Fire Ballmer

In his post about Windows Live last week, Robert Scoble did not really write "Microsoft sucks."

But he did take off after Windows Live. I think if he were as honest with himself and as brave as the Times' claims he would have written what I'm about to.

Fire Steve Ballmer. Now.

Ballmer is a salesman. He is not a strategist. But more worrisome is that Ballmer sucks the air out of every room he is in and surrounds himself with sycophants. (This is common among salesmen.) As a result all the "bandwidth" Microsoft has hired over the last decade is wasted. People are afraid.

The situation reminds me a bit of the way my old school had become when I was there. You get into this great environment and you go native. You don't want to leave, and you don't want to take risks. People would go in with enormous promise, get an on-campus job after graduation, and 30 years later they would wake up mediocre, all the promise gone. Rice is not that way any more. Microsoft can change, too.

Here's how.

Microsoft's people aren't given enough responsibility, their bottom-line performance isn't measured enough, but they're pampered and told all the time how smart they are. This becomes reflected in things like Microsoft's Internet strategy, as Scoble writes:

Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks (look at that last post again). If that’s “in it to win” then I don’t get it. I saw a bunch of posts similar to the one on LiveSide coming out of the MVP Summit. I didn’t post any of them to my link blog for a reason: All were air, no real demonstrations of how Microsoft is going to lead.

When things don't work, heads should roll. For too long Microsoft has been nurturing brains when it should have been nurturing entrepreneurial guts. Compare the rate at which Google comes up with stuff against the rate with which Microsoft comes up with stuff. There is no contest. Google does come up with some stuff that doesn't make money, but what Google does in response to that is that it stops pouring money down the rathole.

Microsoft doesn't do that, and as a result it is becoming precisely what IBM was 20 years ago -- bloated, lazy, slow, consumed with meetings, afraid to make mistakes, bound by a refusal to make mistakes, a conspiracy of silence concerning the truth about itself. It made itself vulnerable to the first kid to come along with a Clue. And that kid was named Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (They have their own Ballmer in Eric Schmidt, but fortunately they keep him on a short leash.)

So Microsoft finds itself in a crisis. Steve Ballmer is one of Microsoft's largest shareholders. He's Bill Gates' best friend. He's been on-campus for 30 years.

But he has to go. And in his place you need an entrepreneur who will nurture other entrepreneurs, measure other entrepreneurs, and kick out all those who don't perform, who don't get growing numbers of people to sign on the lines which are dotted.