My personal opinion is that for Microsoft this is a much better solution than to hire an external CEO with an MBA and no background in software/technology. If the news are true then I wish all the luck to Mr. Nadella.
I don't think BillG would have allowed hiring someone with an MBA and no background in software/technology. He is still the majority shareholder (from what I've read) and sits on the board.
Satya has an MBA too. I was just commenting on my previous comment. I guess author meant that someone just with MBA as a qualification and no relevant tech background would have been bad deal since MBAs get hired in leadership role even if they may or may not possess relevant domain knowledge.
Nobody is going to get hired as CEO of an $80 billion a year company with just an MBA. It would be an MBA plus 20-30 years of business experience, and these days it's almost impossible to avoid technology completely. I'm not even sure domain knowledge is important for a CEO of a company that size: once you become a $50 billion plus company, you don't have time to get involved with the details of the business.
>I'm not even sure domain knowledge is important for a CEO of a company that size: once you become a $50 billion plus company, you don't have time to get involved with the details of the business.
Steve Jobs and CEOs in-between kind of make a counter-example.
Read the biographies of Steve and Steve; Jobs was not an expert, but was familiar with technology of that era. His father taught him electronics, and Jobs was working at Atari as an technician.
They have to make capital allocation decisions, based on the direction the market is taking. An MBA might be able to tell whether China or India needs more marketing dollars, but they won't know whether it's better to invest billions into different R&D efforts.
The executive in charge of mobile isn't going to tell the CEO "look, Windows phone is busted, just fire us and put everything behind a major effort to sell small-medium businesses turnkey enterprise systems."
Why? My experience has been that handing the reins tech companies over to accountants or "business people" has been fair to disastrous more frequently than handing them over to tech people with some business training.
I disagree. Technology people tend to focus on the shiny, which really isn't what Microsoft needs at this point. They're just too big and they play in too many fields where they end up competing with themselves in half of the markets they play in.
After ten years of Ballmer, what Microsoft needs now is a professional manager to sort out the mess he left. They have no shortage of great technology people; what they need is someone to bring the organization to heel behind a universal vision.
Microsoft is not on the verge of great growth or in the position anymore to build "the next big thing." That ship has sailed for them, as all the people capable of building the next big thing have been run off by the ineffective management (or never hired in the first place) and work at Google or Facebook now. Microsoft is, however, at risk of losing a significant portion of their revenue should the PC industry continue its slide and start being displaced in the enterprise.
Nadella is the best choice that is available. I still hold that the best candidate out there for the job is Mark Hurd, but he apparently wasn't interested for the same reason a lot of other outside candidates weren't interested: Microsoft has an infamously poisonous corporate culture, and everyone who worked for an outside CEO would be trying to undermine him and take his job.
I totally disagree on the "professional manager" - that's what ballmer was. and this is coming from someone who thinks ballmer is unfairly criticized.
(eg - what google and apple unleashed on the world in the past 10 years was a major historical shift - coming from product/technical people at their core. arguably, this shift was one that only a newbie or outsider could pull off. 20/20 hindsight to say "microsoft could have dominated those arenas" when they had so many other verticals of strength to tend to. (and 20/20 hindsight for me to say this as well...))
IMHO microsoft needs to keep focusing on hacker-friendliness - they have a great lock on the corporate world, but the corporate world is starting to look to the hacker community for direction.
what do i mean by this?
big companies can't be trusted to just get brand loyalty and keep buying your stuff until they go out of business. look at RIM - Blackberries were mandatory company accessories, now it is BYOD. Look at the server market - the biggest consumers of servers (FB, GOOG) are using designs they made themselves. Tougher for Dell and HP to keep selling ready-made servers. How long before other major corporations are doing the same?
the enterprise market is more tech savvy than times past, and only getting more so. high-level technical creativity and intuitive understanding of product potential is vital.
I always thought the amount FB/GOOG spend on servers is a tiny fraction, when compared to the sum of what all the other companies in the world spend. Do you have a source where I can verify this claim that Dell/HP are having a hard with their server divisions because FB/GOOG isn't buying from them?
This is a honest question as I often am not aware of the whole picture (and have a hard time picking the right sources for that kind of information -- not sure who to trust in a marketing war).
The GP isn't arguing that Dell/HP are hurting because they lost their biggest customers. It argues that they're at risk of losing many customers in the future, because enterprise IT departments will emulate Facebook and Google.
