After Bill Gates, Five Possible Futures for Microsoft

For most people, Bill Gates and Microsoft are one and the same. Gates has led Microsoft to global dominance in the 33 years since its founding, combining a strong opportunism -- getting the code for DOS to sell to IBM for the first PC and aping Apple's visual interface for the first Windows are the two best examples of Gates' moving where the wind was soon to blow -- with a steady vision of desktop computers being as powerful as the mainframes that captured techies' imaginations in the 1970s.
June 30 is Gates' last day as a Microsoft employee, though no doubt he'll continue to advise the company. Taking Gates' place is his longtime buddy and aggressive salesman, Steve Ballmer. In its 33 years, Microsoft has extended its quest to turn every PC into a mainframe and to make Windows the center of the information and technology worlds. It's come close, but there are strong signs that the Microsoft era, at least in the Gates mold, may be ending. And it's far from clear that there is a leader to take Gates' place at this critical time.
Which Microsoft future do you see as likely?
* The "Borvell" scenario* The "slow decline" scenario* The "streaming" scenario* The "Oort services" scenario* The "Gates was right" scenario

The Gates legacy
Calling Gates a visionary is misleading. His success has come from determination and identifying the right time to jump into already-brewing big ideas. Remember that Microsoft ignored the graphical user interface of Apple and then GEM for nearly a decade. It disregarded the Internet for several years. In both cases, Microsoft's adoption came just as the technologies became massively popular. In both cases, there was some degree of chicken-and-egg going on: Microsoft's adoption made it safe for users, but had Microsoft delayed any further, those same users may have gone elsewhere.
In the cases of the GUI and Internet, Gates was criticized for waiting too long. Yet it was Gates who pushed the first version of Excel -- on a Mac -- and several years before Windows previewed what the broader business computing world would look like. So it's clear that the idea of the GUI had been on his mind long before Windows 3.
Microsoft gets teased as being a Borg-like entity, after the Star Trek villains that assimilate other cultures and turn them into mindless drones. That's unfair, but Microsoft is good at appropriating technologies when they start passing the point of nascency and are ready for broad exploitation. Gates' strength has been to push, push, push into these areas.
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It's no joke that the third version of a Microsoft product is the one you should actually adopt, given that taking those "at the cusp" technologies and making them work for the masses is no mean trick। Apple's Steve Jobs can usually pull it off (but not always -- he's had some spectacular failures along the way, as has Apple itself), but he's the exception that proves the rule. And besides, Apple is very good at pushing niche technologies, carefully controlling their scope so that they don't have an unlimited universe of possibilities to handle. Microsoft, by contrast, tries to do everything for everybody -- an impossible effort -- and so falls short for at least some.

Does Microsoft have a grand plan?
So what does that all mean for Microsoft after Gates? Plenty. Whether you think Gates is a technology leader or simply a fast-exploiting follower, he'll be gone very soon. And there's no clear driver at Microsoft. Ballmer is no technology guy; analysts and longtime technologists privately say he's just a salesman, hawking whatever there is to sell. Microsoft's official visionary, Ray Ozzie, is long on imagination but short on execution. Years of poetic memos on collaboration and Web 2.0 haven't amounted to anything substantive.
Even in Gates' waning years, Microsoft seems to have lost a cohesive outline for its future, allowing the debacle that is Windows and the bizarre interface changes in Office and Internet Explorer to come to market. Yet this same company has produced a great server operating system (Windows Server 2008) and sharing server (SharePoint 2007), and shows promising work in its touch-interface technology (Microsoft Surface), in addition to well-regarded midmarket business apps (Microsoft Dynamics) with a world-class user interface. It's clear that there are actually multiple Microsofts with their own visions and execution strengths.
[ Read the latest news and analysis on the post-Gates future in InfoWorld's special report. ]
This lack of forward focus is critical because of Microsoft's business realities. While Microsoft has its fingers in many pies, only two slices really matter: Windows and Office. Together, they account for 80 percent ($6.2 billion) of the company's profits and 61 percent of revenues ($8.8 billion) in the last fiscal quarter -- meaning that they subsidize most of the rest of the business. Yet a variety of factors -- poor execution on Vista and Office 2007, the rise of the browser, the resurrection of the Macintosh, and the emerging tidal wave of cloud computing -- all threaten this pair of lifeblood businesses. For comparison, all of Apple earned $7.5 billion and had a profit of $1.1 billion in the same quarter.
