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It's Not a New Ballmer Microsoft Needs; It's a New Gates
theodp writes "Over at GeekWire, Todd Bishop posits that Microsoft doesn't need to replace Steve Ballmer as much as it needs to replace Bill Gates. 'The perennial push to oust Ballmer is back,' Bishop says. 'But as long as we're all going down this path again, there's actually a larger issue to address: Microsoft no longer has an overarching technology leader next to the CEO at the top of the company – someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays. There will never be another Bill Gates. But there should be someone in his former role as chief software architect, if not in title, then at least in effect.' Ray Ozzie was supposed to be The One, but for some reason that never really worked out (Dave Winer warns BigCo politics can crush even the most innovative). Any thoughts on who might 'fill the bill'?"
Apple will fill the gap.
Ironically, the best thing for Microsoft would be what could have been the result of its anti-trust problems, a company split. It's doing too much, in too many different directions, with too much rigidity. It needs to spin off its divisions and break away from the mother ship. The OS division and the mobile division should be one unit, the business productivity apps another unit, and the gaming division the third unit. Thinking that one CEO can do all that right for all those divisions is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It's not too big to fail, its too big to succeed.
I8-D
SATAN!
Seriously, Gates isn't coming back thru that door.
Anyhow, isn't it time Slashdot use the real MS icon here, instead of the Gates Borg icon? It's so painfully outdated, unfunny and irrelevant. There's just no reason for that thing to still exist in 2011 anymore.
This is an ontopic meta comment.
I wonder what would happen to Microsoft's share price if Gates himself stepped back into the role?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
...because Gates was the only one who built the company from the ground up. That kind of experience surely shapes a person
What, exactly, did Gates do for MS as a technology leader?
MS Bob
Ignore the internet
ActiveX
Illegal practices
They HAVE a Bill Gates there. Ballmer is doing what Gates managed to do to them in the past.
I mean, after all, isn't Microsoft pretty much the only company in existence that could afford to hire him at this point? They should just try to do that.
He might fit the technical bill at the company but I'm not sure he has the innovative skill. I mean, he wrote Sysinternals and knows Windows in and out--but how well he could translate that technical knowledge into some new and exciting product, who knows.
Doesn't he have kids?
"...There will never be another Bill Gates
Er, a comment like that...uh, isn't that quite the slap in the face of all the aspiring and probably just as brilliant engineers at Microsoft? I would tend to think so. People probably thought the same thing years ago when the "other" Steve left Apple, and yet they certainly aren't suffering these days.
What Microsoft needs most now is a new industry leader to follow. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s they had IBM and SGI to learn from. During the 1990s and 2000s, they were led by Sun. But with the demise of Sun over the past few years, there's nobody to show them the way.
Just look at .NET, for example. It is very heavily influence by the Java platform. Earlier versions of C# were extremely similar to the Java programming language. The last successful .NET technologies, namely ASP.NET and WinForms, were clearly very influenced by work done first by the Java community.
Companies like IBM, SGI, Sun and others employed some of the greatest minds our industry has ever seen, and produced some amazing technology. Unfortunately, with no such leader today, Microsoft seems to be following the example of far lesser communities, like those promoting Ruby, Ruby-on-Rails and NoSQL. Their offerings are becoming lousier and lousier, with releases coming so often that it's impossible to build anything but the smallest systems with some degree of certainty. Businesses, organizations and individuals building significant software systems can't afford to deal with the release shenanigans that we see from many Ruby-based projects (which is why Ruby is on its way out of the spotlight).
I don't think that Apple or Google are the companies to follow. Google is perhaps the spiritual successor to Sun in many ways, but they are still very different in what they offer. It may be many years before a new, true leader emerges.
Some reason? The guy created the Lotus Notes. Compared to that Windows 3.1 should be hanging in The Louvre.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianweeklytechnologysection
http://damienkatz.net/2005/02/70-reasons-lotus-notes-sucks.html
They needed a Gates when they were 15, 50, 100, 500 employees and needed someone who could pick one or two things to focus on out of 100s.
