Well, one of the biggest job openings in the history of our humble little industry has just appeared – the CEO of Microsoft is departing and a replacement is sought. It’s a massive opportunity: one of the biggest companies in the world, a pioneer in its field, seeking only the third chief executive in its history. Whoever lands the job will, undoubtedly, become very wealthy indeed.
The question is: who in their right mind would want it?
Don’t get me wrong – it’s probably a pretty good gig. Comfy office, lots of prestige, and a pay packet Scrooge McDuck might find a tad excessive.
But, if I can put this gently, the last guy didn’t do that great a job at it. And he’s not leaving. Not really.
Steve Ballmer, whose thirteen-year tenure as CEO saw the Redmondian behemoth shrink from leviathan to also-ran, remains one of its biggest shareholders. Microsoft’s greatest strength during the Gates years was its air of invulnerability – Now is it looks very beatable. And he’s made no secret of the fact he intends to stick around. To help, he says. But if he wants to help, he should go away.
Steve Ballmer missed the shift to mobile. He missed the opportunity of online search. Project after project has failed on his watch. Belatedly, he’s started a transition within the company towards services and devices rather than focusing solely on operating systems – great idea if it had been ten years ago – and has finally made the marriage between Microsoft and Nokia official. And the incoming CEO has to finish what Ballmer started. Really. A massive strategic shift is ongoing within the company – it’s far from complete – and the new hire will come in in the middle. Anyone worth the name of “chief executive” is simply not going to want to do that. They’re going to want to have the freedom to come in and say “everything the last guy did was wrong and we’re doing it my way now”. They’ll cancel programs, sell off properties, close divisions and set the company on a new path. But the incoming CEO of Microsoft has no such freedom.
Bill Gates is on the committee to find a new CEO. Gates chose Ballmer, remember, then supported him throughout his disastrous tenure. Ballmer is probably going to assist in the search, and will be sticking around afterwards. Does anyone have the cojones to tell those two to butt out and let them run Microsoft? If they do, I doubt they’ll get the job.
So the next CEO of Microsoft is going to have to take the plans laid out by Ballmer – a man whose plans have been demonstrably wonky over the past decade or so – and finish them. Either they’ll work, in which case Ballmer will be eager to take credit, or they’ll fail, in which case the new chief will take the fall. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he got rid of everyone he saw as contributing to the decline of the company over the previous decade, including the entire board of directors. A new CEO at Microsoft needs the freedom to do that too – to fire Bill Gates. Do you think it’s going to happen? I don’t.
Apple takes the “forward-looking” path
Apple did an interesting and kind of unexpected thing when it announced its new iPhones at the beginning of September. Rather than the usual rhetoric of “ground-breaking” or “revolutionary” or even “innovative”, it pegged the marketing of the next-generation handset on the adjective “forward-looking”.
Because, of course, the Fandroid community was all over the internet within seconds pointing out Android devices that already do some version of every new feature of the iPhone 5s. Where’s the innovation? Where’s the ground-breaking? Where’s the revolutionary? Has Apple peaked?
Listen again to the announcement: those words aren’t there. The biggest changes to the iPhone 5s are its adoption of a 64-bit processor (something Android handset makers have been talking about, though none are expected until next year — that may change, of course, in the wake of the iPhone 5s) and a separate co-processor to handle motion-detection. Neither of these has any immediate benefit to users.
Apple underlined the speed of the new processor, but that’s got little to do with being 64-bit. The benefit of 64-bit, as anyone with any technical savvy knows, is the ability to address masses of data at once, and to talk to much larger stores of RAM.
And the benefit of the separate motion co-processor was footnoted to “health and fitness apps” as if they’re worth a separate chip-fabrication process. Don’t be naïve.
The benefits of these changes will be for applications that don’t yet exist simply because they’ve been impossible until now. Just as with the iPad, Apple is providing the tools and asking the developer community to bring the revolution.
Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
