Posted on 01/31/2014 7:04:43 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
No, the best thing Windows could do is make a version of Windows that works and doesn’t need patching every five seconds.
He entered the networking market long after Unix/BSD!
I am a linux user, and generally spare no opportunity to talk smack about MS, but one area where they excell is the quality of their programming language documentation. It’s top notch.
!?
Create a conclusion first and then fit the reality to it. Gates is resigning from Chairmanship voluntarily. Don’t need the hassle.
First thing I did with my last new PC, Windows 8 on it, was boot it up and turn off automatic updates. I don't trust the updates for reliability or security until someone else has used them without a problem. I've not installed a single update since I bought this one over 2 years ago (or thereabouts). Works fine.
Stopped reading right there.
Told a 13 year old neighbor kid that if IE could ask to be his default browser, he could ask the cute girl to go out with him...
/johnny
If I was his age and had his money, the last thing I’d be doing is going to work every day. Life comes around faster than you think, remember Steve Jobs.
IOW....Eugenics.
I haven’t had the auto update turned on in years. Like you, I wait for reports from others before I update and I have had just about every version of Windows since 3.0.
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.
There's a way to do that: formal verification — with which you can prove there are no security holes or bugs.
There's Ironsides, which is a small proof that it can be done and the first (to my knowledge) formally verified Domain Name Server.
>> Ultimately Microsoft’s Internet products (browsers, web servers to development tools) did well
>
> Stopped reading right there.
Ah, come on — IE 5 was a really good browser in its time.
It was IE 6, IIRC, that was when the quality took a nose-dive.
What is conveniently left out of the article is that Microsoft would have faced antitrust action by the Justice Department for any horizontal or vertical expansion...eg in fact did get slammed for it’s browser packaging.
Euthanizing the devil would have been more appropriate.
A lot of very successful people are one trick ponies. You see it in the arts a lot where an artist is new and avant garde, only to never change for the next 50 years (if they live that long).
Gates is and always was a one trick pony. It made him incredibly rich, but didn’t make him incredibly smart. There are a lot of those, but their cookie cutter approach works for decades or across markets.
/johnny
Be grateful he was into selling software, and not suppositories, or we'd all walk funny today.
/johnny
death by vaccine. his family roots in planned parenthood.
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