The next biggest contributor to the bottom line is the Windows Server unit, which provided 23 percent of revenues ($3.3 billion) and 14 percent of profits ($1.1 billion) in the latest quarter. The Xbox unit provided 11 percent of revenues ($1.6 billion) but just 1 percent of profits ($80 million). The online business provided 0.6 percent of revenues (843 million) but lost 0.2 percent of profit ($228 million). The rest of Microsoft -- the app dev tools, the midmarket business apps, and miscellaneous devices -- together accounted for 5 percent of revenues ($720 million) and 3 percent of profits ($186 million).
What these numbers mean is that if Microsoft's core Windows/Office business slows down or even fails, the rest of the company -- excepting the server division -- may not survive. Microsoft needs a strong Windows and Office business to execute the Microsoft-everywhere strategy. Migrating or adapting these assets to an on-demand future is an option, though the financial hit for such a transition is huge, risky, and thus, a hard sell to investors, at least today.
Five futures, from terrible to great
Given the state of Microsoft and the clear trends emerging, InfoWorld has envisioned five futures for Microsoft, from worst to best, from the vantage point of 2018। See which you agree with:]1। The "Borvell" scenario २ The "slow decline" scenario3. The "streaming" scenario4. The "Oort services" scenario5. The "Gates was right" scenario

Microsoft's future No। 1: The "Borvell" scenario
A failure to adapt to cloud computing spells the death of Windows and Office। What's left is a small but viable server-and-app-dev business.
Microsoft's a dinosaur that didn't know its dead yet। The cloud computing meteor was speeding its way, and when pervasive computing in the cloud became a reality in about 2015, Microsoft was all but dead. Why? Because the Windows and Office revenues collapsed as users finally stop buying upgrades they don't need, and cloud offerings via the browser took their place. Poof! Gone was 80 percent of Microsoft's profits. And gone was the money to invest in technologies that took multiple versions to get right -- if they ever got it right -- such as the Xbox, Zune, Microsoft Dynamics, and MSN.
Even before cloud computing finally emerged in an always-available, easily implemented, and secure form in 2014, Microsoft was seeing a long, slow drop in sales. Apple's Mac Viper OS had gained a market share of 40 percent, with all major products other than Office available for it. But the Office need was handled nicely by the 2012 edition of OpenOffice.org, which finally overcame the geeky failings of the open source app's past versions and delivered an Office equivalent that regular people and businesses could rely on. And the back-to-back Vista and Windows 7 fiascos -- which made Mac OS the new safe OS for business -- got the European Union and later the U.S. Justice Department to force Microsoft to resurrect Windows XP as a stable "basic" OS needed for businesses and government agencies to keep running.
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Microsoft's own cloud attempts failed, as they required the use of Windows 7.3 and Windows Server 2012, and favored Internet Explorer over Firefox and Safari, despite the even market shares for all three. Microsoft's famous "embrace and extend" strategy failed because Microsoft could not let go of its dependence on Windows and Office revenues, which drove its decision to make its cloud offerings reliant on them as well.
Not that Microsoft hadn't thought about it, but stockholders panicked when Microsoft's second CEO since Steve Ballmer's departure in 2011 hinted that Microsoft might move quickly to cloud delivery for its key technologies -- the loss of upfront revenues would mean that Microsoft had to dig deep into its coffers to make up income that wouldn't arrive in big chunks if it went to the subscription model, and that would devastate stockholders' short-term returns. (SAP failed in the same struggle and ended up being bought by Business.com -- the renamed Salesforce.com -- while Apple had used its iPhone, MobileMe, and iTunes businesses to slowly move to a cloud-delivered services model, cushioning the impact.)
By 2017, these wrenching changes led yet another Microsoft CEO to take the "Borvell" option, radically scaling the company down to a server-and-app-dev business, following in the footsteps of once-mighty Borland Software and Novell। The Windows/Office group and Xbox groups were spun out to their own companies, with the Windows/Office group following the "constantly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" path of Palm a decade earlier and the Xbox spin-off being acquired quickly by Sony. The Dynamics product line was sold to IBM, which had branched into being a cloud apps provider and wanted something beyond Lotus to offer the midmarket. MSN and the Web technologies were shut down, no match for Google, which had no interest in buying them.
