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Life Without Bill

Entry 804, on 2008-06-27 at 19:59:49 (Rating 2, Computers)

Now that Bill Gates is departing from Microsoft many commentators are concerned about where this will leave the company. Gates and Ballmer have had very different styles and have had a very different emphasis when they worked together there. It seems there are two factions within the company now: the tech focussed Gates followers and the more business and marketing focussed Ballmer brigade.

Surely Microsoft is such a large and important company that one person can't make any difference to its future though. Maybe, but maybe not. There have certainly been a lot of spectacular failures and gradual declines in the computer and tech industry over the last few decades. IBM once seemed unbeatable but now they aren't involved in PCs at all. Motorola was a leader in consumer technology but they look really shaky now. The list goes on.

And, of course, there was one other influential company which was heading towards obscurity before it was rescued by a charismatic leader. That company was Apple. During the time that Steve Jobs was away from Apple and it was being managed by "professionals" instead it went steadily downhill. Most of the products were very average. There was no real innovation. There was no creative spark.

Gates certainly isn't an inspiring leader to the same extent as Jobs but he's the best Microsoft have got. Microsoft are already looking like their previous air of invincibility has gone (both Vista and the Zune are miserable failures). Maybe Bill's like a rat deserting a sinking ship. OK, so its a very big ship and will take a long time to sink, but unless a new captain comes along it will sink eventually, or at least the crew will abandon the great ocean liner and take to the life boats. OK, that's enough of that metaphor!

Its obvious from numerous blog entries that I don't like Microsoft much and I do want to see their dominance destroyed, but I don't really want to see them disappear completely. I would be happy enough if Microsoft still had a significant share (say 50%) of the operating system market (I don't really want Apple to be number one) and it would be OK if Office was still the major software suite (as long as the Mac version had feature parity with the PC version).

So without Bill, Microsoft are likely to decline but they will probably still be a significant factor in the near future. If I was in charge the first thing I would do is get rid of Ballmer and replace him with a more tech oriented person (Ray Ozzie maybe). That way there might still be a chance to see some of the innovation that Microsoft keeps promising but very rarely delivers.

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