Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft? 337
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.'"
Bill Gates (Score:1, Interesting)
I remember reading some books from Bill Gates when I was a kid and just learning programming. He actually had some quite nice ideas (and some that sound weird now a days), but underneath he is a geeky person. A lot more than Ballmer. Microsoft has really got their act together in the recent years tho, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Maybe Gates could start some new thing? He has nice ideas after all.
Let them swim on their own... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as bad as looks like (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not so sure (Score:4, Interesting)
Bing actually has a good market share in US now - 30%. And by market demographics those who use Bing tend to be richer, better educated people.
You mean the kind of people who could afford to buy a computer or laptop but could not afford the time to change from the default MS recommended one?
Mark Russinovich! (Score:4, Interesting)
I vote for Mark [wikimedia.org]! He is an excellent and awesome technical fellow that has impressed me a number of times. It's time for Microsoft to learn from Google; let the engineers take control again.
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Too many management layers and probably too many of the wrong people have been promoted over the years. It's not going to be as easy as saying "replace Balmer". Whoever takes over is going to have to do some serious housecleaning to get rid of those people who are making the decisions to ship bad products.
They should have done what the anti-trust fans wanted done years ago. Split the company up into at least 3 major segments and spin things off. Shove the MS-Office bunch into their own company, shove the server folks into their own company, shove the hardware products into yet another company, etc.
Which cuts down on the layers of bureaucracy and forces those product lines to compete on merit instead of relying on other corporate cash cows (or being used as a cash cow).
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll answer that. (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand, the Kin is an indicator of what's wrong with MS. MS bought Danger with the idea of making feature phones. Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks that was popular with teenagers. The initial plan was to launch new products 6 months after the purchase. It was ambitious but workable plan.
Then MS executives started making a series of decisions that doomed it. First of all Danger used Java. That was never going to be allowed at MS. Project Pink would have to use CE. This would seriously delay any launch plans.
At the same time, there were feudal wars. See MS already has a phone division. While Windows Mobile was more of a business phone than consumer model, they had their own ideas and strategy for a consumer model that would become WP7. Unfortunately the rumor is that the Mobile division denied programming resources to Project Pink so they had to make the migration from Java to CE by themselves. Remember most of the Project Pink members were former Danger employees.
Had the Kin came out in 6 months, it might been a successful product. The market was changing while Project Pink was stuck in development battles. While texting is still popular, the focus was shifting to twitter and FaceBook. These features were bolted onto the product adding further delay. Other features like Calendar and contacts were delayed.
By the time the Kin was launched 18 months late, it was noticeable that the product had no clear identity and was rushed out. It was not a smart phone because it did not really have apps, yet it was not a feature phone either especially at smart phone prices. It was buggy and lacked basic features.
MS cut their losses early on it. Six months later, Verizon relaunched it as a feature phone with numerous fixes. While sales figures are not cited, it is assumed Verizon sold off their inventory.
Re:If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, during the 90's, Apple still had a HUGE warchest of money (close to a billion) - that $150M was barely a drop in the bucket. Now, at the rate Apple was losing money, it would exhaust itself in probably a decade or so.
Apple was literally in a good positoin to shut down and return all the money to investors - it still had significant assets. It just had no future - and shutting down would be a great possibility because of it (shutdown now while there's tons of assets).
The fact that people believe that $150M "saved" Apple was the result. Apple didn't need the cash (Microsoft cashed out a few years later around the millennium), but they needed the business optics. And Microsoft throwing money into a company seen as having no future means they probably know something.
It was more of a confidence builder that Apple had a bright(er) future ahead. Money talks on Wall Street, and $150M was small enough that Apple wouldn't be owned significantly by Microsoft, but large enough to get the attention of everyone.
what ails Microsoft, what's good for us all (Score:4, Interesting)
The business was built up on desktop and office app dominance. But now operatings systems are turning into commodities with the advent of virtualization/emulation/cross-platform frameworks and with widespread, sophisticated web standards. Applications are turning into commodities with the reverse engineering of formats and the advent of new standards.
Essentially, interoperability is bleeding the life out of Microsoft.
Microsoft's (current state of) livelihood is based on barriers; let them suffer. They won't die, not any time soon -- they make solid operating systems. They do make good products, despite all the security issues and bugs we've seen. But now that they've lost their stranglehold on the market they become just another player. They won't grow this big again based on being just another vendor.
This is what all those crazy advocates of "open standards" have been trying to achieve all this time. If all that griping about secret APIs and protocol pollution didn't make sense to you before, maybe it begins to make sense now.
Where Microsoft clamped down on diversity, it can no longer. And the gradual technological progress that Microsoft offered can now be replaced with the fertile offerings of a far wider sphere of operating systems and applications developers. Things like the Great Languish -- IE's stagnation for half a decade during what should have been a period of explosive growth for web technology -- are no longer possible.
I look forward to watching technology take huge strides, relative to what it had been doing under Microsoft's control.