They have enough money and employees to do everything (for some definition of everything.) What they need is a visionary leader who can say "do this in Cloud, do that in the OS, do X, Y, and Z in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint."
AFAICT, Ballmer isn't that guy. (And Steve Jobs is doing his thing at Apple.)
What Microsoft needs is someone who understands what an Operating System is and what it is not. A genuine geek who understands that a 40 GB operating system is wasteful and unnecessary and a sign of incompetence and stupidity. Someone who understands that when your software grows to 10 times the size of your competitors (Linux and OSX) something is badly wrong and needs to be fixed. When you don't know the first thing about coding you have no business managing coders. It will all just turn into one giant predictable mess. As we have seen with post-Gates Microsoft.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I nominate Steve Jobs for the position. All shall love him and despair.
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and
believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write
new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and
fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the
harvest.
Now, that would be an interesting proposition.
As demonstrated by Apple, where the new Steve Jobs is... Steve Jobs. Gates isn't coming back.
At this point Ballmer has too much tenure and is too deeply entrenched; the only way to overrule him is to kick him out of the room. MS needs to rid themselves of Ballmer and replace him with someone that has technical vision. Ray Ozzie should have Ballmer's Job. But that will never happen, because Ray's employee number at MS was more than 200.
Asking this on slashdot is moronic...
I don't know anyone as incompetent and unvisionary as Billy boy gates, not mention someone who is as big a sociopathic asshole as he is which is the type of people companies like to employ, so my answer to the question is: I don't know and I don't care. Hopefully Monkeyseoft will go bust with people demanding proper software, or indeed a compensation for all the millions of man hours, no man years of work wasted in the time of windows 95, 98, until at least XP. Those f-ing installs and failure searches taking time that with a proper OS with error messages at startup and in logs are immediately clear etc.
I don't think that Apple or Google are the companies to follow.
Apple has a bigger market cap than Microsoft and has just released two wildly successful products in the last 5 years: the iPhone and iPad.
They have also created a new, thriving developer ecosystem, substantially change how folks can get applications, music, movies and share those things with others.
Google, likewise, has a portfolio of innovation mostly related to web technologies but branching into computers and mobile devices.
Microsoft has created...the Kinect. Oh, and updated their Windows operating system. If they don't realize the future is in hardware and getting people connected, they better. And they could start by emulating Apple and Google.
The opposite of progress is congress
Surely you're not implying that Bill Gates formerly held such a distinction. I'd like to hear examples, whether by education or in practice, of this engineering background.
Hey, he just finished completely fucking up FCP with the release of FCPX. Why not let him do for Microsoft like he's done for Apple?
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Who used contracts and understanding of law:
1) To get BASIC from the educator he was doing the work for via child labor laws.
2) To get DOS from via contract with Seattle Microcomputers.
3) Used contracts to beat up DIGITAL and their email system.
4) Used contract law to get Sybase (it was sybase for the SQL right?) and the web browser engine.
The understanding of how to steal with a fountain pen is what Bill Gates did well. Being the spawn of 2 lawyers helped him gain that talent.
A tech leader and visionary is needed. I agree. They also need to oust Ballmer...and not replace him. A person talented enough to be a tech leader wouldn't want to work for the kind of company a "Ballmer" makes Microsoft into....where enthusiasm for innovative IT is thwarted by a "windows tax" and a culture of protecting existing technology from yesterday.
.
Any discussion about replacing Gates is premature so long as Ballmer is allowed to continue mismanaging the company.
You do realize that Gates went to Harvard not MIT? Gates has a strong Business background. His is not a technical superstar. He has/had a vision and the business savvy to make it happen. Same can be said of Steve Jobs. Strong leaders know what they want and how to get what they want to happen, but that does not mean they can personally do the work.
I think the dual Consumer / Entreprise personnality can't work: the reliability, compatibility, steadfastness that entreprise clients want is mostly incompatible with the glitter, constant change, and nimbleness to the lastest buzz that consumers want. MS clung to Windows' desktop UI way to long on their smartphones, certainly in the name of synergy... What synergy does a 1% marketshare bring ?