If that is his argument, then I think it's wrong. Small and medium business will never do that for sure. They don't have the knowledge, resources or anything. The ROI is nonexistent for them.
Even for big corporation, what would be a good number of servers for them to reach a critical mass where it is worth keeping all those HW engineers and increased support staff? They want to sign a contract, get regular supported servers, with warranty, etc, and focus on their core business. They get it from the regular folks of HP, Dell, IBM, etc.
Of course there are exceptions but are they numerous enough to say Dell and HP are doomed? I hardly think so. Corporations in HPC market might take a stab at creating something like this. The folks running app/DB/web/whatnot servers for ERP, financial, etc applications?
Interesting that you bring this up the day after Microsoft donates a bunch of server designs to the Open Compute Project. I definitely think that hybrid cloud approaches will squeeze out middlemen like HP and Dell. OEMs and customers are going to be the big winners here.
In a lot of respects I agree with you. Microsoft needs someone who will fix their ridiculous enterprise agreement / contract / sales process and win back the hearts and minds of CIOs around the world. In my personal opinion, this has to be job #1... at least for the Finance+Sales organization.
They also need credibility with consumers and techies on their R&D and hardware/platforms side. Not that they don't have decent stuff now, but they have approached it like a large enterprise rather than as a hip tech company and it's really unsexy for people to proclaim their love of Azure vs [insert ANY other PAAS/IAAS here]. Just as an example.... Windows Phone and the whole Windows OS strategy is something else they should publicize better. At this point, hardly anyone is building Metro mobile apps because it's really unclear WTF Microsoft is doing beyond Windows 8.1, and what will happen to Nokia or their very few other hardware partners if sales don't take off. The Surface Pro is a really nice tab and fits well into a lot of IT strategies, given it hits both the "I want a sexy tablet!" and the "I need my freaking Excel and my goddamn PowerPoint animations!" sweet spots. MS has a ton of potential and loads of talent. They just need to motivate it toward the right objectives, and I think choosing a new CEO from within will help them get there way faster than hiring an outsider, especially one from a non-tech company.
A CEO doesn't work in a vacuum, nor does he need to be the most knowledgeable person in the room. He can pay other people to think for him and ask the right questions. It's not an easy job, but it necessitates taking a 10,000 foot view of everything. Knowing how to navigate a corporate alliance or a merger is much more important than anything technology-specific.
⚫ This spot's proving very difficult to fill. Both in terms of finding the right person, and in getting them to accept. It's been 160 days from the initial announcement of Ballmer's retirement.
⚫ Given Ballmer's long-standing deficiencies and publicly-voiced dissatisfaction with his performance, this also speaks to very poor succession planning on the part of the Board. This would be they: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/bod.aspx
⚫ Enterprise + cloud is probably a safe pick for now. It suggests a de-emphasis of consumer and mobile, and a retrenchment to core strengths, if not enduring ones.
⚫ I'm not sold that bringing in external talent solves problems that insiders can't tackle. The insiders will be well aware of strengths and weaknesses, the challenge is in acting on them given existing internal relationships and politics.
Enterprise is the high-inertia segment in Microsoft's product portfolio and the one most at risk of disruption by SaaS players. Emphasizing it makes a lot of sense.
The problem of insiders is that they may embrace the culture that brought the company to where it is now. It's not always a good thing.
That sounds like an opportunity to me. Get real cloud-based software solutions that compete with Google SaaS officeware, but tie it into desktop office in a way that synergizes without forcing people to subscribe or upgrade.
Apple is good at the monetization angle of this. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same (except with software, not hardware).
Example: 90% of the time I'm on a webex/gotomeeting, I'm looking at one of three things: 1) Powerpoint, 2) Excel/Word or 3) a Browser.
Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier? My guess is that they were too arrogant to make things work for the folks not on the latest versions, or on different OS's.
It's 2014, that's not good enough. People expect your product to be sociable and flexible. And that's why it's Cisco/Citrix software that's showing the MS docs.
> Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier?
What makes you think they haven't done so already? Ever heard of Office 365, OneNote, Lync?
> My guess is that they were too arrogant to make things work for the folks not on the latest versions, or on different OS's.
My guess is that you haven't really looked into Microsoft's products for the past 5 years. I can tell you that they are doing quite well in the product development of their cloud and SaaS offerings lately.
