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October 26, 2019 11:34 pm

Is Microsoft Being Weighed Down By the Ghosts of Its Past?

"The Microsoft of the future is being weighed down by the ghosts of its past," argues former Microsoft engineer James Whittaker, in a new essay at Medium's new tech site, OneZero:The Microsoft of the '90s, with Bill Gates calling the shots, was a technology-forward company, fast-paced, ambitious, and unapologetically capitalistic. .. The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite. Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the Department of Justice for the very same ambition that brought it to dominance, Ballmer's Microsoft was sales-forward and cautious. It was either gazing at its own Windows-shaped navel or nervously clutching its pearls at the approach of Google in its rearview mirror. This inattention to anything resembling the imaginative or innovative caused it to hemorrhage talent, flatline its stock, bore its customers, and miss (or at least be very late to) the next three technology megatrends -- web, cloud, and mobile -- on the trot. It was an era of hand-wringing and coming to grips with a profitable but uninspired slide into irrelevance... Satya Nadella has embarked on a culture-forward vision, which presents some serious historical hurdles to clear. Namely: how does a company move toward a new version of itself when its ranks are replete with people who made their fame and fortune under the previous versions...? Nadella's public fight against the old Microsoft is tacit recognition of the long shadows that both Gates and Ballmer cast. Each exited the company, but their legacies linger... If Windows was the only refuge for recycled failures -- the wannabe leaders who energetically and emphatically backed Gates' and Ballmer's strategy that whiffed on the web, cloud, and mobile -- Microsoft might be ok. But the residue of the past is thick in enough places that it is suffocating the culture of tomorrow... At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. They stand as a bulwark against the data mongering and user exploitation that Google and Facebook see as the future of humanity. The entire world has a stake in Nadella's fledgling culture-forward strategy prevailing over the 40-year momentum of the made-men standing squarely in its way. C'mon Microsoft. The world needs you.

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