Microsoft Server 2016 (which dropped the "Windows" label) had successfully kept the Linux competition to a draw and, through an alliance with Apple, integrated Mac OS Server features। This gave the "Borvell" Microsoft an advantage and helped Apple increase the reach of a server OS that never got more than 5 percent of the market despite the Mac's and iPhone's success.
Likewise, Microsoft's app dev tools kept the Java and Eclipse competition to a draw, as the developer world settled comfortably into two well-equipped, highly capable camps that allowed interoperability in the component/service model of development that became the norm in the mid-2010s.
The "Borvell" Microsoft was a sixth the size of the old Microsoft, but as a focused, smaller company, it proved to be nimbler and more respected for its technical acumen। And Microsoft could still rightfully claim a storied heritage of 40 years of proven success in its two remaining divisions, giving it the kind of respect that few "old-timer giants" -- such as Apple, IBM, and Oracle -- could claim.

Microsoft's future No. 2: The "slow decline" स्सनारियो
Unwilling to change but too big to be displaced, Microsoft enters a period of slow decline that hampers everyone.
Bill Gates retired from Microsoft a decade ago, yet his ghost still loomed large, in the form of a persistent effort to continually extend the reach of Microsoft into every nook and cranny possible। And that ghost inhabited a company increasingly focused inward on its own view of what users should want and do. Like Windows Vista and Windows 7 before it, Windows UT (Unlimited Technology) captured a smaller share of upgrades than its predecessor. Ditto with Office UT. Even though Microsoft paid attention to hardware resource requirements in UT and didn't wield the new software as a way to force users to buy new hardware as its last several versions had done, feature fatigue had set in. For most people, Office 2000 and Windows XP did the job they needed, and learning a new UI every few years was simply not in the cards for a user base that had long thought of technology not as a shiny toy to play with but instead as a tool that needed to get the job done and stay out of the way.
But the long reach of Windows and Office meant that they stayed front and center at work and home, even if users tended to stick with older versions of the software, fracturing the market along version lines and causing great grief for consultants, help desks, and app developers.
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Although Macintosh market share now reached 20 percent, it remained a Microsoft-oriented technology world. And even though Internet-based apps such as Salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks.com, and ADP Payroll.com were now the mainstays of small and medium businesses, Office and SharePoint remained the primary front ends for users' work, especially collaborative efforts.
Why? There just weren't many viable alternatives, and those that did exist tended not to team up to offer a complete alternative. For example, Mac users might rely on cloud-delivered apps such a Salesforce.com, but no one had a viable alternative to Office, by 2013 available to Mac users only as the Windows version running in a virtual machine. And many Web sites based on .Net didn't work well with non-Microsoft browsers, just as many Java-based sites wouldn't play nice with Internet Explorer. Although the European Union and several Asian governments banned the use of IE in 2013 and discouraged government agencies' use of Windows and Office, desktop Linux never became usable enough to be a serious option, and office suites for Mac never worked well with the Microsoft version, making it hard to enforce the ban.
Various technologies meant to sideline the OS in favor of the browser -- AJAX, ARAX, application streaming, and Adobe AIR -- gained traction, but as supplements to the core OS, rather than as replacements. Part of that was due to the platform favoritism that had become the norm in Windows, Mac OS, and others.
But the OS alternatives also faced a series of service outages in 2012 and 2013 experienced by Amazon।com, Google, IBM, and Salesforce.com, as well as several spectacular data breaches at Amazon.com and Salesforce.com in 2014 that compromised millions of people's data and wiped out the business records of nearly 14,000 companies. Cloud-based provisioning didn't look that reliable or secure any longer, after a fling in 2010-2012. SAP and Oracle regained many enterprise customers after the scare, and Microsoft consolidated its hold in the midmarket for its Dynamics business apps.
High bandwidth charges also hampered the growth of cloud-based delivery, as AT&T-Comcast and Verizon-Roadrunner -- which served 80 percent of U।S. households by 2012 -- made by-the-byte pricing the norm, ostensibly to get the capital needed to enhance the wired and wireless networks to support video on demand, Internet radio, app streaming, cloud computing, and other bandwidth-intensive uses. In Europe and Asia, regional governments essentially returned telecom services to highly regulated, per-use utilities in the wake of the 4G bubble and its subsequent collapse. The result: The drop in use of Internet services created a freefall in the Internet economy that came just as businesses were recovering from the global no-growth era of 2009-2010.