Lync doesn't even have an option to pop up notifications when new chats come in. How well do you think that works on a workstation with four screens and no sound?
Right. So imagine if you have two or more monitors, and the one with the taskbar is two or three feet away from where your focus is. The little blinking square is hardly noticeable then, especially if you rarely use the taskbar (and how would you if you have four screens, it will give you RSI just mousing over there every time).
There is one semi-cheesy third-party app which adds more obvious notification, but as it stands, email arriving in Outlook is way easier to see than IMs in Lync, even though Outlook knows all about your Lync conversations, including when you are missing one (i.e. it quietly puts the chats you are missing into your Missed Conversations, even while it is notifying you with a big popup about incoming emails). In 1999 AOL IM would just pop up the chat window on your screen where you could see it.
> Remember you are not their client. Your CTO/CIO/CEO are. It's not you they need to make happy and they won't even try.
That kind of attitude doesn't work anymore. The Enterprise Architect does get listened to these days, because software is key to the health of the company's operations.
We're not in the days where downtime means you get an extra cup of coffee or the day off. Downtime could mean you go out of business.
Microsoft have a lot of lock in with security that makes cloud deployment harder. You may be able to easily edit a document in the cloud; but can you authenticate access to it using Active Directory? If an employee leaves can I remove access to all the SaaS apps they use instantly? Large players like Google can make solutions to these kind of problems, but how many start-up SaaS companies can afford to integrate with something like AD? Microsoft does still act as a gatekeeper.
Integrating with AD for authentication of users to an external service in the cloud isn't that difficult - I've seen a number of approaches work although I must admit I've never actually seen the "official" approach of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in action:
The biggest lock-ins are from Office formats, and Active Directory integration with network and communications services. Crack either of those and the bulwark starts to crumble rapidly.
I will agree with Office but I've a hard time seeing AD disrupted by anything else. The alternatives aren't better and/or are a support nightmare.
And with Office, it seems the Office 365 offering with the web clients has a very good shot at technically beating Google Apps... if they can sell it efficiently is another matter.
I'm not saying that AD is easy to disrupt (the primary challenge is that there's no one clearly superior replacement), but that if you crack it, a massive benefit / bonus of Microsoft's product line is voided.
I think an interesting side effect of this; his vacating of the Cloud/Enterprise role provides a natural succession up the chain for Scott Guthrie. It also gives Scott (who has more of an effect on the Microsoft dev community than any other person) a direct pipeline and solid personal relationship with the CEO.
I imagine that Satya would know the people well and where he wants them so we may see some shuffling in the next 6-9 months. Scott is a great public persona and clicks with developers far more than Soma. Soma is stronger operationally and there are going to be other ops critical roles to fill because Satya's elevation to CEO will certainly cause some high level people to leave.
As I said 50 days ago[1] Nadella was always the most likely internal candidate. It's a choice that makes some sense to me - he's a technologist, which I think is important (note that at some point the Ford CEO was tipped). However, his background is all in Enterprise software.
Microsoft's most successful products recently have all been in the Enterprise field, so that reflects well on him. But there have to be questions about his experience with consumer software.
Microsoft really isn't a consumer company: they make all their profit from enterprise software. Ballmer's biggest mistake was trying to convince an elephant to become a mouse. What he left was a mess that needs a lot of cleaning up. It doesn't help that he reorganized the company 6 months ago, effectively preventing his successor from making any substantial changes from the Ballmer way.
Given the number of people that were mentioned as front runners in this CEO search over the last few months, this seems to be a job that nobody outside Microsoft wants. Nadella was always the most likely internal candidate, and it really feels like they're settling on him because everyone external candidate they wanted turned them down.
yeah, except the video game market and the whole hardware market...
It's definitely the most obvious area for growth that they have available. The enterprise market is more or less saturated by them already. They're sorta trying to push their cloud solution, but they're late to that game. They aren't going to sell a whole bunch more of MS Office... It's a segment that will continue to develop organically, but the place where they really wanna be dumping cash on is definitely the consumer market.
