[bambax]

This rings true. I had some relations with Microsoft last year and it's incredible how inward-looking they are. They spend most of the time telling you how great everything Microsoft-like is or will be, and don't seem to be well aware of the outside world.

They know there are things like iPhones and Android devices, but they appear truly baffled that anyone would want one. They think it's some kind of conspiratory rebellion, that the world uses those out of spite for Microsoft.

[HillRat]

Yeah, the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond. One L69 had this very pointed way of staring at the tablet, then at the big red clock, then back again. Keep in mind, I was part of a team coming in as a prospective customer. Just very weird.

I still have hopes for Nadella -- maybe just because I'm an old Sun warhorse -- but it's going to require a big rethink of MSFT, which right now is basically just a cash pile in search of a market. Changing the burn rate is just playing at the margins (layoffs are not a strategy), and if there's a big plan underlying the Mojang acquisition it's incomprehensible to me on both strategic and financial levels. Likewise, mass-producing Perceptive Pixel displays, while undoubtedly cool, is both fiendishly difficult (PP was basically a garage manufactory, so this is a software company figuring out how to scale up a product that has never been mass-produced) and not something that can push market dominance. Buying Nokia kept MSFT in the mobile space at a very high price, but really only purchased time and space, not a turnkey strategy.

Having said all that, it seems to me that there are two companies on the auction block right now that could give Redmond the germ of a strategy. Both Xamarin and Unity would fit very comfortably in what is arguably MSFT's wheelhouse -- software development tools -- while giving the company a way to seamlessly increase their mobile app ecosystem.

[ScottBurson]

> the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond

> [from the article] “[Ballmer's] view was that anyone in the company who used the iPhone was a traitor,” says this person. “His dad worked for Ford, and that meant you had Ford in your garage.”

This attitude drives me nuts. The best thing Ford and GM could have done in 1985 would have been to buy Civics and Corollas for 10% of their employees so they could see for themselves what was so good about them. But no, instead they had this adolescent "be true to your school" thing going on.

The same clearly applies to Microsoft. I hope Nadella gets that business is not a repeat of high school.

[throwawaymsft]

Beautifully put. Used to work there and the inner navel gazing was painful. People assumed loyalty meant blindly ignoring competing products under the guise of "dogfooding". They would dismiss competitive products almost in disbelief that people would use them (without ever have tried!).

[redler]

With most companies, the center of gravity is obviously on the customer side. The customer, and the market, is ultimately the boss. With the customer lies the product/market fit, the fickle and life-giving revenue stream, the demand that drives features and product and ultimately existential corporate strategy.

But when you achieve the dominance and size and cash hoard of Microsoft, that center of gravity shifts -- the company becomes so powerful and massive that it generates its own gravity. There is the luxury of a cushion so large that it recedes to infinity, distorting strategy to the point where the necessity of its convergence with the customer may no longer be explicitly contemplated. The wooing of the customer is supplanted by an eternal dance of indoctrinated partners in the ecosystem ballroom. The objective financial success of the arrangement trumpets it to become ever more like itself, unfettered and unfed by the market forces and demand that anneal smaller and more nimble competitors.

And so, numbly disconnected from the healthy signals of the natural customer-centric gravitational pull, this dominant entity finally reaches the ballistic apex of its trajectory, unpowered by the thrust of customer focus, and begins its gradual descent. Maybe the law of large numbers, with respect to enterprise growth, is really more of an inward-looking organizational behavior problem than one of stock market psychology.