Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN GLUSKOTER/EPA/LANDOV.
YOU TALKING TO ME? Microsoft C.E.O. Steve Ballmer delivers the keynote address at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, on January 9.
To the saccharine rhythm of a Muzak clip, Steve Ballmer crouched into a tackling stance and dashed across a ballroom stage at the Venetian Las Vegas. A 20-foot wall of video screens flashed his name as the 55-year-old Microsoft chief executive bear-hugged Ryan Seacrest, the ubiquitous television and radio host, who had just introduced Ballmer’s keynote speech for the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show.
More than 150,000 techies and executives were swarming the city’s hotels last January in the annual bacchanalia of cutting-edge gizmos and gadgets. Attendees ran from one vendor to the next, snapping up fistfuls of freebies, inhaling flavored oxygen, and rubbing elbows with stars such as LL Cool J and Justin Bieber.
But this night, an air of discomfort filled the Palazzo Ballroom, where Ballmer was about to give the show’s opening presentation, one delivered by Microsoft’s C.E.O. for 14 of the previous 17 years—the first 11 by Bill Gates and the rest by Ballmer. Weeks earlier, the company had declared that this would be its final keynote—and, worse, that it wouldn’t even be back next year as an exhibitor to showcase new innovations. The timing for big news about its products, it said, didn’t match that of the annual high-tech pageant.
Rumors had swirled throughout the day that Ballmer planned to go out in a blaze of glory, offering a peek at a yet-to-be-released stunner from a company whose recent innovations had too often been lackluster or worse. Instead, what emerged was a gonzo spectacle, structured as a confab between Seacrest and Ballmer. Cookie Monster showed up, as did a gospel choir that belted out a bizarre song composed entirely of random tweets shot into cyberspace by who-the-hell-knows.
As for announcements of quantum leaps into the technological future: nothing. Ballmer applauded the still-long-awaited Windows 8 operating system (which as of this writing is available only as a release preview online). He burbled about his expectations for Xbox, the game console that successfully competed with Sony PlayStation. Out came Windows Phone 7 again, which, despite widespread praise from users, had experienced bleak sales results. A demo followed, which proved an embarrassment; the device’s voice-to-text messaging failed and then another glitch forced a Microsoft staffer to reach for a different phone. The media response was dismal—the company’s last presentation, a prominent blogger wrote, was a “cruel joke.”
Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products. Over those years, inconsequential pip-squeaks and onetime zombies—Google, Facebook, Apple—roared ahead, transforming the social-media-tech experience, while a lumbering Microsoft relied mostly on pumping out Old Faithfuls such as Windows, Office, and servers for its financial performance.
Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion.
How did this jaw-dropping role reversal happen? How could a company that stands among the most cash-rich in the world, the onetime icon of cool that broke IBM’s iron grip on the computer industry, have stumbled so badly in a race it was winning?
The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.
By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success.
In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.
That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records.
“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”
Today, Microsoft stands at a precipice, an all-or-nothing opportunity that may be Ballmer’s last chance to demonstrate to Wall Street that he is the right man with the right plan to lead the sprawling enterprise into the future. With Surface, the recently unveiled tablet, Windows 8, Windows Phone 7, Windows Server 2012, and Xbox 720 in the offing, he could be on the verge of proving his strategies—including last year’s controversial, $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. But whether these succeed or not, executives say, the Microsoft of old, the nimble player that captured the passions of a generation of techies and software engineers, is dead and gone.
“I see Microsoft as technology’s answer to Sears,” said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. “In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”
Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.
No, really.
One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.
monopoly money
While Microsoft was once the hippest company on earth, its beginnings could be traced to the Holy Bible for nerds—Popular Electronics.
In December 1974, a 21-year-old college dropout named Paul Allen purchased the latest issue of the hobbyist magazine at a newsstand in Harvard Square and was barely able to contain his excitement. In bold letters, the cover headline screamed out that the world’s first minicomputer with the power to rival commercial models had been invented. Allen rushed six blocks to Harvard College, where his high-school chum Bill Gates was a student. The two had long wanted to write an operating program using the computer language called BASIC, but Gates had held off; he would start such a project, he told Allen, only when someone developed a computer with a fast processor. Allen thrust the magazine into Gates’s hands, and the two agreed: the moment had arrived.
Things moved quickly. Gates, Allen, and another friend wrote a program they called Altair BASIC and persuaded the company that made the computer—MITS, in Albuquerque—to license it. They named their new company Micro-soft. Soon, the personal-computer market was exploding. Micro-soft began selling its programs to bigger and bigger corporate players. Within two years, the company, renamed Microsoft, was setting the industry standards for microprocessor programming. Working at the young Microsoft was, by all accounts, thrilling, but also unnerving. Gates was relentless, demanding the same intense commitment of everyone he hired.
In 1980, IBM—then the world’s largest computer-maker—came to Gates and Allen and licensed their company to write the operating software for their soon-to-be-released product, the IBM P.C. It was Microsoft’s big break, bringing the company the riches it needed to finance its coming blast into the stratosphere.
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