In this environment of a few dominant players at each chokepoint, all fixed on their own machinations to make customers dependent on them. Microsoft was not alone in pursuing a path of "fully integrated stacks" that complicated hopes of heterogeneity; the two remaining major U.S. carriers, along with Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP, had similar strategies. Sometimes they acted as an informal cartel with each other and key players such as Adobe, Apple, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, but just as often, they came across as independently lumbering giants whose uncoordinated steps kept IT ever fearful of being stepped on accidentally.
Ironically, this very strategy perpetuated Microsoft's slow decline। Customers were loath to invest further, given the high prices that customer lock-in afforded providers such as Microsoft. That continued to drive a slowdown in Microsoft sales, as customers that could escape did and the rest stayed pat as long as possible.

Microsoft's Future No। 3: The "streaming" scenario
After a wrenching adjustment, Microsoft migrates Windows, Office, and its other apps to a controlled cloud, keeping a lock in these familiar territories
For investors, the 2011-2015 era was pure hell when it came to Microsoft। Windows 7 and Office 2010 followed Windows Vista and Office 2007 as duds, gaining minimal adoption, mainly as preinstalled software on new computers. For several years, Microsoft had been working in its server group on desktop and application streaming technologies meant to help datacenters better manage far-flung users. By 2011, it became clear that Microsoft should provide its OS and core apps over the cloud to everyone, not just give that capability to enterprise datacenters, as application streams.
The shift to an on-demand streaming model quickly ate up 75 percent of Microsoft's $6 billion in cash as the upfront sales of Windows and Office slumped, replaced by monthly and annual subscription charges that took years to add back to the upfront income. Investors focused on the next quarter's returns freaked out, abandoning the stock after Microsoft stood firm in its decision to make the wrenching changes in its business and delivery models.
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That famous stubbornness paid off. CEO and Chairman Steve Ballmer could show in 2017 that Microsoft was earning even more as a streaming-based provider than as a packaged apps provider. That's because Microsoft realized it could sell its software steadily without disrupting its users every few years in the process with "big bang" upgrades.
In 2017, most users got Windows and Office as streaming apps, loaded into virtual machines on their computers but maintained at Microsoft. Thanks to virtualization, user apps and data occupied separate virtual layers, so they didn't cause problems for Windows, giving Microsoft huge support savings. The Office productivity apps and the Dynamics business apps were delivered the same way. Users no longer had to worry about managing these apps, could be assured that they always had the latest updates and fixes, and that their own apps wouldn't open security holes.
Plus, the Linux, Mac, and "ultra-low-cost" computer markets -- nearly 25 percent of users in 2012 -- could now embrace Windows again via this streaming method, which let Microsoft tune the OS to each computer without maintaining separate versions. Windows became part of the background of practically every computing device. Even in the mobile space, where Microsoft had been a bit player for years, the streaming strategy let it share the market equally with Apple's iPhone, and spelled the end of the many other mobile OSes such as Google Android, Java, Linux, and Palm.
These moves meant that 80 recent of profits continued to come from Microsoft's Windows and Office businesses, supplemented by the steady-as-she-goes Server and app dev divisions. But Microsoft never did figure out the Google competitive game, and quietly exited its MSN and search businesses in 2014, while also selling the Xbox group to Sony in 2012.
And its cloud-computing offerings remained in the controlled approach taken by its original Live offerings and also pushed by Oracle and SAP in their ERP "safe clouds"; minor enhancements and specialty plug-ins to the core Microsoft product lines, this time anchored to the streaming versions rather than to packaged versions।

Microsoft's Future No. 4: The "Oort services" स्सनारियो
A near-death experience lets Microsoft embrace the cloud and again become a favorite of customers वर्ल्दावैद
Long adept at staving off targeted threats to its core revenue streams, by 2013 Microsoft finally fell prey to the micromarket effect। Linux on increasingly popular UMPCs (ultramobile PCs), the rise of OpenOffice in developing nations, and the customized productivity app marketplace borne of Google's App Engine application-hosting service and its Salesforce and eBay acquisitions -- all chipped deeply enough into Microsoft's core customer base that the company finally had to loosen its grip on the computing industry's once-best legal license to print money, its Office and Windows software business.
Ballmer's impassioned 2014 "cold dead hand" speech, during which he shook a 3D optical copy of Office 2012 in front of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, before smashing it on the podium and storming off stage, was his last as Microsoft CEO. Rumors of a Gates return went unrequited, as the Microsoft board began spinning off product divisions to stanch shareholder flight and stabilize the company around interim CEO Ray Ozzie.
