Microsoft's replacements in other key positions are moving the company in a better direction.
With the strangely public ousting of Microsoft’s Bob Muglia earlier this week, it may seem that there are few software engineers left at the highest levels of Microsoft. I was surprised to discover that this isn’t completely true. Of the 18 members of Microsoft’s senior executive team, seven of them are techies and while that may shockingly low, the non-techies hold positions such as head lawyer or top HR person.
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Microsoft’s senior exec team as of 01/12/2011.
There’s reason to believe that Microsoft is doing the right thing in bringing in new blood to key positions — even though it might be hard to fathom right now how the exodus of Muglia is good for corporate customers. Muglia is widely regarded as the reason for Microsoft’s success in its most important segment: corporate IT customers. His unit was responsible for Windows Server — a product that routinely wins praise from Microsoft customers. The unit was also responsible for the company’s developer tools and cloud computing platform. On the one hand, it’s sad to see an iconic American company treat a 23-year, highly regarded veteran this way. On the other hand, Muglia was paid well, and when you swim with the sharks …
There’s reason to believe that new leadership would be a good thing for this unit. Windows Server has been hurt by the trend in virtualization — why buy more Windows Servers when you can run your old ones in a virtual machine? Hyper-V is merely a band-aid. And Red Hat has grown into a $1 billion company by “giving away” its software under the open source subscription model.
Bigger still is that Microsoft is an also-ran in cloud computing, with Amazon still so dominant that its proprietary APIs are considered de facto standards. And if it doesn’t gain purchase in the cloud, Microsoft’s future in its most important segment is scary indeed. Cloud computing is on everyone’s radar.
It is concerning that of the highest senior offices at Microsoft, less than half are run by those who really understand how to build technology. But in looking at the bios of Microsoft’s senior executives, seven could be called true-blue techies, and they are sitting in the most critical technical roles.
There’s only one area where a techie should lead and a marketing guy is there instead: the mobile communications business. Arguments might be made that Andrew Lees, president of the mobile division (including Windows Phone 7), is an old-fashioned “coder” at heart, because he has a computer science degree. But nearly all of his work experience has been in sales and marketing,according to Microsoft.
That said, Lees has been, so far, better than the last guy, Robbie Bach. Bach was not only the highest paid Microsoft executive in 2009 (largely from stock), but he was the guy the brought the world Kin. Microsoft is still struggling to recover from the Bach era and come up with a smartphone that people want. Smartphones are the next era in client computing, and one that has largely moved on and away from Windows (both users and developers).
Windows Phone 7 success remains to be seen, but Microsoft has begun to move in the right direction.
The real new blood success story is Xbox 360 and Kinect. That unit is now run by Don Mattrick, once known as the gaming industry’s wunderkind. At the age of 17, Mattrick founded Distinctive Software, which was acquired by EA in 1991 and lead Mattrick to a career as an EA executive. Microsoft has benefited from Mattick’s brilliance in knowing what the gaming public wants. Kinect has allowed Microsoft to bask in a glow of “coolness” that it hasn’t otherwise seen since the 1990s.
If new blood can do for Windows Server and Azure what Kinect has done for Xbox, then Ballmer has made the right choice. No doubt we’ll see Muglia’s mug in a great new venture after he leaves Microsoft and we at Microsoft Subnet wish him well.
