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Life after Ballmer: How to fix Microsoft

With Ballmer's impending departure, Microsoft has a unique opportunity to refocus its efforts and counter the challenges posed by its faster growing rivals
By David Cardinal
Steve Ballmer at CES

By almost every traditional measure, Microsoft is one of the world's most successful companies. Over 38 years it has grown from nothing to become a $78 billion-per-year high-tech powerhouse. It employees nearly 100,000 people and is estimated to have made over 12,000 of its employees millionaires. Unfortunately, Microsoft isn't judged by traditional measures -- it is pitted head-to-head against even faster growing rivals including Apple, Google, and Amazon. When set against that background, its largely dormant stock price and lack of blockbuster new products have made it look like a laggard and caused increasingly loud demands for radical change.

Whether Steve Ballmer's departure after 33 years -- 13 of them as CEO -- was long-planned, or a reaction to investor unrest and blow back from his recent massive company reorganization, may never be known, but either way it is the right time for Microsoft to take stock of its assets and draft a new plan for its future. Unhappy investors like ValueAct Capital -- recently offered a seat on the board as part of Microsoft's changing of the guard -- may all know they want new leadership, but they certainly don't agree on what Microsoft should do next. Company veterans upset with the centralized control inherent in the new, functional corporate structure may get their chance to figure out what they'd like to see done instead. A changing market and tougher competition has made Microsoft's "fast-follower" strategy and "Windows über alles" motto insufficient to stay on top of the high-tech heap.

Stock price history comparison ten years

Return of Gates

Predictably, there is a swirl of rumors around the possible return of Bill Gates to run Microsoft, at least on an interim basis. No less a luminary than Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff thinks this is the right plan. Leaving aside whether Gates would want the job back, or whether he's doing more good for the world trying to solve its problems through his foundation, it is certain that he has a unique advantage if he decides to tackle the challenge -- credibility.

Much of Microsoft's thrashing over the last two decades has been the result of increasingly harmful internal politics, so whoever takes over will need to make some very tough choices and even tougher changes to the corporate culture. Gates, as founder and original company technologist, is one of the few who has the respect of the organization and might be able to make those kinds of bold moves successfully. His time "outside" may also have given him the perspective he'd need to take Microsoft in a new direction. Gates may also be the only executive other than Ballmer with the knowledge and experience to make the company's new functional model -- which is widely believed to have been designed to mimic the centralized management model of Apple under Jobs -- work. Gates also has credibility with the marketplace, which will be much needed after the way Microsoft has tattered its brand with lackluster launches of Windows 8 and the Surface product line -- as well as a decade of wild-goose chases in the all-important mobile arena.

Whoever it is, they'll face plenty of challenges

Ballmer's recent missives to Microsoft's employees are reminiscent of Gates' memo after he freaked out about the success of Netscape and the internet. Gates was able to rally Microsoft to defuse what it then saw as the largest threat to its business, but today's challenges are of a much larger scale. Netscape, Yahoo, and other internet threats were small startups with cachet and momentum, but not much else. The competition now is well-heeled, well-managed, and moving aggressively to cut off Microsoft's main sources of revenue: desktop and server software. Google in particular is pushing cloud-based solutions for the desktop, while both it and Amazon are gnawing away at Microsoft's server primacy with low-cost cloud platforms based on open-source internals. A long dry spell for internal business innovation at Microsoft has also driven many of the best and brightest out of the company, so the new leadership will need to grow its talent pool quickly.

Next page: To be Apple, or not to be Apple, that is the question

To be Apple or not to be Apple

To deal with these challenges Microsoft will need to move away from its comfort zone of high-dollar royalty packaged software products. Obviously it has been feverishly working on alternatives -- ranging from Azure and Office365 SaaS offerings, to the Surface product line to capture hardware revenue that has been going to its OEMs. Unfortunately, so far these are not much more than stop gap measures. Azure may now be over $1 billion in revenue, but that is only about 1% of Microsoft's total. Similarly Office365 will be a great new way for Microsoft to reach desktop customers, but so far it doesn't have any traction in the increasingly important mobile market.

Once and for all, Microsoft needs to decide if it wants to be Apple and reduce its dependence on software royalties by capturing total system revenue. Right now it has a bad case of schizophrenia, making business decisions to try to prop up the value of its software on the one hand, while dabbling in the hardware market in competition with its partners on the other. OEMs need to pay much more to get Windows and Office instead of Android on their mobile devices, for example, while at the same time Microsoft is competing with them directly using its Surface product line. That conflict hasn't helped its partner relationships and adds to the incentive for partners like Samsung to back away from Window 8 for mobile devices.

Microsoft's recent announcement that it plans to acquire Nokia's handset business pushes it much further in the direction of "go it alone" for Windows Phone 8. The move is a tacit admission that Nokia can't compete on its against Apple and Samsung with WP8. Microsoft is clearly hoping its deep pockets will make a difference.

OS Market Share chart showing dramatic shift with the introduction of the iPhoneOS market share chart showing dramatic shift with the introduction of the iPhone

Embrace the customer

Whether Microsoft decides to emulate Apple or comes up with some other ideas for blockbuster revenue-generating products, it needs to take a page from the Book of Jobs and seriously embrace its target customers. Microsoft has such a diffuse set of audiences and so much internal disagreement on product direction that decisions often seem to be made by opinion poll. Collecting data on real-life usage is incredibly valuable -- and Microsoft excels at it -- but cherry-picking features and bug fixes from customer wish lists isn't the same as carefully defining the target customers and making a product that delights them -- a strategy that has minted Apple and Amazon hundreds of billions of dollars.