Also, MS seems to lack courage. The recent successes (kinect, xbox...) all were in brand new fields where no feathers were being ruffled, and no entrenched interests threatened. I feel that, for all his chair-throwing, Ballmer never manages to force any change. So while MS is doing mostly OK (OK products, strong lock-in thanks to Sharepoint, Office formats, user skills, and nice dev tools) there hasn't been any "Wow" software / hardware /service, except again for Kinect (which I think is not even their own tech), in a long while.
I'm not sure it's all that much about technical vision per se. Any kind of vision would be good, especially a more customer-centric one: design / ease of use a la Apple, standards compliance and interoperability even at the cost of less lock-in....
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Gates NEVER developed any tech that helped MS. NEVER. What he did was steal other ppl's work, and cheat illegally. Nothing difficult about doing that. The real problem is that MS can not cheat easily right now. What would have helped MS is had the allowed the break-up. In my posts during that time, I spoke against the break-up because it was obvious to me that it would bring back more companies that would cheat. Now, MS is slowly dying because they are TOO big.
And for those of you that think that is not true, look at our bail-out of GM and Chrysler. Chrysler was sold off to a foreign company that had gone through a collapse, and GM still stinks. Had we broken them up, they would be smaller, but at least several of the new companies would know how to get back to size. Politics is killing America. We were built on small, but push big.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't let the chair hit you in the ass on the way out!
The push to get rid of Steve Ballmer isn't because they need a "new" Steve Ballmer. It was because Steve Ballmer isn't able to fill Bill Gates' shoes and provide the vision Microsoft needs.
It isn't about a "new" Ballmer as much as it is you'll need to remove Ballmer himself to successfully get a new visionary in there. Unless he is totally gone, he'll have too much say in the way things are run and he just doesn't have what it takes.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Bill Gates as a tech leader? He never was. He was a business leader and excelled at pushing and sometimes breaking the boundaries of ethical behavior but he NEVER excelled or was even adequate as a technical leader.
The world has changed AND the world knows it has changed for the better and is NOT going to let the old times return, exceptions like Nokia proving the point. Gates only achieved one thing, through wheeling and dealing he managed to make Windows THE OS that everyone HAD to use. Not wanted to use like OSX or iOS, had to. It worked but instead of continueing to push their advantage Gates let MS go lacks and basically allowed everyone to overtake MS left right and center.
And now that MS is no longer dominant, NOBODY is going to allow them to dominate again. You can see this by the absolute refusal of phone makers or even computer makers to go the windows only route. Even Nokia is still releasing a LINUX phone in the form of the N9. That would never have happened when Gates was calling the shots in a by gone era.
Could you imagine in the early days of Dell them selling Linux? HP going back to pushing its OWN OS?
That is the problem for MS, it is stuck in the past. Some parts try, the acknowledgement that Silverlight would need to run on both OSX and Linux by MS itself showed how much the world has changed, but they did not follow through on it. This is a world in which MS buys google ad words to advertise its browser on a google search for chrome. You couldn't make this up. MS is funding the development of its chief rival browser in an attempt to get people back to using its own free browser the searcher either already has available OR can't run! Desperation is not even an adequate word to describe this.
Gates and Ballmer can't cope with this new world in which MS is just another software vendor with a not particularly valuable brandname. Proof? Windows Phone. It doesn't sell. Apple Phone? Can't ship them fast enough. One has value as a brand name, the other is a liability. Why do you think it is called the X-box and not the Windows Box or MS-X?
If Apple were to release a game device you would be sure their logo would feature heavily (see the back of the iPad). Where is the MS logo on the x-box? What is the MS logo?
MS still has a lot of power and its money supply is near infinite, so why can't it deliver anything of interest anymore? Why is Bling so crap, Windows Phone so un-intresting? Why is it not dealing at all with its largest installed game base, the windows PC?
