Satya, why did you let Gates look over your shoulder?

It’s hardly news to you that Microsoft is in a spot of bother. Its rivals, in the form of Google and Apple, have well and truly drunk its milkshake by seizing opportunities in web search and mobile devices. The unimaginative and stagnant management in Redmond failed to see these opportunities until they were gone. Apple makes more profit and more revenue and has a massively larger market capitalisation than its once-invulnerable rival. In the last quarter of 2013, Apple sold more devices running versions of OS X than all of Microsoft’s hardware partners combined.

Let me clarify what that means: all of the Windows PCs, all of the Windows tablets and all of the Windows Phone devices did not outnumber the Macs, iPads and iPhones sold by Apple. That is staggering. It turns on its head the received wisdom that Apple made a mistake by going it alone rather than licensing its OS.

Little wonder, then, that Microsoft is busily revisiting its own thinking on the matter. Its Surface tablets and the outright acquisition of Nokia’s handset business point to an increasing focus on controlling the product end-to-end, like Apple does. So when incoming Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella says the company must focus on mobility and devices, the industry says “well duh” – though perhaps using more analyst-y jargon.

As I pointed out a few issues ago, a new Microsoft CEO needs to do more than “well duh”. This is a company that has led the industry, and I don’t simply mean in terms of market share. For all it its criticisms, Microsoft has been an innovator. Before Microsoft, there wasn’t really such a thing as “the software business”. The notion that the biggest and most powerful company in the computer industry wouldn’t make computers was unthinkable before Microsoft. 

For Microsoft to recover, it needs to do more than follow. It needs to lead.

Nadella needed to clear the decks of old minds in Redmond. He needed to ask Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to leave. He could still call them for advice if he wanted to, of course, but while they remain in official positions at Microsoft, Nadella’s authority would be reduced. 

So I applauded when I read that Nadella had asked Gates to step down as chairman, but stopped abruptly when it was because he wants Gates to take a more hands-on role. That’s the opposite of what he needs. The exact opposite.

In 1997, Apple chief executive Dr Gilbert Amelio (remember him?) announced that not only was company co-founder Steve Jobs returning as “special advisor to the CEO” but the other co-founder Steve Wozniak was returning to take some woolly role regarding the education market. The idea was to have these two Apple icons back on board, to give the company some mojo or other.

It didn’t work, of course. The technology industry is ruthlessly anti-nostalgic. Looking to the past is never the way to find the future. Within six months Amelio was gone, Jobs was running the joint and had fired the entire board of directors, and Wozniak had quietly retreated to his own things again.

Right now, Nadella looks like Amelio, thinking that having Bill Gates working hands-on at Microsoft will have a magical effect. But Gates looks like Wozniak – he’s moved on, he’s more interested in other things. He’s made his contribution. It’s hard to see what he has to offer it now. Nadella needed to take the reins and say “I’m the boss now, I have the ideas, and I’m going to lead us to the future”. Instead, he’s gone and said, “Hey, remember Bill? Good times, good times”.

A shaky start in a new job is not necessarily fatal, and Nadella may find his feet soon enough. But he’s sacrificed the momentum that he could have gained from a more authoritative beginning. Microsoft’s great strength was its sense of inevitability – the idea that whatever it did would eventually, one way or the other, be what the industry did. Right now, it doesn’t have that, and Nadella doesn’t look like getting it back.