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Many of the factors in his departure — stock price, internal politics, shareholder pressure, public relations — aren’t my area of expertise. I’m a tech critic, a reviewer of products. But even from my particular angle of examination, Mr. Ballmer’s time as the head of Microsoft has been baffling.
He completely missed the importance of the touch-screen phone. (“There is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he said in 2007.) He missed the importance of the tablet, too. Yes, Microsoft now sells attractive phones and tablets, but they came years too late. They have minuscule market share and little influence.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand why Microsoft missed these tidal shifts: It’s always been a PC company. It helped to create the PC revolution, its bread and butter was the PC — and so of course the company kept insisting that the PC was the future.
It would have taken an exceptional thinker, an out-of-the-box visionary, to admit that the company’s foundation was crumbling. Mr. Ballmer wasn’t that guy.
Indeed, his instinct to cling to the past is also responsible for the train wreck that is Windows 8. Under Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft created an elegant, clean, easy-to-use, unnamed new operating system that I call TileWorld; it’s the touch-screen face of Windows.
But Mr. Ballmer and his team lacked the courage to break completely with the increasingly complex, bloated desktop version of Windows. So they created Windows 8 simply by grafting TileWorld onto the old desktop Windows. The result is exactly twice as complicated as before, because now you have twice as much to learn.
Windows 8 computers haven’t sold well; Microsoft’s Surface tablets have bombed; Windows Phone has about 4 percent market share. The dawn of the touch-screen-PC era that Microsoft predicted hasn’t come to pass, either. And PC sales, all over the world, are way down. That may be partly because of the phone-and-tablet revolution — but the Windows 8 mess certainly didn’t help.
In some ways, Microsoft has been frozen in time since Mr. Ballmer took the helm 13 years ago. It’s still raking in money from its big three cash cows: Office, Windows and XBox. Even if it did nothing but rearrange the toolbars in each year’s new versions, they’d still sell.
But most of Mr. Ballmer’s initiatives haven’t fallen on fertile ground.
As the New York Times article about Mr. Ballmer’s resignation makes clear, it won’t be easy for his successor, whoever that turns out to be. Microsoft is a sprawling empire without a particularly clear vision, other than, “Keep Windows, Office and XBox alive.”
How do you even begin to design a successful operating system if you don't have a clear vision for the machines it is supposed to operate? And how do you grow or even maintain Office sales in a world in which the machines people want are not running your operating system?
Will Microsoft figure this out?