Bill Gates built an amazing airplane. Steve Ballmer crashed it in the desert. Satya Nadella rallied the survivors, put it back together, and got it flying again. Yes, he absolutely deserves the credit just as Ballmer absolutely deserves the blame.
Actually, Ballmer did quite well at MS. He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman.
He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you using anything other than .NET. The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux.
Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.
I feel that reflects quite well Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook as well. Jobs just wanted to make 'insanely great' products [for their users], with the side effect of profit, while Tim Cook is probably fixated on efficiency and Shareholder value. Apple has had record profits and performance, but most will tell it's not the same and its future is not so certain.
It seems paradoxical that trying to maximize shareholder value at all costs could have the opposite effect long term; but think of it this way: almost every company in the world is fixated on profit -- that's not a differentiator. What makes the company is amazing products that people need, even depend upon -- once you have that, it is very hard to fail.
Profit singlemindedness can definitely lead you astray, be fragile (of course, the 'user-oriented' robust strategy can be thought as ultimately also a form of profit seeking).
What Nadella seems very competent at doing is also pleasing his workforce as an additional important stakeholder.
> Tim Cook is probably fixated on efficiency and Shareholder value.
Tim was the 2nd in command of Apple for years. Easy to forget this, but Apple's success in the 2000s is partially attributable to Tim as well (not to forget all the other brilliant folks at Apple).
I'd probably agree. It might also be a Peter Principle thing where Ballmer/Cook were great at busdev/ops respectively while Gates/Jobs were more inspiring leaders.
Product development, especially in brand-new markets, requires a visionary with excellent taste, and the trust and respect of his team to revise with confidence.
I can imagine what happened with Zune, cloud, etc is that (an enormously successful) MS assigned senior engineers to head up potentially prestigious new projects as professional rewards, but what they should have done was acquire-hire startup founders with fire in their belly (and strong vision) about the space. Ironically anyone with that much belly fire probably would have left MS to pursue it, basically disqualifying everyone left. :)
I oversimplify both the MS and Apple examples as the "builder vs. caretaker" pendulum. Though Tim Cook could hold the reins for the next 10-20 years, I have no doubt that Apple will transition to another builder in the future. Once per generation? Every other generation? The computers (plural, laptops, PCs, phones, etc.) industry is still young.
Eight years post-Jobs, it remains to be seen what Apple's evolutionary thrust turns out to be, Amelio/Sculley. For now the market expectations (user desires) would seem to support innovation and design as a business priority.
This was right on point. The TouchBar and the problematic keyboard on those recent Macbook Pro laptops were clearly features that no Apple users ever wanted or asked for. Apple has lost some global market share as a result even though their net profit still went up. I'm afraid they are trading long term brand reputation for short term profit gains. They need to re-align product innovations with customer's best interests in mind.
It was pointed out recently that in this year's product lineup apple have started responding more actively to customers (it was also noted that these are post Ive too so there might be something in that)
Of course success with a vision often also includes a significant degree of luck and being in the right place at the right time. The iPod was just another MP3 player, albeit one with a certain style and design that captured lots of attention in spite of a premium price.
But it certainly wasn't ordained that Apple would parlay that into the runaway success of the iPhone.
Luck and timing play into it, but so does design and usefulness. Keep in mind the state of the world when the iPod came out. College kids sharing MP3s across school networks, etc. If you used microsoft's media players, by default they often "protected" the music by converting it to WMA files that were locked. Now you're unable to share with the other kids in your dorm. The cute boy/girl who asks "what song is that" that's blaring out your open dorm room can't just receive a copy. MS tried to win the war by cozying up to the labels.
Contrast this with Apple, which (then) used MP3s and you could plug in the player and have friends copy the music; add in the premium pricing and you've also got a status symbol. "Sharing" mp3s was the modern equivalent of sharing CDs or cassettes, something the labels took way to long to figure out in their early attempts at strict online digital music.
I have no idea if Apple intentionally did this, but it mattered. MP3 players were in their infancy and when people compared, the ipod looked better.
The iPod had, famously, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." It won for various reasons, but the iTunes music store started off with DRM, with tracks limited to 5 devices, so it didn't win for lack of DRM. (Well-executed UX and design played a huge part.)
Well pre-Zune (which was pretty mediocre; I got one for free and gave away as a gift) there were lots of other MP3 players. But I agree Apple had the premium offering especially once you got to the click wheel generation. And the music store sealed the deal.