The answer is simple, nobody MS has any experience in having to think competitive. They are not used to having them. Now they do. None of the old guard can deal with it. To bad. There won't be a competent replacement because that would mean the old guard admitting they are passed it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays.
The should hire Linux Torvalds!
One thing Bill Gates never ever had is "strong engineering background and technical vision". He is an excellent strategist without even the smallest hint of a conscience.
From the moment he bought QDos from Seattle Technologies and onwards its been a technological disaster with all decisions taken with the aim of crushing competition. The tech has always been behind anything else in priority. Internet Explorer is an excellent example where the desire to kill Netscape lead to its integration into Windows, a decision people thought would only lead to problems at the time, something that still plagues Windows from a security standpoint.
I suggest reading up on third party accounts on what really happened since the Dos trials with Digital and onwards.
HTTP/1.1 400
So what a multinational corporation really needs a psychopathic megalomaniac asshat at the helm. Who would've thunk it?
So if they call, I suppose I could consider an offer.
Perhaps.
Damn, I'll have to move though, won't I? That's never good. And it's awfully rainy up there in MicroTown.
Still, to get to replace that damned paperclip character (or the search dog) with something cute, something toad-ish perhaps ...
Toad-san
The problem when divisions depend on each other like you mention is that innovating becomes very hard to do.
If Microsoft were split in several independent companies they would have to abandon their traditional "embrace and extend" strategy and learn to work together with others in following standards. That would be good for them.
"Embrace and extend" only works when you have an undisputed monopoly, which Microsoft now has only in desktop systems, and nobody knows for how long even that monopoly will last.
I'm not convinced that he'd be the right person at this time, though. He was visionary enough to see that a software company was a good idea; he saw the good idea of other people and either plagiarized or bought them; he was a ruthless businessman who resorted to unethical methods to claw his way up from the bottom, reach the top, and stay at the top. When you think about it, are those the qualities that Microsoft needs today? Post-investigation, Microsoft needs a softer, gentler hand. Ironically, Ballmer is that softer, gentler hand, that makes overtures to the industry, rather than dictating ultimatums to it.
Gates and Jobs are similar in many respects, while Ballmer and Sculley share an equal number of opposing qualities. Gates and Jobs are both dictatorial, with clear visions of what they want, how they want it implemented, and what they're going to do to keep the users locked in and dependent on them. Ballmer and Sculley, however, are less visionary and approach most issues from a traditional business perspective. Remember how Sculley opened up the Mac platform, allowing clones? Jobs would never have done that. Nor would Gates. Ballmer, on the other hand, I think might have. While it didn't work out too well for Apple, at the time, there was potential there for licensing and making the brand more popular. Maybe if Sculley had been more aggressive in his licensing of the Macintosh brand -- going to HP, Compaq, and IBM with enticing offers -- he'd have been on to something, rather than just diluting his own marketshare, by allowing his partners and allies to undercut him. Ballmer and Sculley aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be, but their lack of vision does hurt them. What hurts them even more, however, is their lack of viciousness. Ballmer is unfairly characterized as a psychopath, whereas I think he's probably much more bipolar than anything else. He doesn't have the ruthless, take-no-prisoners attitude that being a high powered CEO demands, and when he's compared to Gates, people often uncharitably use this against him. I hate to defend the guy, because I don't really like him, but he's just not that bad. He's the second coming of Sculley, who was also vilified and detested by analysts, for not being a good enough judge of what to plagiarize and who to destroy. Given a choice, I'll take Sculley and Ballmer over Jobs and Gates. While Jobs and Gates brought their corporations to dizzying heights, Ballmer and Sculley are the better choice for consumers, competitors, and underlings. Jobs is nothing more than a more charismatic version of Gates -- which goes a long way to making him preferable to Gates, in my mind -- but Jobs is still a dictatorial asshole who can't stand competition. Ballmer, as excitable and unvisionary as he may be, is preferable to Gates, unless you're looking for a ruthless asshole with very little empathy. Analysts love that shit. I don't.
Is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and... I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way... (Steve Jobs, commenting on Microsoft in PBS's Triumph of the Nerds documentary).
