Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft? 337
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Soulskill
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from the more-cowbell-not-available dept.
theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"
Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
MS probably needs to remove one or two levels of management to allow things to speed up again. Ideas and progress are slowed by too many filters.
Ballmer is not the problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
Its overly simplistic to put the blame on Ballmer since it was Bill Gates that got Microsoft under close scrutiny from monopoly enforcement agencies all over the world. Bill Gates was also the one that won Microsoft the biggest EU fine in history for Bills predatory practices.
What Ballmer has done is followed in Bill Gates footstep with so-so products sold by extremely hard marketing and very shoddy business practices. If anything Ballmer is just a bleaker version of Bill. The return of Bill Gates would just be about more pressure on OEMs, more underhanded deals and more of using the monopoly again.
Personally i would love it if Bill Gates took the helm as it would make Microsoft become irrelevant even faster than today. The mobile and computing industry at large is right now liquid mercury and the tighter Microsoft squeezes the sooner it will slip.
If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you're getting what you think you are asking for.
These are large crude parallels being drawn here: "Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved it" is an interesting story, but Apple's story is certainly exceedingly unique.
Not many companies crawl back from hasbeens to dominance. Apple was a joke in the 1990s, a shell of its former '80s self. The natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen. This is Microsoft's fate. Google's. Facebook's. etc. Apple is the weird exception, not the rule, and I wouldn't let its experience try to teach us anything. It's like seeing someone hit the lottery and trying to figure out how they did and repeat that. No, Apple is a pretty unique story in technology and business. Microsoft can't find their Steve Jobs in Bill Gates.
Re:Not so sure (Score:2, Insightful)
Technology is becoming social graph driven...
What the fuck does that even mean? Stop reading blogs about startups. "inventing" a way for your friends to know you just stepped into a restaurant and ordered a taco, and that is was delicious... is a far cry from a flying car, new energy source, or cure for cancer.
All Microsoft has to do is be good at what it does. Be a good provider of video game consoles, search engine results, computer and cell phone operating systems. And now I guess, do something with Skype. But none of that has anything to do with the marketing spammers wet-dream that is social media. "Oh sorry Bill, I know you started the company and led it through its most profitable years, but you need more facebook friends."
actually (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather they just go out of business. It is long overdue.
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but they used to catch up with the guys they were chasing.
Re:If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
If the natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen, how do you explain IBM? Have they found some type of middle ground of the IT landscape that makes them immune to bubbles and fluctuations in the market? They seem to be doing well for themselves, and have been for a long time.
Re:Ballmer is not the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation: Ballmer isn't as good as Gates. Under Bill Gate's leadership, Microsoft garnered so much market share that it scared nations.
Wrong. Ballmer is relying on momentum to keep Microsoft afloat. This is what the share holders are upset about. They see a future where most of the money are in mobile computing appliances and it appears to the man on the street that Microsoft's extensive portfolio is stuck on the desktop. This isn't necessarily true but their server products and mobile OSs haven't been stellar performers.
Personally I think its a shame someone can't enjoy their retirement without a bunch of whiny shareholders begging him to come back to work. Shareholder's are holding on the illusion that if Bill Gates returns then somehow he would be able to bring Microsoft back into a strategic marketing position that would preserve their market share.
Sounds like a pipe dream. Microsoft is building strategic alliances with cell phone manufacturers (eg. Nokia) and renewing their commitment to the smart phone market that they neglected since they dropped the ball on Windows CE back when Gates was preaching "Windows Everywhere". I wouldn't count Microsoft out just yet.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.
Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team (commodore) and disappeared off the planet.
Had they chosen IBM PC instead, maybe we'd all be using Berkeley Windows instead of MS windows. And Bill Gates would be in the same camp as Nolan Bushnell or Jack Tramel.
Selling MS-DOS to IBM and riding it was indeed a streak of luck, of having a vision that could be worked, and having it at the right place and the right time. But to assume that such a streak of luck is the only thing that propelled MS to its position of dominance is as bad an oversimplification of things as one can make. Removing the typical moral overtones we at /. like to put on things, Gates did a hell of a lot more (as one of the few people that can be geek/technocrat and businessman at the same time) in driving MS's direction. Getting a streak of luck is great. Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
I'm not a fan of MS products, and I've always prefer to work in predominantly Unix/Linux systems and development environments (for practical and ideological reasons). But even I can find some objective neurons left to give credit where credit is due.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
The word you are looking for isn't FUD it is vaporware [roughlydrafted.com] and frankly one should give credit where credit is due as it turned out to be a bloody brilliant strategy. MSFT knew at the time they were years behind and had some serious trouble, so Bill had the occasional screenshot and mockup cooked up and through the sheer power of his giant brass balls and ability to bullshit got the press to believe it was real.
This managed in a one two punch to not only keep OEMs buying MSFT for fear that they would be left out when the "next new thing" hit, but also killed competitors who couldn't make their real products able to do the miraculous things Bill's non existent OS could do. Frankly it was bloody brilliant. If you had run BeOS or OS/2 at the time (I ran both) you'd know that Win pre 98 was like a joke compared to them, but Bill and his magical brass balls kept them both at bay with nothing but bullshit and some phony screencaps.
But as for why he won the OS battle I'd argue its the same reason you don't see Linux getting any traction on the desktop: The combination of ease of use and availability of programs. I know this shocks the shit out of Linux users, even have one moron here who can't read a sentence that put it as his sig, but as far as Windows users are concerned THERE IS NO CLI IN WINDOWS since they will never ever have to use it, ever. Windows has spent untold millions in research and work making sure every single thing is "clicky clicky" simple, whereas Linux is to this day more often than not a screen scraper on top of a CLI app and if you need to do anything more than the absolute basics (such as install a driver or change wireless settings) you will often have to drop to term.
The other reason for winning is why I gave up on OS/2 and BeOS around the Win98 era, the availability of programs There are literally millions of programs, from games and video editing to office software and every niche of business under the sun, both free and commercial and the one OS you can be assured it runs on is Windows thanks to its network effect and backwards compatibility. Hell Windows 7 seems to get several patches a month that are nothing but new shim settings for older programs, MSFT really does put in the work when it comes to backwards compatibility. While Linux too has plenty of apps, the simple fact is all the decent ones run on Windows while there is tons of specialized software that has no Linux equivalent and never will. Sure you have 50 million text editors and programmers tools, but what about medical transcription? CAD and engineering programs that will work with the big name software like SolidWorks?
In the end while Bill's ability to bullshit got them through the dark times of Win 1/2/3 it was all the money spent on ease of use and the whole "developers developers developers" meme that allowed MSFT to win the whole ball of wax.