Words cannot express my contempt for the stack-ranking system that Ballmer liked. I saw perfectly good engineers being forced out because managers had to find five or ten percent of their staff to let go. Some groups deliberately hired under-performers so they could fire them and protect the "real" members of their teams.
His "everything has to be Windows" philosophy was toxic, too. (Then I realized that he didn't really care about the underlying technologies of things, and as long as you called your embedded system that had an event loop and some interrupt handlers "Windows Event Loop And Some Interrupt Handlers, Enterprise Edition" you would be politically safe).
Short term thinking can make for excellent quarterly financials, but detrimental to long-term growth in ways that aren't obvious. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Ballmer's Microsoft missed the boat on several important major technologies.
Imagine a world where the "iPhone" was a Microsoft product and Apple was a company left buying out other phone companies in a futile effort to catch up. That would would look very different.
IMHO, there is an alternate universe where Ballmer was never Microsoft's CEO, and instead, they had someone who could envision a future of mobile and cloud offering years before the competition did. Which means a world where the Windows Phone outsells iPhones and Androids combined, where Azure has 70%+ of the cloud computing market, where the Microsoft store is streaming original video content to customers through Xbox Live, etc. In this world, Microsoft crested the trillion dollar market cap several years ago and is well on their way to hitting the $2T mark.
The current One Microsoft is Ballmer's vision executed by Nadella. Ballmer absolutely deserves some credit for putting the plan in motion that lead to Microsoft's resurgence. Nadella did NOT take over the company and lead an about face on Ballmers plan. He did extend the plan to be even more open to letting other Microsoft products cannibalize Windows.
Vista was necessary. Forced people to upgrade devices. Introduced the security prompt - where everything doesn't run with admin privilege. Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 also came under Ballmer.
>His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft and not the customer
What on earth is this doublespeak? If he always did what was best for Microsoft, we would not be discussing what his problem was in managing Microsoft. That's not how "what's best for Microsoft" works.
Firstly, notice the word tried. But in leads into the problem with many business people. "Best for mircosoft" would have been customers locked into a MS ecosystem where people were forced to buy the whole album to get a few songs the way the labels wanted it. That's what they tried to do, but obviously the customers didn't agree.
His problem, as an executive, was not "trying to do what is best for Microsoft". His problem, as an executive, was failing to do what is best for Microsoft.
The Zune was a great product, IMHO better than the ipod, if for no other reason than you didn't have to deal with itunes. The hardware may not have been as sexy looking as the ipod, but the software was far superior, and it was better in all other ways- I loved that it had an FM tuner.
Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing, lulled back down into the ~20-30's and stayed there until he stepped down in 2014. He did "exceptionally well" at keeping it where it was...
If you looked at historical p/e, the low for msft was the last year of ballmer. I think their p/e was 8... it was never a dog stock but an 8 is kind of like what you get if your p&g or coke. It’s not a growth stock anymore. That was about the time we started seeing the precursors to office365. So good things had started back then, but to assume a the role it has today where it’s equally a peer to Apple and google and not just relegated to be a waning player with a solid book in the enterprise (ie, sap, Oracle, etc) is quite an accomplishment. It’s as if msft finally did what gates and ballmer both failed to do: Become cool and strategic to an emerging / now dominant tech paradigm. It’s hard to give credit to one person ... credit goes to everyone there who not just went along with the pivot to cloud but took it to a whole new level.
> Go look at the stock history, the moment Ballmer became CEO in 2000 the price stopped growing
Nah, not really. 2000 was the dot-com bust (which was the start of the death spiral for a lot of formerly high-flyers, including Sun Microsystems) and 2001 was the DoJ consent decree, which brought a lot of MS's attempts to expand to a screeching halt. Ballmer, while being thoroughly mediocre in a lot of ways, deserves at least some credit for not tanking MS in that era.
Actually Ballmer did many things correctly. There was an incorrect call / arrogance in approaching the mobile phone market a certain way, and delay in building something like their hardware organization. But I don't think this means Ballmer was a complete failure. Microsoft delivered stellar results in many dimensions during Ballmer's years as well.
Ballmer built the amazing airplane that Bill Gates owned. Ballmer was there from close to the beginning, knew much more about business than Gates, and was intrumental.