I know everyone hates on Balmer, but he seemed to follow a very sensibly strategy and there seems to have been a genuinely big effort to integrate their different platforms and services into something that pleasant to use and develope for. At least stylistically, Windows RT, 8, Phone and Xbox are identical. The underlying "meat" is in wonderful languages (C#/F#), with a great IDE (VS13), with - from what I understand - and well made new libraries. They've also aggressively tried to cut out the old moldy stuff, and have paid for it in the short term (ex: Windows RT not supporting Win32 & Windows Phone 7 not being very compatible with Windows Phone 8)
What market? I know I'll probably get crucified for saying this, but video games are only a good business if you're making the games themselves. The hardware is low margin, and you don't really make it up on the licensing anymore either since gamers have so many platforms to choose from. Worse still, you can't form a dominant platform through the methods Microsoft traditionally uses: you have to convince consumers directly. And video games are just a "good" business, never a great one: they are very risky and the maximum payout is limited. EA and Activision both made about $5 billion in revenue. Combined they made as much as half of the Server and Tools business (and at much lower margins.)
Microsoft's core strength is licensing software to businesses. Hardware and game consoles are a foray into a high-risk, low-margin business (well, low margin relative to software.) By contrast, Microsoft's operating margin on enterprise software is close to 50%. The margin on their entertainment and devices division is currently less than 1%. Comparables would say that a good margin in a hardware business like that is 10-20%.
Worse still, selling consumer electronics and media properties to consumers requires a sales channel that Microsoft has still not mastered. Windows and enterprise software are sold through a reseller model: Microsoft makes products and advertises them to a network of people who have discovered they can make a living selling and implementing Microsoft software (be they PC OEMs or consultants.) They have never been good at consumer marketing or retail sales. They've never had that "cool" brand image you need to succeed there, and the amount of money you have to spend on marketing is insane compared to their more profitable cash cow.
There's still plenty of room for them to innovate in the enterprise space too. Oracle and SAP suck donkey balls to use and Microsoft is actually really good at delivering rock-solid enterprise software with a good blend of usability and power. I just fear that if any new CEO focuses too much on the consumer side of the business, there are a lot of much more profitable options on the enterprise side.
The consumer side is a huge distraction to Microsoft, one that has produced a lot of red ink but never really any profit. Look at their historical results since, well, ever, and you'll see that the consumer products consistently lose money while the enterprise software keeps growing margins and top line.
Microsoft can't rely on dominating markets. They have to get back into the, and do as Apple and Google have done and invent markets.
I feel Microsoft will only have the confidence to attack the consumer market when they feel their enterprise market position is a competitive advantage.
All this banter about it being a bad choice or a good choice because Satya's current role is enterprise focused is just goofy. Had Elop been chosen we would not be acting as if Microsoft is only a phone company now and is abandoning the enterprise.
I think the unspoken logic here is that Microsoft is already doing great in the enterprise and poorly on devices, so hiring somebody with the same distribution of strengths and weaknesses will just exacerbate the weaknesses without helping the strengths all that much (since they're already strong there).
Or maybe it will signal that Microsoft is serious about being an enterprise software company and might stop wasting money and mindshare on chasing trends it can't ever catch.
Does a CEO have to have a long background in all areas a company as big as Microsoft has a foot in? Aren't we looking for the magical unicorn that has excelled in the enterprise, consumer devices and who knows, green energy all in a single lifetime?
I think it's a fallacy to think a CEO with an enterprise background wouldn't (or couldn't) let the consumer division prosper. That he/she would hinder it or something.
As much as saying "I think this person should keep doing what he's doing because he's really good at it" can be said to be speaking against someone.
This isn't my own opinion, mind you. I don't know enough about this whole issue to have an opinion of my own. I'm just explaining where I think the disconnect is. I think the people who don't like the choice of Satya dislike it because they feel Satya is doing as well as he can do in his current position, and Microsoft needs to bring in a different skill set in order to make the company good in areas where it isn't already.
All the talk of needing a turn around specialist, I personally don't see it. Really, a visionary or someone who can actually come up with a constructive, actionable plan that grows market share (in realm of focus) and revenues makes sense to me. I would like someone less steeped in the monoculture that is Redmond, but Satya will be a solid choice. Tony Bates would be my preference for "internal candidate".
Of course these are just my personal opinions.
If Bill Gates is removed as Chairman that will be a major change.
As a former NOKIAn I am sad. I want to see MS go down in flames and without Elop it's gonna be difficult. However Indians are also very talented at destroying the spirit of their own companies and alienating their users (see Harman or Adobe) so there is a hope...
As a current Nokian I find your attitude to be unrepresentative of what Nokia stands for, and unfair to the great many Nokians of Indian descent who helped make Nokia the incredible company it was.