Even John Dvorack thinks that MS is brain-dead. He correctly pointed out YEARS AGO (more than a decade) that if Microsoft *really* employs the best and the brightest, as their PR claims, why is their software so backwards? He took an example of using the "copy" function.
When you drag a bunch of icons to copy stuff from one drive to another, it blindly starts the copy, it doesn't check if there's enough space, it doesn't check if there's a file already at the destination with the same name, so, if this copy is going to take hours, you have to monitor it for any pop-up alerts. Because any of these issues will stop the copy dead. It's 2011 guys, why is "copy" still a function like it's 1950? Is this *really* what the best and brightest can achieve?
MS needs a top to bottom overhaul. They are too mired in management, and even brilliant engineers can't rise to the top in such an environment. MS's greatest innovations came from stealing other people's ideas.
These days, people are smart enough to NOT approach Microsoft to give a demo of new technology, so MS has less and less people to steal from, hence their perceived lack of innovation.
If MS wants to innovate, they are better off separating into two companies -- one that serves their corporate interests, making "Enterprise" software, reliable and dull, that gets updated every 7 years, while the other creates glitzy consumer stuff that can crash, but at least it's cutting-edge, and churns out new OS releases yearly.
And while I've got your attention; what's with the crap in the summary? Bill Gates doesn't have an engineering background, he's a college drop-out. He's not even visionary -- every idea he's ever had was stolen from someone else. Don't get me wrong, I admire his tenacity and drive to dominate the software industry, but that's been his ONLY vision - to be bigger than every other company. Well, he did that, until Google came along.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
When so many people at Microsoft all conform to a similar corporate vision and the ones who think outside the box, such as Ozzie, didn't last and are no longer with the company, who could take the reigns without either continuing down the path of Gates/Balmer or conflicting with the vast majority of employees? I'm willing to bet if Microsoft found a guy like Steve Jobs to take the CEO position it would cause so much internal strife that it would hurt the company. There would be too many disagreements and perhaps an employee exodus. How do you think the engineers will feel when nine times out of ten the CEO tells them that their work isn't good enough, that they have to fix X and Y and add Z in for good measure? And it has to be done within the week. That's not the lifestyle these guys are used to. They're used to telling the CEO what's good, not the other way around.
Or, to take an extreme example, if you were to put a guy like Bill Joy in charge he would run the company into the ground by being ethical. Most of Microsoft's money comes from leveraging their dominance with Windows and Office. If someone were to open source them, the company would have to find a new goose to lay golden eggs. They've been searching for that goose for decades, investing billions and hiring some of the brightest minds. Then think of all the lost money from no longer extorting other companies with "patent protection" (look what Oracle is doing with Sun . . .), think of all the government officials that would no longer be bribed, all the lock-in technologies that would be abandoned. It may be good for the market, good for the world in general, but it would be bad for Microsoft. They're so colossal that growth means monopoly. The only reason I no longer consider them a monopoly is because they've been so stagnant for the past decade while many of their rivals have had so much success.
I do think that, in either situation, it could work in the long run. But I also think in either situation it would be extremely damaging in the short term and the board may not put up with it long enough for the company to change for the good. There's a reason people like Ozzie don't last at Microsoft.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Yeah, maybe they'll steal Steve Jobs from Apple. Or might that violate their anti-compeditive behavior restrictions?
Afaik, all the clever youngsters, like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc., are wholly focussed upon the software-as-service mentality that's so hostile to Microsoft's interests.
I'd imagine the best move for stockholders would be de-facto breaking up the company, allowing each business component to go it's own way free from the politics & meddling of other components. Fire the board & Ballmer. Hire someone with an appropriate technical vision for each component.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I'm ready to start any time. I can work an extra hour here and there, and I'll only ask for a few million in "golden parachute" money if and when I drive the company in the ground. Thereby saving the board and the investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
And really could I be any worse than Balmer?
