more of a business phone than consumer model, they had their own ideas and strategy for a consumer model that would become WP7. Unfortunately the rumor is that the Mobile division denied programming resources to Project Pink so they had to make the migration from Java to CE by themselves. Remember most of the Project Pink members were former Danger employees.
Had the Kin came out in 6 months, it might been a successful product. The market was changing while Project Pink was stuck in development battles. While texting is still popular, the focus was shifting to twitter and FaceBook. These features were bolted onto the product adding further delay. Other features like Calendar and contacts were delayed.
By the time the Kin was launched 18 months late, it was noticeable that the product had no clear identity and was rushed out. It was not a smart phone because it did not really have apps, yet it was not a feature phone either especially at smart phone prices. It was buggy and lacked basic features.
MS cut their losses early on it. Six months later, Verizon relaunched it as a feature phone with numerous fixes. While sales figures are not cited, it is assumed Verizon sold off their inventory.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
-- Linux user #369862
The word you are looking for isn't FUD it is vaporware and frankly one should give credit where credit is due as it turned out to be a bloody brilliant strategy. MSFT knew at the time they were years behind and had some serious trouble, so Bill had the occasional screenshot and mockup cooked up and through the sheer power of his giant brass balls and ability to bullshit got the press to believe it was real.
This managed in a one two punch to not only keep OEMs buying MSFT for fear that they would be left out when the "next new thing" hit, but also killed competitors who couldn't make their real products able to do the miraculous things Bill's non existent OS could do. Frankly it was bloody brilliant. If you had run BeOS or OS/2 at the time (I ran both) you'd know that Win pre 98 was like a joke compared to them, but Bill and his magical brass balls kept them both at bay with nothing but bullshit and some phony screencaps.
But as for why he won the OS battle I'd argue its the same reason you don't see Linux getting any traction on the desktop: The combination of ease of use and availability of programs. I know this shocks the shit out of Linux users, even have one moron here who can't read a sentence that put it as his sig, but as far as Windows users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI IN WINDOWS since they will never ever have to use it, ever. Windows has spent untold millions in research and work making sure every single thing is "clicky clicky" simple, whereas Linux is to this day more often than not a screen scraper on top of a CLI app and if you need to do anything more than the absolute basics (such as install a driver or change wireless settings) you will often have to drop to term.
The other reason for winning is why I gave up on OS/2 and BeOS around the Win98 era, the availability of programs There are literally millions of programs, from games and video editing to office software and every niche of business under the sun, both free and commercial and the one OS you can be assured it runs on is Windows thanks to its network effect and backwards compatibility. Hell Windows 7 seems to get several patches a month that are nothing but new shim settings for older programs, MSFT really does put in the work when it comes to backwards compatibility. While Linux too has plenty of apps, the simple fact is all the decent ones run on Windows while there is tons of specialized software that has no Linux equivalent and never will. Sure you have 50 million text editors and programmers tools, but what about medical transcription? CAD and engineering programs that will work with the big name software like SolidWorks?
In the end while Bill's ability to bullshit got them through the dark times of Win 1/2/3 it was all the money spent on ease of use and the whole "developers developers developers" meme that allowed MSFT to win the whole ball of wax.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The business was built up on desktop and office app dominance. But now operatings systems are turning into commodities with the advent of virtualization/emulation/cross-platform frameworks and with widespread, sophisticated web standards. Applications are turning into commodities with the reverse engineering of formats and the advent of new standards.
Essentially, interoperability is bleeding the life out of Microsoft.
Microsoft's (current state of) livelihood is based on barriers; let them suffer. They won't die, not any time soon -- they make solid operating systems. They do make good products, despite all the security issues and bugs we've seen. But now that they've lost their stranglehold on the market they become just another player. They won't grow this big again based on being just another vendor.
This is what all those crazy advocates of "open standards" have been trying to achieve all this time. If all that griping about secret APIs and protocol pollution didn't make sense to you before, maybe it begins to make sense now.
Where Microsoft clamped down on diversity, it can no longer. And the gradual technological progress that Microsoft offered can now be replaced with the fertile offerings of a far wider sphere of operating systems and applications developers. Things like the Great Languish -- IE's stagnation for half a decade during what should have been a period of explosive growth for web technology -- are no longer possible.
I look forward to watching technology take huge strides, relative to what it had been doing under Microsoft's control.