David Maynard writes:

Still, there's the matter of why would someone be induced to change the
vision?

If the new guy lacks the vision, he has no choice.

Stagnation is one possibility and the other is the 'new guy' making
his mark with his own 'vision', but if things are humming merrily along
he'd be foolish to change things too much so we get back to "where do we go
now?"

In the case of Microsoft, it would be because the only way to keep
things humming along is through continuous exercise of the same
vision--and that vision is now gone. Steve Ballmer is a businessman,
not a visionary, and he belongs much more to the standard MBA school
of management. I understand he reads all the latest "how-to" books on
management (literally).

Sure it was the norm because it only ran on the company's proprietary
hardware so, go to it folks, make more stuff for our proprietary hardware,
which is where the money was to begin with, and you're not releasing into
the market the thing that makes it proprietary, your hardware.

Yes. Customers had source so they could change it if they needed to.
It was never going to run on any other platform, anyway, so it didn't
matter.

IBM failed to recognize just how utterly trivial it was, compared to
'mainframes', to duplicate the hardware, not to mention they had simply
purchased a public domain design made from freely available parts, and then
to publish the one and only 'proprietary' piece, BIOS source, *PLUS* haven
given away rights to sell the DOS (same, "who cares about the software?"
notion)... well, woops.

I'm not saying it should have been obvious at the time but it sure is in
hindsight and I'd imagine Microsoft noticed it along with everyone else.

I think it was obvious even then. PCs were clearly a different ball
game.

IBM has always thought about everything in the same way. I remember
renting a typewriter from them once, and it was just amazing how they
did it, with invoices and purchase orders and service contracts and so
on. If something went wrong with the typewriter, I had to schedule a
visit from a field engineer--I couldn't just bring the broken part in
somewhere and get it replaced. The cost of one visit from a field
engineer was greater than six months of rental fees.

That's one reason why companies are always searching for a 'process' that
is, essentially, 'one-time genius' independent. I.E. idea generation from
market feedback, hire/consult 'experts' in the new thing, brain storming
sessions, focus group studies, etc..

And has any company ever succeeded at this? Success requires being
smart, and no process can produce intelligence where it didn't
previously exist.

I wonder if that's because Bill Gates is 'gone' or if it's more the result
of this being about as far as a business suite/'Windows'O.S. combination
can take them, especially in a U.S. market, at least, that is closer to
saturation than it is the wide open early days of growing by leaps and
bounds and where you have to now do upgrades, or 'something', just to stay
even. The wave they were riding ain't there no more.

I think it's both, and the wave has definitely broken on the beach and
is now starting to pull back out to sea. Unless they come up with
something entirely new (not just another "upgrade" of the OS or
Office), the tide has permanently turned. I don't expect them to come
up with anything new.

The whole business model of continually forced upgrades isn't going to
work forever, either. Eventually consumers will get tired of moving
to a new OS every year. Even now, there are untold millions of PCs
that are never "upgraded" beyond the OS they had when first installed.
Each time Microsoft tries an "upgrade" to maintain revenue, it
increases the incoherence of the installed base, which has more and
more versions of Windows up and running, from Windows 3.1 to XP.

And there isn't another 'IBM' giant poised to dominate a huge future market
that you can sell DOS to and clean up when someone cracks their BIOS code
nor is anyone going to give them 'sell to others' license rights, so those
'great ideas' aren't going to happen again no matter how 'smart' they are.

Yes. I think MS has a comfortable number of years ahead of it, but
there will be no major breakthroughs or skyrocketing growth now.

MS is becoming the very company with which it fought when it was
little. MS is the new IBM. But the wheel will continue to turn.

When you first posed that scenario I thought it made a lot of sense but the
more I think about it the more I question it, at least as a 'universal'. It
can certainly happen that way but you can also be simply obsoleted by the
next 'great idea'. For example, the introduction of calculators put the
slide rule folks out of business, at least in that business, virtually
overnight without them having to make 'too many mistakes'.

The next great idea need not come from another company; in theory it
could come from MS just as it has in the past. But the visionary is
gone at MS, so it won't come from MS this time.

If a single brilliant CEO could live forever, then companies could be
successful forever. But that's impossible, so virtually all companies
end up with bad management at some point and dwindle or disappear.
There are very rare exceptions, such as GE, which is so diversified
that it can scarcely avoid making money no matter who is at the helm.
Microsoft has no diversification at all, though, and that's very
dangerous. Its attempts at diversification have been largely
unsuccessful, too (MSN was a disaster and has only survived through
constant infusion of billions to keep it in business).

Of course, I suppose you can always call it a 'mistake' to not be
diversified enough (that's those bottom-line-style management types you
don't like) ...

For long-term, large-scale success, diversification is essential.
There are few areas of business that are so constant and guaranteed
that you can specialize in them over the long term and still make
money.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.