Early
Measures In Nadella’s Microsoft
Earlier
today Kara Swisher reported that Microsoft’s Tami Reller, executive vice
president of marketing, and Tony Bates, executive vice president of the
company’s Business Development and Evangelism group will both depart. A
reportedly formal announcement date of Tuesday now appears to be little more
than a coming perfunctory exercise in rehashing.
If nothing
else, the changes indicate that Microsoft under Satya Nadella will look quite
different than the firm during Ballmer’s reign, though there doesn’t appear to
be indication yet that the company’s new CEO forced the changes.
The exit of
Bates is sensible as he was an unselected CEO candidate. Swisher reports that
he has received several offers for the top seat at technology firms, and there
is recent precedent for Microsoft leaders leaving the mothership for top roles
at other companies.
Reller is
more interesting, given that before her current role she was part of the duo in
charge of Windows in the post-Sinosky era. Her then-cohort Julie Larson-Green
recently picked up a new, internal role to clear space for the incoming Stephen
Elop who will take up her job as the head of Microsoft’s hardware efforts.
In addition
to the above, advertising in the new Microsoft appears to have been removed
from the hands of Mark Penn. Tom Warren, a reporter who covers Microsoft,
remarked on that change this way:
I doubt that
view is too controversial either inside or outside the company.
Microsoft
declined to comment on the reported executive changes.
Opportunities
For Change:
Call it a
chrysalis moment. Nadella inherited a firm on a firm financial footing, but one
still in transition regarding its business model, and organizational structure.
The changes listed above could allow Microsoft to revamp its public messaging
strategy (advertising), and developer and OEM outreach. New installs in those
roles could lead to structural changes.
Raise your
hand if you think that Microsoft’s marketing and platform messaging couldn’t
use a burnishing. To be fair, Microsoft’s recent ad campaigns have received
plaudits, and the firm certainly has done a better job of late attracting
developers to its Windows 8.x and Windows Phone platform (successes that are
bearing fruit, I’d say). But Microsoft has more, and harder work ahead of it to
not simply establish its platforms — which it has done to a modest, if stable
extent — but instead to drive them to market parity with the far larger iOS and
Android ecosystems.
So change
might not be a bad thing. Provided Microsoft brings in exceptionally strong
people to recently vacated leadership roles that are key to its growth.
It’s simple
to forget that Microsoft’s time atop the platform pyramid is either over, under
severe threat, or at least shared. And that if Microsoft fails to reassert
ascendency in that realm — or again, some sort of equivalence — its
still-healthy enterprise-facing products and services could face future market
and dollar-share erosion to rival products and services that are native to
platforms that have supplanted the venerable Windows et al. (Windows has to
become young again, essentially.)
To do that,
Microsoft needs to woo both the regular public, and the technology community.
Hence why Reller and Bates leaving the firm somewhat in unison is interesting,
as it could provide Nadella with an obvious, organic, and unforced — in the
non-negative sense, of course — opportunity to retool and advance Microsoft’s
message to consumers (buy our stuff, it’s the best!), and developers, partners,
and the like. It could stumble at this, but the opportunity is now at least now
open by default.
It’s hard to
gauge the early success of a new CEO of a complex company with massive reach
and product diversity. But I think that when it comes to the most publicly
consumable fare that a company produces you can catch earlier changes in the
wind. So, we should keep our ears up.
Finally, I
wouldn’t cast the above changes in staffing as a negative for Microsoft, except
in that Microsoft is losing two very competent workers. By that I mean that the
news is not indication that Microsoft is melting internally following Nadella’s
ascension. So far, I’ve heard no chatter to that effect.
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