I think not. I could send out teams of legal minions to defeat any upstart enterprise just as easily as he does. Hell I might even innovate something just for fun. Wouldn't that be hoot!
once more into the breach
This should be left to capitalism in action surely? If some company or other struggles, others will come in and take its place, innovating and leading society forwards into great riches and so on.
It's not like Microsoft per se is an essential public service, or that we've somehow let our businesse and economies all get tied in to their closed ecosystem, from allowing years of dodgy practices and un-checked market dominance...... Oh, wait. Damn.
Microsoft is not thinking in this way because they know Bill Gates. He is not a great technologist. He is not a great programmer. He is an excellent salesman and executive.
This has always been why Microsoft succeeded despite having products in most ways inferior to their competition. Go read the story of Gates and the first BASIC rom.
>>someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays
Bill Gates didn't have an engineering background. He miscalled networking protocols, the internet, memory usage, memory and processor scaling, as well as numerous other technical mistakes. He was great at being a backstabbing bastard, however, so perhaps that is really what Microsoft needs. Ballmer is an angry man, but not as good at the killing as Gates.
Microsoft is way past the stage where techies are in control or driving the vision. Yeah, it would benefit Microsoft to have a very smart person in a top position, but current management, who probably have never held technical roles, would never allow that to happen. Rule number one in management is, if you are dumb, make sure everyone around you is dumber.
Saying we need another Gates is like saying America needs Bush back as President. The fact of the matter is the company, and country, were already sinking by the time the torch was handed off to the new guy. Whether or not the new guy is better/worse than the last guy is up to your individual preferences I guess.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
He flunked out. Wrote a BASIC interpreter. Whined like a brat. Then his mom handed him the PC market which he could only fill by taking someone else's work and changing two letters.
His parents were hugely rich people.
"Ray Ozzie was supposed to be The One, but for some reason that never really worked out "
Gee, I wonder why...
MS hired the most nerd, bland, responsible for the most boring piece of software person ever, AND IT DIDN'T WORK OUT
All that talk Steve Jobs gives, about passion, liberal arts, etc, may seem BS, but it is needed sometimes.
Bill Gates of course is a geek, but he can 'kick ass'.
Ray Ozzie seems the kind of idiot that at first chance would put everybody and all products in a strict 'waterfall process'/'design by committee'.
how long until
Internet is the platform.
Html5 and Javascript is what it understands.
Windows is getting irrelevant. All the OSs are getting irrelevant, unless you are a geek (99,9 of mankind is not).
It doesn't matter how many rabbits they can pull off the hat, it's very unlikely they will come up with another cash cow to keep growing like they used to, no matter who's in charge.
It won't exist if its not for him, but over the time we have to innovate and improve and we should be open for new ideas.
Electronic Cigarette Reviews
While you do see everyday people using iPhones, it's extremely rare to see somebody using an iPad.
That's funny. I never notice iPhones, but just last night someone in my wife's (and my) birthing class was using an iPad 2. Every time I've flown since the iPad was released, at least one person in my line of sight had an iPad. Its has not proven to be a fad, and it certainly hasn't worn off if it is one.
Just to be devils advocate, but just because you don't see something doesn't mean it's not being successful. The sales numbers of the iPad are huge, even more so when you compare the competition, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. It may be overhyped, but it has succeeded in creating a market that Microsoft spent years trying to create. Where we go with this is only limited by our imagination and cost.
As to not seeing them, well I see quite a few people around me with them.
My only gripe with tablets, in general, is that they depend too much on someone else's cloud.
Are tablets gadgets? To some people maybe, but they are finding genuine uses, where a normal computer wouldn't have been an ergonomical fit.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I love reading all the venom that Bill Gates is getting in these comments. It really shows how transparent the general Slashdot userbase is when it comes to jealousy.
Steve Ballmer is emblematic of the problem with American corporations. He's a business man, not an engineer or a designer; his background is in economics. This means he lacks a fundamental understanding of what his company does. He's never been in the trenches so he doesn't really have an innate understanding of the technology. And these kinds of guys, far too often, lack real passion. That lack of passion means they wont really be able to commit to what may be a good idea because it wont pay off in the short term. They're fixated on the bottom line, which certainly is important, but it's not the most important thing if you truly want a company to thrive.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were so successful because in many ways they were the antithesis of the suit with the business, economics or marketing degree. The funny thing here is that no one would really expect a designer or engineer, regardless of experience, to effectively run a financial company. And yet it's become a convention that you go to the guy with the business degree.
