Nadella, who succeeded Ballmer one month ago, took a step this week by unraveling part of a restructuring his predecessor put in place in one of his last acts as chief executive officer. Nadella appointed onetime Democratic political operative Mark Penn to the just-invented post of strategy chief and shuffled other executives to resolve an unwieldy setup Ballmer had established in the marketing department.
Interesting look at the goings-on surround Ballmer’s end.
One thing that’s readily apparent is how clueless the Board is. I mean, seriously, you’re going to turn down Nokia’s mapping division using foreign unrepatriated money? That thing would’ve been pennies on the dollar.
If they want to flesh out Bing’s global mapping footprint that would’ve been one way to go about it. Huge mistake, and I’m not surprised that Ballmer was so frustrated.
Another thing from the article is how bad of a choice Mullaly would’ve been for CEO, and how close Elop and Ballmer were (was tipped about retirement before most people).
Nadella seems to be reinforcing a lot of Ballmer’s choices (Elop has even more power now in MSFT. He runs all devices from Xbox to Surface to Lumia, Mark Penn is in charge of strategy who was a Ballmer hire) so my guess is he’ll streamline the reorg but not massively change it.
I think Nadella is a fine choice to execute of Devices and Services as he already walks a fine line between opposing forces in Server (On premise, Cloud, Hybrid, and home grown services like Bing and Xbox Live), he knows that the future is in many devices (including some MSFT made, some not) and many services (MSFT made, running on MSFT cloud, or built using the MSFT stack on premises).
Stories like this keep surprising me, because I always think (assume) that big companies are run by very smart people and decisions involve a lot of thought by huge teams to come to the right conclusion. All scenarios are calculated through.
In reality things do or do not happen because a few people or even one person can be stupid, stubborn or delusional.
Most of the time this is wishful thinking.
I was once on a major outsourcing project. One of the managers told me that during the bidding phase a huge team spent quite some effort to come up with a reasonable offer. Then upper management met on the golf course and explored their gut feelings. As a result the price was lowered. Guess how the project fared…
Often enough it’s the case of a one-trick pony. Unfortunately the one trick usually does not work when transferred to new environments. E.g. Leo Apotheker going from SAP to HP.
For Bill Gates I have quite some respect.
Ballmer I have met once at the Redmond campus when he took the helm. He held a pep talk for our team. I was not impressed. But my opinion really went downhill after he ridiculed the iPhone launch. Just my $0.02.
He didn’t ridicule the iPhone launch, he ridiculed the iPhone COST, which changed pre-launch.
Something tells me he STILL wasn’t impressed, regardless of the exact timing of his ridicule.
You might be right… *yawn* …nitpicking…
But hey: The overwhelming dynamics of Windows Phone YOY growth should keep me awake… *dozing quietly off*
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2014/02/paging-mythbus…
To be honest, as an Apple user, he did have a point there.
I skipped the first generation iPhone. No GPS was no iPhone for me. Jobs’ WiFi triangulation stuff didn’t convince me. Maybe it worked in the States (in big cities), but I doubt it would have worked anywhere else.
I don’t think he did. The original iphone might not have been the perfect phone for everyone’s use case. But many people saw the ease of use for common functionality, and the new functionality added on ( Full web browsing) and understood that the game had changed. Microsoft did not, at least going by all the public statements that people gave at the time. I don’t know what was said internally, of course.
Also, if you read the stories behind the iphone, its kind of a miracle the thing worked at all. That was some great last minute work by a lot of people.
Yes, but the easy of use made it more expensive than higher tech phones. Mobile Safari was really the only highlight.
I was missing too much to spend my money on an iPhone until the iPhone 3G arrived. Now the iPhone is still expensive, but I gladly pay up for the ease of use, (third party) app quality and ecosystem even though there are more advanced phones out there.
Personally I can imagine people doubting if the iPhone would take off. Google thought it would and acted, the rest didn’t and Microsoft reacted too slow.
I didn’t mean to say that you, personally, were wrong looking at your own decision making process at the time. But, for a large number of people the ease of use was the killer feature. Also, it was released in the US first, where it was competing with Motorola Razr and similar phones. We didn’t get into the whol symbian/ nokia craze.
To be fair to Steve, when asked about the iPhone he couldn’t, in his position, really praise it or state that Microsoft was in trouble over it. That’s shooting yourself in the foot and then handing over the gun to your competitor.
Microsoft missed the mobile boot and I think this is regardless of the iPhone. Steve should have dismissed all the competing devices/systems, as he should have, but he also should have worked very hard on his own product. That turned out too little too late. It also included a false start with WP 7 (on which I’m still stuck).
And me personally I don’t get the impression Microsoft is really going for it that hard, not as hard as they could if they really wanted to.
Microsoft’s strong points are Office, Windows and their server offerings. I wonder why they still bother with WP. Why not ditch it and offer iOS and Android apps to access their services. It’s much easier and cheaper to do a bunch of apps than it is to do those apps AND build an operating systems for them.
It’s unlikely they’ll get a very large market share, certainly not in the near future, so to keep everybody happy they need to be on iOS and Android anyway.
It really comes down to what company you want Microsoft to be and which markets they should focus on. There are many other companies Microsoft could spend their money on that might aid them better (buying Xamarin as an example comes to mind).
If you disagree with the Devices and Services move, then buying Nokia makes a lot less sense and I think the opposing board probably does (or did during that meeting – article seems to imply some changed their minds).
Personally I am not so sure Microsoft should attempt to move into “devices and services” (aka mobile hardware and cloud solutions). Such moves are very far from where they started (as a software company) and I fear what made their old offerings strong might suffer from it, along with maybe cultural problems when doing such a massive switch.
In any case, it will certainly be very interesting to see what moves Microsoft does next.
Two quotes from the article:
“Nokia made about 80 percent of handsets using Windows Phone, and the arrangement was set to expire in February 2014. Nokia had been dropping hints it might start making devices to run on Google’s Android platform. Ballmer needed a way to keep Nokia in Microsoft’s world.”
And now we know why Microsoft paid so much money for Nokia. Not even Nokia wanted to remain selling a losing proposition such as Windows phone and the only way to make sure that they would do so was to buy the company.
In July, Microsoft reported the biggest earnings miss in at least a decade. Owing to poor sales of Surface, it took an unexpected $900 million charge to write down the value of inventory.”
How many companies can afford to simply throw 900 million dollars down the toilet? This is why Microsoft´s monopoly position on desktop computing did so much harm. This unfair monopoly has allowed them to use their deep pockets to put out of business many companies who make better products than they do, but who cannot afford to lose as much money as Microsoft is willing to do in order to enter a new market or corner an existing one.
MS would likely maintain a monopoly position even without any unfair practices; and they gained that position largely by luck when they were still small. And in a time when most alternatives to MS products were really worse… ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?540890 )
Edited 2014-03-13 00:06 UTC