Sometimes a dominant company loses its edge, and instead of being the industry leader, becomes just another “me too” player. This month's issue of Vanity Fair has a scathing retrospective of the most high-profile example of this in recent memory. In "Microsoft's Lost Decade" (subscription only. Preview available here) Graydon Carter analyzes Microsoft’s fall from grace over the last decade. And while the causes are myriad, there is an implicit commonality among them: Steve Ballmer.
But of all the different flavors of blame poured upon Microsoft’s current leader throughout this brutal piece, my favorite (of course) was the one dished up by none other than Steve Jobs himself. According to Jobs, Ballmer is not a product guy. He’s a sales guy.
The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company… [Then] the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when [John] Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.
For sure, it’s through that lens that I read the entire piece. When you listen to some of the things that Steve Ballmer has said over the years, you realize that at the very least he looked at his company, the products it makes, and its business in a fundamentally different way than Steve Jobs did. And by some standards, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he’s a guy who doesn’t get it when it comes to products and “innovation.” But what does it mean to get it?
One thing I’ll say it means is that the very word “innovation” is over-rated. It’s become a word that get’s used by top management in presentations and talks at company meetings to explain what a the company needs to be doing more of. They’re hoping that they can get their employees to invent the equivalent of the jet pack in whatever business their company competes—the thing that revolutionizes their industry. I know this because I've seen it first hand.
But the fact is that the iPhone (and iPod, and iPad) are not, when you look at it, what a lot of these people would call “innovative.” In the original iPhone, there were no major technologies that were new. Touch screen devices already existed. Multi-touch was not invented by Apple. And the whole notion of the smartphone itself had been around for years as well. Looked at a certain way, there’s really no jet pack in the iPhone. Looked at on a spec sheet, you wouldn’t see radical innovation. Same for use cases: there’s nothing you’d want to do (or even could do) on the original iPhone that you couldn’t already (at least technically) do on the Palm Treo which is the phone I owned for three or so years before getting my first iPhone. But oh, you could do them so, so much better on the iPhone. Jobs used the word “magical” and he was right to use it. There’s a magic there, and that’s the innovation.
And the innovation here involves a relentless, ruthless synthesis and refinement of existing technologies to serve, in this case, a prescient vision of what people would want to do with these devices and how these devices would fit into the lives of their owners. So while vision is necessary, there’s also so much discipline and focus that needs to be brought to bear, company wide. To be successful in this way, as a company, you need to do so many things right.
And so, bringing this back to Ballmer, to be fair, the kind of leader that can bring Apple-like success to any company is exceedingly rare. Steve Jobs was, by many standards, both a visionary and a genius. But with Ballmer, it’s obvious that he doesn’t even really consider products when he thinks about the company as a whole. He thinks more in terms of line items on a spreadsheet. And if innovations lies anywhere, that’s not where it is.