And I think that kind of attitude towards management gives rise to a bloated, and inefficient layer of middle management. There's this whole layer of employee that exists mostly to shield upper management from day to day operations which is ironic because that's the core of their business. And that whole layer of middle management is entirely focused on self-preservation. I've come to feel that middle management positions are like welfare for the upper middle class. Someone with real passion would cut through all that bullshit and would be more directly involved with the business.
"Microsoft has a virtual monopoly."
There's the story in a nutshell. Microsoft doesn't need new CEO's or any other positions filled. Microsoft needed better judges to stomp their asses when they were in court for monopoly abuses. *sigh* That was just one of the minor sins of the Bush administration, though. Their DOJ let Microsoft off the hook way to soon.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Possibly not the best fit... but in some ways, MS needs to do something different.
Actually Gates was a coder, and pulled some cool tricks to get dos to fit and work from a floppy (wish I had a link).
And when was Perl started? Bash? awk? TeX? Borland Pascal was very different from other pascals out there.
Lots of people were writing something BETTER than Basic.
As to "CEOs are not supposed to guide development." the problem with that brush-off is that this damn thread started with someone proclaiming that Bill Gates was a great developer and had geek skills. If so, why would BG be a good CEO from that? It's, apparently, from you, not relevant.
PS the markup in Excel was worse than the markup that Borland used in their Quattro product, but that was taken from (IIRC) a perl FORMAT statement.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and his name is Mark Zuckerberg.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Nuf said.
It's not like they couldn't compete that way: Microsoft Research hire a lot of very smart people. It's just that currently, the Windows and Office code base is a huge pile of shite that the smart people don't want to waste their life cleaning up, whereas present management seem to view it as a valuable asset rather than the giant sunk cost it really is.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
That's it.
It's been proven that marriage kills off inspiration and productivity in scientists (Google on that , Satoshi Kanazawa was the author of one such study finding that). Bill got rich, a golddigger latched onto him, and the decline of Microsoft became inevitable. It's a familiar pattern.
They need to get their chairs in order.
His toolsets show it in a way: Especially Process Explorer (yes, it's "merely a better taskmanager" but in a LOT of ways).
I agree - It's not a really question of his tech skills, but as you said, his mgt. skills & dealing with people "doing deals" (which anyone can learn, give time). Then, comes the leadership abilities. This one, imo @ least, your either BORN with it, or, you will never, ever really have it. I'd say he has them probably, just by his leading the way in his toolsets and what they do... but leading people IS the question & a whole diff. ballgame.
See - I've personally "had a difference or two" with the guy 2 times over the past 15 yrs., & it wasn't good on either account really!
(Once in a company he & I worked for 1996-2000 on the side contracting to they & later @ Windows IT Pro Magazine where I proved that memory optimization program DO help (e.g.-> Unfreeze halted Exchange Servers)).
He's not infallible though, none of us are.
This field's complex... I mean, hey - they "debugged" electricity within a decade of its use for consumers... we still haven't FULLY managed that in computing, especially software (though it's world's better now than it was say, 15-20 yrs. back).
Still, even though we had a "slight disagreement" once via email regarding sales of programs & how they worked by comparison?
Just before the Windows IT Pro fiasco:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/internals-and-architecture/the-memory-optimization-hoax#feedbackAnchor
I helped him fix a program of his anyhow in 2003, & he was man enough to thank me for it via email (that said a lot to me actually).
I did so, because the program was unique @ the time (probably still is) & useful, in pagedefrag.exe...
