Kicking Bill Gates Off The Board Is The Best Thing Microsoft Can Do

Business Insider ^ | 01/31/2014 | Julie Bort

[SeekAndFind]

Microsoft is an insanely profitable company standing on the edge of disaster. It desperately needs new thinking. 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. Gates' world was: Go slow. Microsoft 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 actually wasn't an Internet visionary. He entered the browser market long after Netscape, for example. His efforts to catch up and crush Netscape 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 almost 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.

[FreedomOfExpression]

You wouldn’t want to interfere with the hate fest, would you?

[Aria]

HA!

My brother in law met him - thought he seemed like an unassuming guy. Another relative works at the Gates Foundation where the goal is to give away all the money. My relative is very happy there.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

“Microsoft has a historical culture of moving slow and not failing.”

I’d like to visit the alternate universe the author appears to be visiting from. Perhaps, he’ll let me use his worm hole.

Microsoft has a historical culture of shipping half-finished product out the door, then using service packs to fix the bugs. Most people know that a new Windows version is actually still in beta testing; and you have to wait for SP2 (at least) to have a product that’s ready for prime time.

A couple of decades ago, I read a book contrasting the MS culture, with that of IBM. IBM really did move slowly, and methodically (comes with the mainframe business). MS was known to rush things to market, and patch over the problems after they’d gotten the jump on competitors.

[Edward Teach]

"I still use WordPerfect."

Holy hell! You mean there's two of you??

[OneWingedShark]

Holy hell! You mean there's two of you??

I actually like WP — it's what I use to make my brochures and my [amateur] writing.
I think Corel could wipe the floor with MicroSoft if they took a little bit of a gamble and rewrote it in Ada w/ formal verification: this would make it extremely portable and ensure it free of errors. (Imagine being able to say our program cannot cause your computer to crash, and no bad input will cause the program to crash.)

[SandwicheGuy]

Bill Gates is a smelly little ape. I detest the man. His products, e.g., Word, try to tell me what to do, and it is hard to overcome the defaults in his software. He is a totalitarian.

Untold millions of people use Bill Gates' Office Suite. You don't like it so you call him names. And HE is the totalitarian... Really? What have you done with YOUR life, squib?

[SandwicheGuy]

A lot of very successful people are one trick ponies.

That is truly an original and thoughtful observation. I quite like it.

[NoCmpromiz]

I still use WordPerfect

So do I. Since the days when you used the Word install floppies as coasters (and there was no such thing as Windoze..)

[Rum Tum Tugger]

It’s too late for Microsoft to ever resurrect its early success. There just aren’t enough MS employees who care anymore. Once a company loses its entrepreneurial spirit, it’s on a downhill slide.

[Hootowl99]

Yep, that's about right regarding the timeline of Lotus 123 versus MS Excel spreadsheets. Lotus kicked off the spreadsheet application but never really innovated on the HMI side. The innovator was the Quatro spreadsheet that brought tabbed workbooks and the ability to link between workbooks. MS Excel became dominant not because of a superior product but because of the MS Office bundling.

I am radically ticked off using MS Office now because the latest incarnation of Office and Windows 8.X have thrown KISS out in favor of HMI chaos.

[wardaddy]

Lol

Freepers kill me...really

[wardaddy]

Free Republic has serious warts that pop up from some quarters

Making light of careless folks who get killed is one

This populist resentment of rich people is another

Its a tightwad forum...a fair amount of bitterness...look at the freepathons lack of partucipants
Same folks rationalize not tossing JR a couple of bucks a week likely detest Gates or Ellison or Zuckerberg etc

I don’t agree politically with any of them but I don’t resent nor disparage them

[FroggyTheGremlim]

OS/2 was superior to Windows in every way.

Still is.

Just ask Steve Barkto.

[Covenantor]

Heck, Geoworks supplied free by AOL was in the early days left early versions of Windows in the dust. A fully set of apps running over DR-DOS on my 640k Toshiba 3100e and a half card modem made me a road warrior. Well written and tight code that ran fast on the 286 cpu. The WYSIWYG word processor was unsurpassed in ease of use and features. IMO still my favorite WP. After AOL dropped it for Netscape, IIRC, it withered away. Still, I ran GeoWorks Pro for quite a while on my 386 machines.

[jamaksin]

Oh, the days of VisiCalc, MultiPlan, ...

[rockrr]

I remember being on campus in ‘94. The OS’s were NT 3.5 and WFW 3.11. There wasn’t yet an established default protocol for campus networking configurations and consequently one would encounter a mongrel mix of NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, and TCP/IP. Some buildings would employ DHCP but even that wasn’t standardized yet.

Access to the Internet was through a proxy server and was “invitation only”.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Untold millions of people use Bill Gates' Office Suite. You don't like it so you call him names. And HE is the totalitarian... Really? What have you done with YOUR life, squib?"

Perhaps I should not call Gates names, but calling someone names does not make one a totalitarian. I justify "totalitarian" in Gates's case because he is one of the prime supporters behind Common Core, which I view as a profoundly flawed, centralized, and destructive approach that was foisted on virtually the entire country without debate.

[SandwicheGuy]

...because he is one of the prime supporters behind Common Core,

I'm sorry, I did not know that. If that is so, I stand in the street with you, and using much more foul language than you. That is such and evil program.

I thought he only messed with software. I'll have to look more into this.

[CodeToad]

“Microsoft killed them too.”

BS. Novell killed themselves. Like Borland and others they simply produced lousy software for a high price and stopped competing. Bill didn’t have to have the most perfect software; he simply showed up every morning and competed. The rest flew off in their expensive jets, literally.

[CodeToad]

“Same folks rationalize not tossing JR a couple of bucks a week likely detest Gates or Ellison or Zuckerberg etc”

Perfectly said. Tightwads. Liberal minded, really.