Similarly, Microsoft has a bad habit of trying to redefine customer needs to fit its business model, instead of adapting its business to customer needs. For example, when it came time to build a robust version of Windows that went beyond DOS, Microsoft rejected using any of the widely available and free Unix variants -- including its own Xenix -- in favor of hiring VMS architect Dave Cutler to develop NT -- a proprietary system that met its need to be able to charge big bucks for the OS. While it is hard to argue that the $20 billion in enterprise revenue Microsoft's server and tools division generates isn't hugely valuable to the company, it has largely meant ceding the hosted and cloud server market to open-source alternatives -- and cloud developers to Amazon's AWS. As much of the industry moves to cloud and hosted solutions, that leaves Microsoft as an eroding island with little expertise in Linux or other market-leading technologies.

Apple, by contrast, realized that its value was in the combination of hardware and software, quickly adopting Unix as its base OS -- admittedly after its own internal efforts fizzled -- and pushing customers onto it when it realized what a great deal it was to get all that tested technology for free. Instead of tying up billions in R&D on a new desktop OS, it could spend its at-the-time more limited resources on new products like the iPod and iPhone. Being smaller at the time, it was also okay with giving up the server market -- allowing it to focus maniacally on the consumer as its target customer.

Microsoft has had the money and resources to be an early innovator in many markets. Despite its partially deserved reputation as an imitator, it has created category-leading products in segments including multimedia, mobile, servers, databases, and developer tools. Unfortunately, many of those efforts, like the TabletPC, Windows Mobile, and Windows Media Center were allowed to falter -- often killed by the weighty and well-funded existing businesses who saw them as some type of threat. That type of internal strife -- often disguised as complaints about the new products not being architecturally compatible with the company's flagship products -- is incredibly deadly. I saw plenty of it during my time at Sun, where efforts to make our systems easier to use were often thwarted by concerns about incompatibility with existing systems.

Next page: How to save Microsoft

Splitting up the spoils

Many investors and pundits have argued for years that Microsoft would be better off split up into pieces. Ironically, a breakup was one of the possible resolutions to the since-forgotten antitrust suit against Microsoft. Unfortunately, Microsoft's current business strategy relies on leveraging the clout of Windows on the desktop to help it succeed in newer markets like Windows in the living room (the new Xbox One running Windows) and mobile (Windows Phone 8). Without support from the mothership, those ventures would need to thrive on their own. Perhaps equally troubling to Microsoft's management team is the possibility that if those business units were separate companies they might decide to dump Windows altogether, further weakening the parent company's franchise.

The result so far has been paralysis, with Microsoft's business units "gifted" Windows, whether they like it or not. As an example, if the Surface RT hardware is really as good as Microsoft thinks it is, maybe it would sell more than the paltry number it has if it ran Android instead of Windows RT. Or perhaps if Microsoft wasn't so tied to protecting Windows, the Office business unit could be a driving force in Android applications, instead of having a late-to-the-party offering with limited functionality. Conversely, if Microsoft is going to stick with its "all in" strategy, betting the company on Windows, it needs to take better care of its partners. On the heels of an unpopular launch of Windows 8 and an incompatible Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is asking partners to "trust me" with the launch of Windows 8.1 -- by not providing early access to the developers and IT professionals it relies on to smooth adoption of new releases.

Microsoft's organizational structure (at least, until today)Microsoft's organizational structure (at least, until the re-organization) Given the difficulty of managing a company as diverse as Microsoft without a straightforward vision, splitting it along either market or product lines is certainly an option -- and one often employed when all else fails. Before that can even been considered, though, the recent reorganization, heralded as the beginning of a "new Microsoft" would have to be unwound, and functional organizations put back into business units. Even after that is done, the businesses will still have all the same challenges, so by itself dividing them into separate companies provide a silver bullet solution.

Three suggestions for the new CEO

First, decide whether Microsoft really wants to be Apple -- with a growing empire of retail stores, high-margin from selling premium systems, and a laser-like product focus. If not, then stop pretending and figure out how to instead develop the 21st century version original vision of being the software provider of choice. Whichever way you go, make sure someone owns each product and jealously guards its key aspects against organizational politics. I know how damaging those can be, as they killed many excellent efforts during my time at Sun -- with many of the same "lack of architectural purity" complaints that helped kill innovative products in mobile and media at Microsoft.

Can Microsoft take over the living room with a set-top box as its "next big thing?"Second, unleash mobile. Really think through from the ground up the best way to support and sell to the mobile worker. Leverage your strength in the enterprise and IT organizations, but not by limiting what your mobile team can do. Antics like Ballmer's smashing of an employee's iPhone only demonstrate a lack of respect for legitimate customer needs.

Third, I'd love to see Microsoft maneuver around Google, Amazon, and Apple by making a serious play to be the set-top box of the future. Xbox One is already a better set-top box than gaming system -- except that it requires a separate set-top box from the cable company. If you could figure out a way to solve that problem -- joint venture, merger, or mega-deal -- then you could have "the next big thing" all to yourself.

Now read: Windows 8: The disastrous result of Microsoft’s gutless equivocation

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