It's irrelevant what Indians as a class may or may not be. Considering the choice is about a specific individual, not a random selection from a group, there's definitely more information than useless (incorrect?) stereotypes. Ballmer's a white guy and did a fine job destroying and alienating.
The selection of an internal post IPO candidate makes the most cultural sense. If Sinofsky had not incurred a billion dollar fine by failing to include browser choice in the EU version of Windows 8, it might have been him.
Amid suspicions that Microsoft is having trouble finding the perfect person to fill this role, Satya makes sense. I've always thought of him as an incredibly talented administrator rather than a brilliant general. He's a known person within Microsoft who can be a caretaker for the organization while the hunt for a CEO who can lead the next charge can continue.
It's a bit of a poisoned chalice for someone outside of Microsoft as if Gates and Balmer remain on the board as any new CEO will be continually undermined by people "going to Bill/Steve". To appointment someone from inside Microsoft is simply rearranging the deck chairs.
Best thing for Microsoft would be to hire an outsider who will come in with an unbiased eye and clear out the deadwood to give new growth a chance or to milk the cash cows to their inevitable conclusions. To be able to do this you need Bill and Steve and their old guard out of the way.
MSFT's power and potential is in everything enterprise and Nadella understands this (or rather passionate about this) universe from top to bottom better than any other candidate.
I know he reads voraciously, so it's possible he's reading HN. He totally listens to forward-thinking devs. ScottGu works for him, so he's been leading us as we've been doing all this open source work on Azure and ASP.NET.
Big mistake IMO. I can't imagine Satya "the enterprise guy" being CEO of the devices company (he's probably qualified to be CEO for the "services" part of Microsoft). I'm wondering if him and Elop would work as co-CEOs, but history shows that's not a good idea either.
Not sure if you are trying to pull out the old faded joke or being truly serious. Bing has about 18%-27% market share depending on Organic vs Powered By. No I am not nitpicking a specific blog article, infact its the first summarized link on a Google search for "Bing market share". Bing also powers Siri, which is another major contributor.
>Windows is largely enterprise.
Its revenue may be largely enterprise but its still a monopoly in the consumer side. Infact I can blindly bet that majority of users here on HN is using Windows.
Based off the majority of OS related post and comments, I would assume so too but there are a good number of lurkers and users who are non-vocal about their use of Windows. I couldn't find any HN Poll on this matter, but I hope someone who dealt with an HN effect would be kind enough to share their Analytics report on the OS traffic.
Yesterday a buddy of mine (and partner in crime - the proverbial kind) tried to install a new language and dev environment on his machine. 4 hours and much frustration later, he still couldn't do much.
On Linux the same tasks would have taken 20 minutes (and did, as I had installed the same environment several months ago).
I couldn't imagine doing any development on Windows unless it's C++ or C# on VS... Everything is a hassle compared to Linux.
I wouldn't call it that. My assumption is based off of the outcome in desktop market share and the fact of the monopoly title still being held by Windows.
>Yesterday a buddy of mine (and partner in crime - the proverbial kind) tried to install a new language and dev environment on his machine. 4 hours and much frustration later, he still couldn't do much.
Out of curiosity what was he/she installing? Unless its a *nix port of something, all it should involve is install and run.
Well its quiet opposite for me, everytime I try to set up a dev environment or anything GUI related (like media center) on Ubuntu, there is atleast one thing that happens not to work. Googling mostly comes up with a fix where I would need to recompile the whole thing, at which point I give up and switch to Windows.
However, for servers, I love Linux distros, it works perfectly out of box, I can't imagine running Windows for anything server related.
On Linux you use the Haxe install script, then sudo apt-get or sudo zypper install everything. Add a Vim script for context aware code completion, haxelib install a few things, all done.
On Windows - Haxe installed easily. Everything else was a nightmare - had to download everything from every vendor's website, then had to download a bunch of dependencies from various other vendor's websites, then he had to figure out versions of .NET (apparently he needed .NET 2.0 AND .NET 4), 32 bit vs. 64 bit. In hindsight if we were to do it again it'd be quicker, but it was a hassle.
Everything worked (eventually), but it wasn't fun. I'll never again take for granted how Linux pulls in dependencies for everything automatically.