(I.E.-> He made some "rookie" mistakes in it, which surprised me actually considering how you said "he knows windows inside & out"... but, he did so, in a very "rookie level" hardcode of the registry location for the pagefile.sys (which can be moved to faster disks))
I *think* he may still have a hardcode for eventlogs too in it, I wrote him on that back in 2003, but I am NOT SURE HE CORRECTED FOR IT!
(Yes, you CAN MOVE THOSE too to a less used or more space-free disk as well via the LOG entries underneathe each log in Windows here, e.g.-> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\eventlog\Application & the FILE entry there & same with like eventlogs there too)).
I guess what I'm trying to say here, is this: Mark R.'s really good, no doubt about it, but... he's not infallible & I've proven that much myself!
(Again - though, none of us are).
Personally, I think he likes doing his job and that's enough (well, until they show him say, a "blank check" & said "fill this in for your yearly salary" etc. that is, lol!)
APK
P.S.=> I also do know that he & a gent named Bryce Cogswell ran SysInternals, basically a 2 man company really, but he's already BEEN there/DONE that in essence, albeit on a smaller scale... but, they did WELL at it.
I also know that guys of that nature (coders) tend to be in the job, because they LIKE the job, being essentially an "electric carpenter" sort of, & for the creativity & seeing your work perform things for yourself & people (I've done it myself, still do, & liked it), & most of them tend to HATE mgt. roles unless the pay "steps up" to match the extra duties.
Yes - I've also been on the mgt. side of the fence for large companies, & it's a WHOLE DIFF. BALLGAME, dealing with people + politics...
... apk
BallmerGATE! Show Ballmer the gate.
You mean new gates at the entrance to keep people like Ballmer out?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The key to Microsoft's success had nothing to do with any of the people there, aside from their willingness to do anything in the name of profit. What made MS the powerhouse it used to be was MS Office, and the stranglehold it had over businesses. At one time, the inability to create or use Word or Excel documents was a huge detriment to any company who dared defy convention. This gave MS the monopoly power they abused to crush competition and force people to buy their products. Now, after numerous antitrust suits and technological advances, MS no longer has that advantage. There are too many other options, from competing office suites and compatibility tools to online competition, MS just can't strangle the competition anymore. They're still a huge company with a lot of power and influence, but they have to actually try to compete, and that's never been their strong suit. The decline is inevitable.
He was a coder, but his coding ended very early.
Gates didn't impress me as a visionary, just a guy who knew a half-decent idea when it was presented to him and how to hook it into the momentum and fear of change that the company built by being the first real mass-market player.
Ballmer is an ape, physically and mentally; he worked as Gates' evil alter-ego, but seems better suited as consigliere than capo.
They need someone like Jobs, who can tell that you're just going to orgasm over the next product he picks from the development bin, and they need whoever's standing behind Jobs doing Apple's production since the Sculley days, because it's actually better than Microsoft's. Really, the only reason Apple OSen haven't completely shoved Windows out of the way is the fear of change thing, both at the consumer and enterprise level. If Apple overcomes that, Microsoft is through.
Idiots. BG didn't make MS "great" being a monopoly did. No they can't have it back,
Not for established companies in mature industries.
Sure, there's a subjective component. But a company with billions in assets and hundreds of millions in profits isn't going to have a market cap in the chump change zone.
Of course, back in the 90s all that went out of the window.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
RMS
Lou Gertzner took IBM in the early to mid-90s and turned it around. What MS needs is someone like him. Someone who can take a tired and old company and completely revamp it and its culture. Neither Gates nor Ballmer should be involved in MS these days, IMO.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'll take on the job.
Personally, I absolutely love what Steve Ballmer is doing for Microsoft. The more they fail (the smaller their monopoly), the more innovation we will see in computer/software technology. I am glad Google and Apple have come in and shaken things up.
Suppose Microsoft had continued the way they were going in the mid-90's. If that were the case, I believe that rather than using app-stores on our Android or iPhone devices, we would probably all still be carrying single-function cell phones, sitting in front of our desktops PC's or 7-pound laptops, installing $60 software that performs the same functionality as Picasa or Google Maps from CD's that we bought packaged in cardboard boxes from Best Buy or Wal-Mart.