Steve Balmer announced his retirement from Microsoft today sometime in the “coming soon” future. This has, of course, opened the floodgates of opinion, where everyone seems to be chiming in with some witty view or snide comment.
Most of that ‘analysis’ (and I use that term very loosely) is pretty shallow, not very well thought out, shoot from the hip stuff. Mostly it reminds me why I don’t write much about tech any more. Immediate snarky witticisms — content free or not — get pageviews; thoughtful commentary generally doesn’t because you can’t generate a meme-gif from it. (now would be the appropriate place to decry the intelligence level of the internet, except we forget that before the internet, we had the National Enquirer and People magazine to do this kind of writing for us…)
When Balmer came on, Microsoft was a challenged company. As he leaves, it is a challenged company. In the middle part, we tend to forget that he kept the company growing and profitable pretty consistently. Just not growing insanely fast or acting insanely profitable.
It’s hard to think of someone who could have run Microsoft better, however you want to define better, given that the company being run is Microsoft. When you’re captain of a battleship, it doesn’t matter how loud you yell “Turn right” or push on the rudder, physic wins and it takes time to change direction. Perhaps the company would have fared better (or just differently) with more radical decisions and changes, but would the board of directors have allowed them? I’m unconvinced. Balmer’s not alone with the challenge of changing courses in a big company, he can call up Meg Whitman and share a beer or three on that one.
The big challenge is that Microsoft (like HP) has no idea as a company how to be nimble, and the sheer size of those companies makes it hard to impossible for anything to happen quickly. Teaching a company to innovate faster isn’t as simple as writing a couple of memos and heading out to lunch.
Leo was probably right about HP needing to be split up (he needed to use a scalpel and not a hand grenade to do so), and if Microsoft really wants to change it’s culture and speed of innovation, it should consider it as well. Carve it into pieces, give each to its own executive team and board and let each move forward independently as a much smaller organization.
Not gonna happen, either in Microsoft or in HP. But it keeps being proven again and again, large is not a competitive advantage in the technology industry. If there’s a question that sends Tim Cook for the Maalox, it’s that one, not the fight with Android.
My view is whoever Microsoft brings in to replace Balmer, they will likely have the same struggles and I don’t expect significantly different results, not unless they get really radical and break up the company into pieces. I simply can’t see the board agreeing to that.
So my final view of the Balmer era is that he did the best he could, his successor won’t be significantly more successful at solving the challenges, and Microsoft will continue to be Microsoft. A company that makes a boatload of money and doesn’t get any respect for doing so. Give Balmer a C, maybe, but at least he didn’t put the great battleship Microsoft on a rock like Leo did by chasing the strawberries instead of watching the helm…