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Divested of the Mobile Devices, and Home and Entertainment groups, Ozzie began the arduous journey of distancing the beleaguered company from impending litigation brought about by the strengthening of intellectual property and software patent rights. With Software Arts v. Microsoft expected to serve as a litmus test for retroactive patenting, Ozzie released what became known as the "Microsoft Global Services Manifesto" memo in 2015, hinting at the possibility of open-sourcing Windows as part of his plan to reshape Microsoft around a "services-plus-services" agenda, a move Fox Tech 24/7 pundit Michael Arrington mislabeled the "Gerstnerizing of Microsoft."
Despite internal turmoil and the specter of a $500 billion VisiCalc settlement, Microsoft ended up well positioned to make good on Ozzie's vision. Having successfully re-engineered its software for multitenancy during its "software-plus-services"-dominated early '10s, Microsoft shifted relatively easily into full-on Oort computing, an updated version of cloud computing that leveraged both Microsoft's decade-long buildup of datacenters across the globe and its recent accumulation of low-orbit satellites provisioned through deals with the American and Russian governments.
Corporations, having warmed to the notion of hosted services thanks to SaaS pioneers such as Salesforce and Google, welcomed the move, and what was once criticized as a small-business play began to win over Fortune 500 customers -- especially those whose technical infrastructures were left teetering on the brink of collapse as a result of the earlier implosion of Microsoft's software business.
On the client side, the breakdown of the Web/desktop divide spurred by Google, with its Gears technology, and Adobe, with its AIR suite, began working in Microsoft's favor, as users -- increasingly free of Windows environments and accustomed to ubiquitous muni-5G access, ultramobile tablets, and public thin-client terminals -- soaked up Ozzie's reintroduction of the Ballmer-banished Mesh initiative, now nostalgically coined Mesh 2।0, in early 2017.
Attracted to Microsoft's VPN-less approach to remote management and automatic services provisioning, companies also readily embraced Microsoft's proprietary Web-within-the-Web, collaborating with and conducting transactions with other organizations via Partner Mesh। Energy cost spurred by $500-per-barrel oil prices also pushed companies to adopt Microsoft's Live Work Live Mesh, technology that extended enterprise-grade services to employees' Personal Mesh environments so they could finally work anywhere they chose on whatever device got the job done -- an ethos extolled for years by myriad technology vendors in advertisements intended to woo stock investors but at last made real.
Developers, too, returned to the new-look, services-based Microsoft, after having wandered away from Microsoft due to waning Windows adoption rates and the once-lucrative ad-based application distribution model pushed by Google in the early '10s. Tapping into Ozzie's "feeds-within-feeds" application model for Mesh based on the long-forgotten XML, developers built a vibrant ecosystem around Microsoft's services offerings and were rewarded by the hidden fruit of Microsoft's ruined software empire: idle, and hungry, Microsoft sales reps.
Freed of the need to push software licenses on corporate customers, Microsoft's sales force -- many of whom counted themselves among the "Microsoft micronaires" whose life savings were decimated by the company's 2014 implosion -- found rich rewards acting on behalf of Microsoft developers, supplementing the services Microsoft provided its corporate clients with services from Microsoft's newly returning software developers।

Microsoft's future No। 5: The "Gates was right" scenario
Everyone thought Bill Gates had no vision. As it turns out, he did. And he got the last लौघ
Bill Gates didn't see much of Steve Ballmer anymore, now that Bill was skipping most of the board meetings। But when they met they'd share a good laugh. After all, although things went pretty much according to plan, they never imagined the company would reach such a peak. Good ol' MSFT was now bigger, in terms of market cap, than any company in the U.S. If it weren't for the Chinese banks, they'd be kings of the world.
Not that it was easy to get where they were. Well, the technology was easy, all considered. Everything the company needed to dominate the "software business" (as Gates insisted on calling it; he never liked carving it up into "business" and "consumer," or "desktop" and "Web," or "installed" and "hosted," which had always prevented people from thinking clearly about it) was already in place by 2010. The trick had simply been to stay the course and let the "idiotic fads" -- SaaS, cloud computing, virtual desktop, superthin clients, business cloud, the rest -- run out of steam. What was that other one? Bill could never remember. "Oh yeah, Web 2.0. Google and Web 2.0! Jesus," he exclaimed in an interview.