Satya is no Steve Jobs or Larry Page. He is typical corporate ladder climber who took 22 years in the company to get to where he is. Before you credit with all the profits in server & tools, make a note that he was in Bing and did not had any major impact in direction or turnaround. Microsoft divisions are setup in such a way that if you put a monkey on the top (or even Steve Ballmer, for that matter) for a year or two, it will still make same amount of profits because of licensing deals. Satya also hasn't brought anything dramatic or revolutionary in his current job. Azure is still irrelevant and Dev Tools still has little impact on Windows or vice versa.
So Satya would be your choice if you want "stability", no fear of any dramatic changes and "easy as she goes" attitude. Honestly that is the least what Microsoft needs right now. Microsoft is currently pretty much in same situation as Apple was when Steve Jobs arrived. I know, I know, I see you jumping off your chairs quoting last quarterly results and telling me it is far from bankruptcy like was Apple. But have noticed a chart of PC sales for last 3 years? Have you noticed a giant slump in Office that is only matter of time to eat away the growth in server and tools?
In any case, I really think Micosoft needs a bold bet, not someone conservative. It needs someone who would come in and say, this size of 100K employees is bullshit, who has courage to remove about 60% of crud that has been accumulated in form of MBAs, PMs, "Business Managers", GMs and their 13+ levels of hierarchy. Someone who would have balls to say managers are overhead, less important and there needs to be 30 reports per manager (instead of current 3-7). Someone who can personally deeply dive in to products and send out "30 things to fix and improve" every Friday night. Someone who will go to end of the Earth to get the best talent in industry. Someone who insist on best customer experience and signs off his/her name on each product release saying that he personally has tested and used every customer facing aspect of the product and is happy with it. Someone who would never let crapeware like Windows 8 get through the door. Someone who insist on same OS for Phone and Tablets. Someone who would not hesitate to move org charts if things don't work out as intended.
As far as I'm aware Satya is neither of these. He is your regular MBA with tech experience who can keep the ship steady in good weather.
That's disappointing. I was really hoping that it would be someone external to the company who would be visionary enough to take them to new heights. Instead, they're picking the safe, enterprise bet, who won't change things too much.
I would say Microsoft's consumer facing days are numbered.
As a Microsoft Developer, I don't want a Microsoft with new vision. I want a Microsoft that will continue to build a great platform to build business applications on.
We moved away from WPF after Windows 8. We gravitated towards ASP.NET MVC, but increasingly started using Angular JS.
While I love these new javascript libs, I miss the great tool set that Microsoft always provided. Without that, I think we can eventually move completely off Microsoft without looking back.
You do realize that you're confirming the previous point of the "consumer side days are numbered". Platforms for business applications are not good for consumers.
The thing is, the "PC market" is rather artificially defined to be that market in which Microsoft dominates.
If you take the generic concept of "personal computer", what people were using those for five or ten years ago, people are now often using smartphones and tablets. Due to how the market is segmented for analysis, this isn't counted against Microsoft, but the money doesn't care how we segment it. The PC, in the long term, is going to be a niche market. Not today, not tomorrow, but in 5, 10, 20 years, a Microsoft that owns the entire PC market and little else will be a tiny, broken Microsoft.
If we count tablets in with PCs, then MS's "PC" monopoly is already gone. Tablets are selling around 1/3rd of what PCs are selling, so that gives MS a 75% share.
If we count smartphones in with PCs, then PCs almost disappear. Smartphones make up about 60% of the combined smartphone+tablet+PC market, with tablets making up another 10%, giving PCs 30%.
I'm sure you'd point out how PCs are still very popular, how MS still makes tons of money off them, how they're not going anywhere soon, etc. And I completely agree. But in the long term, it's not going to last, not in the form it exists now. I'm sure MS could do decently well for a very long time as they are, but they will stagnate and they will eventually shrink if they do so. They might remain powerful, but not to anywhere near the same degree.
For your Wal-Mart analogy, imagine if Wal-Mart totally owned retail sales, but "retail" was defined to exclude all online sales, and Amazon was selling 3x as much stuff as Wal-Mart once you counted online. Even as Wal-Mart owned the "retail" market and remained profitable, it would be completely reasonable to think that they might need to change.
Those won't remain PCs forever. "Post-PC" devices are already making substantial inroads, just to a much smaller degree so far. How many business laptops meant for field use have been replaced with smartphones and tablets because all they're used for is reading e-mails and viewing maps and such?
