Who should take the helm post-Ballmer?
Those of us in and outside of the Microsoft community have had plenty to talk about since last Friday’s surprising announcement that the company’s CEO Steve Ballmer will be retiring sometime in the next twelve months.
Was he forced out after the debacle of a $900 million loss on the Surface RT tablets? Why is he leaving right after Microsoft’s major reorganization? What will his legacy look like? Will his exit bring a fresh wind to the company, a chance for reinvention?
Ballmer addressed some of these questions in a recent conversation with all-things-Microsoft ZD Net reporter Mary Jo Foley, including his biggest regret and greatest achievement, and why Microsoft no longer wants to be IBM or Apple.
So what’s the best move Microsoft can make right now? And who should be the next CEO? Sanjay Bhatia, CEO of Izenda, has a few thoughts on the matter:
“One thing you need to know about Microsoft is it’s not just one company. Microsoft is really an ecosystem of half a million global partners. What the global partners are doing that is most successful, for example Izenda is actually up 145 percent this year, and a lot of our partners have a similar story, and what they’re doing to do that is delivering cloud services to enterprise. The next CEO needs to make Microsoft a cloud services company that really focuses on the enterprise.
“David Sachs has done a great job with Office 365, it’s the first version of Office I’ve used in years. Very, very impressive, really gets it, that’s a great example of what Microsoft should be as a company.”
You want a complete migration of the company to cloud services?
“It’s really just a face lift. Microsoft is already doing this very well, if you look at Office 365. Outside of hardcore gaming, which is the only area where they really do well in the consumer space, Microsoft needs to focus completely on the enterprise and help the ecosystem on things like Azure, SQL Server and big data, Windows Server, that’s where things are just thriving. They’re already doing this, but they don’t talk about it. They try to be a consumer-facing company like Apple and that’s not their history or their culture.”
Have you got any names in mind of people that you would like to see as the new chief?
“I would love to see David Sachs, I’m very impressed with his work so far. Ray Ozzie is another one, he was Microsoft until he left in 2010 for HP, he’s very much like Bill Gates, started Groove Network. In terms of outsiders, perhaps someone like Marc Benioff, you know, he really understands the cloud. That’s the type of leader you need, someone who is a technical leader, who’s built a company that’s oriented toward the cloud and delivering that to businesses rather than focusing on the consumer.”
Who do you have in mind? Agree or disagree with Sanjay’s picks? Share it!
