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Steve Ballmer and the Albatross Known as Windows
How Microsoft's phenomenal success led the company astray. For years now, Microsoft watchers have wondered about the timing and other specifics of Steve Ballmer's departure. Now we know them — or a lot more than we did yesterday, anyway. After 33 years at the company, the executive who started at Microsoft in 1980 and has been its CEO since 2000 has announced that he'll retire within the next 12 months, once a successor has been named. For folks interested primarily in the stock market, Ballmer's time as Microsoft's head honcho is defined by the fact that its shares have largely flat-lined during his tenure. Here, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, is a chart comparing how MSFT has compared to AAPL during that time period: If you — like me — don't care much about Microsoft's stock price, Ballmer's legacy is far more complicated. It can't be summed up in a chart or a tweet or even in one blog post. I am not among the man's harshest critics, in part because I believe that all tech-company hegemonies are destined to decline, sooner or later. The dustbin of tech-company history is littered with outfits which were once market-defining behemoths: Lotus, WordPerfect, Netscape, Palm and oh, so many more. Microsoft in 2013 is not a company on the verge of joining them: It's still making vast amounts of money and managing to be highly competitive in everything from mundane business software to blockbuster videogames. Bottom line: I'm pretty sure that there are alternate universes in which the company was run by someone else in recent years — maybe even Bill Gates himself — and fared considerably worse than it has under Ballmer. Still, I can't imagine that there's anyone out there who believes that it's a given that Microsoft will be anywhere near as important to the future of personal computing as it has been to its the first four decades. Including Steve Ballmer: Last month, he instigated a massive reorg, with the aim of turning Microsoft into a "devices and services" company. Those moves acknowledge that the Microsoft of the future, assuming it's successful, won't be the Microsoft we've known. Like the reorg, many of the most notable Microsoft moments of the past few years involve sudden, epoch-shifting change. Ballmer's company has done things you wouldn't have expected Microsoft to do, from giving Windows 8 an entirely new primary interface to making its own PC hardware. It's been a lot for the company's customers to process all at once, particularly since so many of them value comfortable familiarity over great leaps forward. (Exhibit A: Windows XP, the 12-year-old operating system Microsoft can't kill.) If Microsoft is behaving like it's trying to make up for lost time, it's because...well, it's because it needs to make up for lost time. And it's lagging behind Apple and Google in the race to define the future of personal computing mostly for one simple reason: For too many years, Windows was too damn successful. At some point along the way, Microsoft's golden goose became an albatross. The Windows era — which began with Windows 3.0 in 1990 and continues on, at least if you're talking about laptops and desktops — made billions for Microsoft and its investors. But it also gave the company a number of bad habits it's still trying to overcome. Such as: • Windows' success led to hubris. From its very earliest days, Microsoft was never a company afflicted by a crippling lack of self-confidence. In the years when it was crushing the competition in categories such as PC operating systems and productivity software, being unimaginably headstrong helped. But after that competition was crushed, Microsoft lost its ability to take the most serious threats to its dominance of personal computing seriously. (I'm still not sure whether Ballmer's famous blustery dismissal of the iPhone was sincere or not — but either way, it was unfortunate.) The company also treated paying customers shabbily in some instances — like with the dismal copy-protection scheme it insultingly named Windows Genuine Advantage — in a way that couldn't have been less humble or less lovable. t necessarily be very much like old stuff, a philosophy that led to the Metro interface used by Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
Steve Ballmer and the Albatross Known as Windows
How Microsoft's phenomenal success led the company astray. For years now, Microsoft watchers have wondered about the timing and other specifics of Steve Ballmer's departure. Now we know them — or a lot more than we did yesterday, anyway. After 33 years at the company, the executive who started at Microsoft in 1980 and has been its CEO since 2000 has announced that he'll retire within the next 12 months, once a successor has been named. For folks interested primarily in the stock market, Ballmer's time as Microsoft's head honcho is defined by the fact that its shares have largely flat-lined during his tenure. Here, courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, is a chart comparing how MSFT has compared to AAPL during that time period: If you — like me — don't care much about Microsoft's stock price, Ballmer's legacy is far more complicated. It can't be summed up in a chart or a tweet or even in one blog post. I am not among the man's harshest critics, in part because I believe that all tech-company hegemonies are destined to decline, sooner or later. The dustbin of tech-company history is littered with outfits which were once market-defining behemoths: Lotus, WordPerfect, Netscape, Palm and oh, so many more. Microsoft in 2013 is not a company on the verge of joining them: It's still making vast amounts of money and managing to be highly competitive in everything from mundane business software to blockbuster videogames. Bottom line: I'm pretty sure that there are alternate universes in which the company was run by someone else in recent years — maybe even Bill Gates himself — and fared considerably worse than it has under Ballmer. Still, I can't imagine that there's anyone out there who believes that it's a given that Microsoft will be anywhere near as important to the future of personal computing as it has been to its the first four decades. Including Steve Ballmer: Last month, he instigated a massive reorg, with the aim of turning Microsoft into a "devices and services" company. Those moves acknowledge that the Microsoft of the future, assuming it's successful, won't be the Microsoft we've known. Like the reorg, many of the most notable Microsoft moments of the past few years involve sudden, epoch-shifting change. Ballmer's company has done things you wouldn't have expected Microsoft to do, from giving Windows 8 an entirely new primary interface to making its own PC hardware. It's been a lot for the company's customers to process all at once, particularly since so many of them value comfortable familiarity over great leaps forward. (Exhibit A: Windows XP, the 12-year-old operating system Microsoft can't kill.) If Microsoft is behaving like it's trying to make up for lost time, it's because...well, it's because it needs to make up for lost time. And it's lagging behind Apple and Google in the race to define the future of personal computing mostly for one simple reason: For too many years, Windows was too damn successful. At some point along the way, Microsoft's golden goose became an albatross. The Windows era — which began with Windows 3.0 in 1990 and continues on, at least if you're talking about laptops and desktops — made billions for Microsoft and its investors. But it also gave the company a number of bad habits it's still trying to overcome. Such as: • Windows' success led to hubris. From its very earliest days, Microsoft was never a company afflicted by a crippling lack of self-confidence. In the years when it was crushing the competition in categories such as PC operating systems and productivity software, being unimaginably headstrong helped. But after that competition was crushed, Microsoft lost its ability to take the most serious threats to its dominance of personal computing seriously. (I'm still not sure whether Ballmer's famous blustery dismissal of the iPhone was sincere or not — but either way, it was unfortunate.) The company also treated paying customers shabbily in some instances — like with the dismal copy-protection scheme it insultingly named Windows Genuine Advantage — in a way that couldn't have been less humble or less lovable. t necessarily be very much like old stuff, a philosophy that led to the Metro interface used by Windows 8 and Windows Phone.