There's no doubt that MS can coast for a long time on PCs, but if they do, they're never going to dominate they way they did in the 90s, and they will eventually go away.
You are absolutely right. But I'm pretty sure (crystal ball time) the post-PC device looks a good deal closer to a Surface Pro than an iPad.
That concept of keyboard + mouse + touch screen is really good; you need a way to have custom line of business apps developed for it. Apps need to be easily installable on it. It needs to have integration capabilities with oddish hardware. App state needs to be 'sane' and persist extant data without wrecking it due to swapping out of memory.
IOW, the capability lineup looks a lot like a PC on someone's desk, even though the form factor might reflow to be a tablet placed in a dock with attached bluetooth keyboard/mouse.
You could be totally right about that. It's a bit of a tough sell to me to say that Surface will keep them relevant, but it's definitely far more possible and reasonable than them staying relevant sticking to the PC.
His twitter seems to suggest he really is into keeping up with the latest trends. https://twitter.com/satyanadella The article states there was a 5 month search. I'm glad they are hiring within the ranks.
I agree. But, that said, I don't know that "people who are active on Twitter" and "people who are up on the latest trends" are always connected (which is what was implied).
On topic:
I do not think this guy (or any CEO) of Microsoft is going to be able drive Microsoft in any true sense of the word. Gates is not going anywhere.
Off topic:
I might be the only one who came in here excitedly expecting to see a Female CEO of Microsoft. Kind of disappointed when I saw the picture and it's just another balding dude.
No I'm not female or a feminist, just kind of excited for drastic progressive change that I personally favor (I think more girls should be in tech, especially in leadership)
This won't end well. Microsoft is a bubble with an echo-chamber internally. Their employees are in the 1990s era, which is making DVD application software (Word, etc.). The problem is that they still think that way. Senior managers are from the 1990s. Or they hired from colleges and sheep dipped people in the same thinking. People from startups and industry don't last long there, and definitely don't rise in management.
The reason startup or industry people don't rise in Microsoft is that they are rejected as not matching the 1990s way of doing things.
Examples: Their UI innovation was in WPF because someone forgot to tell them that UI dev now happens on web pages and iPhone. Hotmail is a joke. MSN is a joke. Web hosted office 365 is a joke. Exchange web UI and client main usage is for 1990s customers and not 2010 customers. C# is charging in the opposite direction of the entire webapp industry's development platforms. (aka, they were late to MVC, Hadoop, Linux server hosting, etc.) They push Windows OS lock-in to win (but that fails).
The right leader comes from Silicon Valley in a startup gone big. That right leader will then replace many of the other leaders in MSFT with Silicon Valley highly strategic leaders. When the CEO is a Microsoft person, they will keep the same Microsoft 1990s style internal leaders and nothing will change in the category of what needs to change.
C# is charging in the opposite direction of the entire webapp industry's development platforms.
I'm not sure if you're confused or I'm confused. C# is a programming language. What exactly about C# is "in the opposite direction of the entire webapp industry's development platforms"?
Have any examples of a startup leader taking over a large, mature company and doing well? Seems like the skill sets of driving a race car don't necessarily transfer well to locomotives.
People who thrive at building a startup often are not particularly successful taking over a mature business. Meg Whitman comes to mind, though HP has its own world of hurt.
I like all of your thoughts except that the leader has to come from a Silicon Valley startup gone big.
I just don't agree. There's too much risk of a culture clash. At the altitude that MS flies- you need someone who knows how to pilot gargantuan ships. I'd way rather see someone from a fortune 50 company take the reigns.
There's a huge difference between developing a horse to be an olympic competitor and riding a horse to multiple championships.
The biggest priority for new CEO is to get the two major divisions OS and Devs on the same page instead of bickering and reinventing the UI several times over from other groups. Secondly, he needs to put focus on UI design and usability instead of having engineering lead the way.
From one former Milwaukeean to another, I hope this kicks more recruiters to the area. With three major universities in the city, there was a dismal number of national recruiters dropping by when I lived there (about a decade ago now, maybe things are different).
I grew up in the Milwaukee area, but eventually moved to Boston. I think it produces a decent amount of talent (my school had a great technical program) but there's not a lot of interesting employers there.
I grew up in Milwaukee and (in 2002) applied only to California universities because I thought the tech industry/opportunities out there were much more substantial, and I'd have a leg up on professional networking. Has worked out well. YMMV
