Kicking Bill Gates Off The Board Is The Best Thing Microsoft Can Do
With word that 22-year Microsoft veteran Satya Nadella is likely the new CEO, attention turns to the leadership of the company's board of directors. It will have two former CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
So new thinking is unlikely to come from them.
In fact, Gates has a track record of huge strategic errors that have cost the company years of progress in market share. Here's why he should be the one to go:
1. Gate's world was: Go slow. The company needs to change its corporate culture. Today's tech companies try to move fast and fail. They can fail because they move fast, which means that they can fix a mistake as fast as they create one. Microsoft has a historical culture of moving slow and not failing. That comes from a time when people installed software once very three years. Times have changed. Now companies deliver software via the cloud and can add or roll back new features every day.
2. He almost missed the Internet. The Internet rose during Gates time as CEO and he wasn't an Internet visionary. He entered the browser market long after Netscape. His efforts to put Netscape out of business led Microsoft into an epic antitrust judgement and 10 years of oversight by the Department of Justice. Ultimately Microsoft's Internet products (browsers, web servers to development tools) did well and grabbed lots of market share. But Microsoft and Gates didn't lead here, they followed, and disastrously so.
3. Speaking of the Internet, there's Bing. Bing is a fine service, but Microsoft will never beat Google by being a me-too search site. New leadership needs to figure that out.
4. Gates not only missed the software open-source revolution, he was its No. 1 enemy. Open source, which is where developers freely share the code they create, has been a major change in the software industry in the past decade. It's almost a religion with young idealistic programmers. Gates (and Ballmer) saw it as a threat and threatened to sue it out of existence. They've since softened their stance about some forms of open source. But bad blood still exists. Gates got this one very, very wrong.
3. Like Ballmer, he missed mobile. By a mile.
4. Gates didn't notice cloud computing either. Salesforce.com was founded in 1999, when Gates was still CEO. Once again, Microsoft entered cloud late and is now playing catch up to Amazon with Azure, and to Google with Office 365. Gates is not a cloud visionary.
5. Gates could have nipped the Windows 8 disaster in the bud. There was exhaustive user testing while Windows was being developed indicating that people didn't like Windows 8. Then Windows chief Steven Sinofsky plowed ahead anyway. Gates was chairman during all this. Windows is his legacy. Why didn't he step up with one of his epic rants and turn that ship around?
6. Gates let Ballmer do the Surface tablet. The Surface was guaranteed to cause trouble with Microsoft's biggest PC partners. And it has. HP, for instance, one of the world's biggest PC makers, has publicly called Microsoft a competitor and run to Google. Then he let Ballmer double down and buy Nokia for $7 billion.
7. He let Ballmer buy Skype for $8.5 billion. The grand strategy of that was ... what?
8. The late bloomer thing has got to stop. From Gates, Microsoft became a company that tried to enter every successful tech market late, and then spend enormous resources catching up. That has got to end.
9. He's a brilliant philanthropist. On the other hand, Gates has found his visionary role solving hard problems like poverty, illness, education, which obviously thrills him to the core.
So it's time to leave Microsoft, concentrate on the philanthropic work that he loves, and everyone will be better off.