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The Empire Reboots - notes

[WHAT]

1. ] Over the last decade, as the biggest force in tech history hurtled toward irrelevance (albeit lucratively), a few blamed Microsoft’ s woes on founder Bill Gates, while most pointed to his successor as C.E.O., Steve Ballmer. Bethany McLean charts the breakdown of their relationship, the growing dissatisfaction with Ballmer, and the challenges and opportunities facing its third C.E.O., Satya Nadella, as Gates returns to the fold.
    

[WHY]

1. ] me
1. ] On the Myers-Briggs personality test, Gates and Nadella are similar personality types (NT's) not Ballmer. So perhaps they’ll work together seamlessly to run Microsoft, helping it meet the huge challenges it now faces. They are both adept at the sort of big-picture corporate-speak designed to persuade people that the company not only has its act together but also has a vision.
2. ] SN
1. ] " great world, ,what is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention. And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that’s the core of this company—that’s the soul. That’s what Bill started this company with. That’s the Office franchise. That’s the Windows franchise. We have to re-invent them. . . . That’s where this notion of re-inventing productivity comes from.”
3. ] BG
1. ] " SW is the most exciting industry, You know, when it comes to vision, speech, handwriting, screens that are going to be pervasive, that are going to let you navigate information in rich new ways, in ways that you understand your customer, what’s going on with your products. . . . We’re not even a third of the way towards empowering workers even to the dream that goes back to the start of the company.” He adds, “The opportunity is pretty incredible. And the original idea of having great software people and broad software products and Office being the primary tool that people look to across all these devices, that’ s as true today and as strong as ever.”
4. ] SN 
1. ] “The way I think about success is our relevance,” says Nadella.
5. ] Benedict Evans
1. ] “The Irrelevance of Microsoft” is actually the title of a blog post by an analyst named Benedict Evans, who works at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. On his blog, Evans pointed out that Microsoft’s share of all computing devices that we use to connect to the Internet, including P.C.’s, phones, and tablets, has plunged from 90 percent in 2009 to just around 20 percent today. This staggering drop occurred not because Microsoft lost ground in personal computers, on which its software still dominates, but rather because it has failed to adapt its products to smartphones, where all the growth is, and tablets.
6. ] MSFT is very powerful, they are sitting pretty - financially, it doesnt matter
   
1. ] approx 3/4 of msft revenue from 2 products (windows + office ) In the last 12 months the company reported sales of $86.83 billion and earnings of $22.07 billion; it has $85.7 billion of cash on its balance sheet. 
2. ] In the Valley, there are two sayings that everyone regards as truth. One is that profits follow relevance. The other is that there’s a difference between strategic position and financial position. “It’s easy to be in denial and think the financials reflect the current reality,” says a close observer of technology firms. “They do not.”
7. ] threats,
1. ] company is facing a confluence of threats that is all the more staggering given Microsoft’s sheer size. Competitors such as Google and Apple have upended Microsoft’s business model, making it unclear where Windows will fit in the world, and even challenging Office.
6. ] blaming Ballmer
1. ] Many people blame Microsoft’s predicament on Steve Ballmer, 
2. ] His contentious tenure ended more abruptly than most people expected when he stepped down last February, after announcing he would do so in August 2013.
3. ] Gates & Ballmer stopped speaking to each other as a result of the bad blood surrounding Ballmer’s resignation. Ballmer subsequently resigned from the board of directors as well
4. ] Ballmer owns more of the company than the founder. Indeed, Ballmer’s 333 million shares, worth some $15 billion, make him Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, with a 4 percent stake.
5. ] After a five-month search for a new C.E.O., which Fortune called a “textbook example of how not to do CEO succession, Nadella, who has spent 22 years at Microsoft, was chosen. Until then, his name was barely known in the outside world. As one former Microsoft executive puts it, “He was flying commercial a year ago!”
7. ] Ballmers version
1. ] a chart that tracks the profits of the top 25 technology companies from 2008 through 2013. Back in 2008, Microsoft was the most profitable company, earning 15 percent of all the profits generated. In 2013 it was the second-most-profitable company (after Apple), earning 12 percent of all the profits generated. In technology “it’s easy to glorify the products produced and the reputations won, not the money made,” he says. Indeed, under Ballmer, Microsoft’s profits grew almost threefold, to $21.8 billion.
2. ] “Steve will never get the credit he’s due,” a former executive says. “He was brilliant—brilliant—in finding ways to harvest more money from Windows and Office.”
3. ] acknowledges his mistakes. “I probably under-shifted to one or two things, and I feel bad about that. I don’t feel bad about social networking. Good for Facebook, great, but I don’t feel bad [that we missed it]. I feel a little differently about search, and a little differently about phones. We should have done better. I feel worse about phones than I do about search.”
4. ] biggest mistake - longhorn aka Vista - released late, lacked key features, and had many failings that enraged customers. I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. All our resources were tied up on the wrong thing.” the fact is neither Ballmer nor Gates stopped the failure from happening, even as almost everyone else saw it coming.
5. ] Ballmer likes to note that the lines of authority were not clear, which is part of what makes thinking about his tenure complicated: I didn’t feel completely in charge until Bill left [entirely in 2008].” “He didn’t know how to let me be C.E.O., and I didn’t know how to do it,”
6. ] It is a well-known part of Microsoft history that Ballmer and Gates fought bitterly during the first year of transition. At the urging of both their wives and Microsoft’s board of directors, the two men patched things up at what Ballmer calls a “really awkward, terrible dinner” at the Bellevue Club in early 2001.
7. ] one thing everyone agrees on, which is Ballmer’s genuine love for Microsoft. “He cares more about Microsoft than anyone in the world, including Bill,” says a former executive.
8. ] those who see Gates in situations where he is not the one in control are less forgiving. “He was so publicly and so early in life defined as the brilliant guy,” says a person who has observed him. “Anything that threatens that, he becomes narcissistic and defensive.” Or as another person puts it, “He throws hissy fits when he doesn’t get his way.”
9. ] Ballmer was Gates’s best man when he married Melinda, in 1994, and, an early Microsoft executive says, in the old days, when Microsoft was run by a small executive council, there were a few people who rose to the status of first cousins—but the family was Bill and Steve. “Everyone else was a hired hand,” this person says. In 2006, Ballmer described the relationship in his own way to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I think brothers tend to argue a lot, and somehow they stay brothers and stay connected,” he said. “I think Bill and I have figured out how to do all of that.”

[WHERE]

1. ] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft.print

[WHEN]

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[EXAMPLE]

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[HOW-TO]

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[REFERENCE]

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Details

ID: 3866

NAME: MSFT-the-empire-reboots

DESCRIPTION: ] Bethany Mclean @vanityFair - Mclean looks back through the gates ballmer regimes at MSFT and what Nadella brings to the table going forward

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: 0

OWNER ID: 75

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