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A decade after leaving the helm of Microsoft, Gates could now admit, in that told-you-so way of his, that those years had been painful for him. It was hard being criticized for being a technology laggard when in fact Microsoft's technology -- from the presentation layer to the back end -- was ahead of everyone. Well, almost everyone. As he told InfoWorld in an exclusive interview on the 10th anniversary of his departure as CEO:
But of course, who else had all the stuff we had? Larry Ellison? IBM? Steve Jobs, for crying out loud? Nobody! At least people know now that Google and Apple didn't matter. Blips. I kept saying it was about software-plus-services, and dammit, it was.
That was the key, our portfolio. Second to none. Back then, though, no one could see over their own desktops. Especially Wall Street. Windows and Office, Windows and Office, Windows and Office ... I can still hear them now. Sure, you couldn't dismiss Windows and Office -- still the most important software on the planet. They funded everything. But in those days, nobody gave us enough credit for all the stuff we built around the OS and apps -- the middleware, the communications, the rich media, the management and development tools. All the beautiful tools. And to have a lot of the neatest stuff, the really super stuff -- speech recognition, handwriting recognition, VoIP, the virtual reality -- written off as "Bill's adventures," that was hard to take. Wake up, people.
Couldn't they understand we would need it all? I mean, hello, we're working on the next generation of computing here. Wall Street, the press, the no-nothing analysts ... they have this mountain staring them in the face for 10 years, and the whole time all they can say is, "Where's your cloud? When are you going to put this in the cloud?" Well, here's your cloud, pal. You see it now, don't you? Yeah, a trillion-dollar cloud is hard to miss.
[ Gates was getting a little worked up, thinking back on it. Time to take a pill. --Ed.]
Of course, "cloud" isn't really the right word। That was the thing about software -- you could run it anywhere. On a client, or on a server, or on both at the same time -- what's the difference? Well, none of course. Same goes for operating systems and applications -- no difference, necessarily. People get stuck on the old concepts. Funny, back when we were pulling all the apps into the operating system, it was a crime. Ten years later, we've pulled the operating system into the applications (virtualization! now there's a word you never hear anymore), and no one blinks twice. And what's the difference? Not much. Idiots.
OK, sure, there's one huge difference। That's the whole point. Now that the OS travels with the apps, Office runs everywhere -- handhelds, laptops, desktops, wherever you like, even on Linux. Boy, did that one blow their minds. Almost as big as the shock we created when we rolled the OS (and everything else) into Office and killed the Windows brand. But like Steve and I agreed, if you're not running Office, then you don't need Windows. And as long as your software streams from Office.com, then we don't care where it lands. Run it on Linux or even a Mac, if you can still find one.
Hard to believe there was a time when people thought they would run serious apps in a Web browser. I guess maybe they thought they would have to. Gotta admit, we were really milking that Windows and Office cow. Still, Google apps? In a Web browser? I love the way Ballmer put it that one time, during that meeting with Jerry Wang and Yahoo. Running an app in a Web browser is like living without a penis. Exactly. Boy, I wonder what Jerry Wang is doing these days. Idiot.
Well, Steve and I can laugh now. Steve did a super job of keeping the train on the tracks. Like I told him when I stepped down, keep doing what you're doing. All the important pieces are in place. Keep hiring the best engineers, and make sure we've got our hands in all the important stuff. But don't give the engineers too much control. Engineers always want to be first, and that's the one sure way to kill our business. The shift to "on demand" is going to happen, but not how people think. It's still the software market. We own it today, and we'll own it tomorrow. Let's not be in too much of a hurry.
Yeah, everything worked out just fine. Soon as the Chinese banks hit a rough patch, we'll be No. 1. Even now, why can't people see that software is bigger than money? Anyhow, Steve was smart to hire all of those business guys. They really held the course. I'd much rather spend time with engineers than the MBAs -- I just had to get out of there. But you gotta admit, engineers have no business sense. Engineers would put a kitchen in a skateboard if you'd let 'em. Idiots.

Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/147518/after_bill_gates_five_possible_futures_for_microsoft.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/24/26FE-microsoft-gates-borvell_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/24/26FE-microsoft-gates-decline_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/24/26FE-microsoft-gates-streaming_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/24/26FE-microsoft-gates-services_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/24/26FE-microsoft-gates-plus_1.html