If I Was In Charge of Microsoft, the First Thing I Would Do…

Before we talk Microsoft, let me talk about the premise here.  How many times to you hear your­self or some­one else make the fol­low­ing state­ment,  “If I was in charge of that com­pany the first thing I would do would be…”  I hear it every day, and prob­a­bly utter the phrase myself every other day.

Some­times we say this about our own com­pany.  Some­times about a rival.  Some­times it is the result of a bad expe­ri­ence with a com­pany you love, or a pleas­antly sur­pris­ing expe­ri­ence at a busi­ness you never knew existed.

I find it fas­ci­nat­ing to hear what peo­ple think should be done.  I have a hunch, peo­ple in cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing depart­ments might be inter­ested too.  Thus, I intro­duce the fol­low­ing series of posts.  If I was in Charge…

Now, as a con­sumer, my belief is that through choos­ing where to spend your money, you are indi­rectly in charge, but this is dif­fer­ent.  I am say­ing if you had absolute power to make one change in a com­pany, right now, what would you do?

I like to use Rod Sommer’s matrix of con­sid­er­ing ease of imple­men­ta­tion rel­a­tive to size of impact.  So based on this model, the best things to do are those that are easy to get done, and result in huge results.  You may sub­scribe to a dif­fer­ent deci­sion mak­ing model.  That is where the fun is.  Your thoughts.

So I hope you will share with the world by com­ment­ing.  No idea is too small, or big, and every­one is wel­come to play along.

So back to the post.  The first com­pany in this series is one that every­one knows, and many love to hate — Microsoft.  Never in his­tory has a com­pany whose prod­ucts so many peo­ple use so fre­quently been so hated.  This com­pany lit­er­ally changed the world with DOS, Win­dows, Office, and other tools.  How­ever, the firm’ his­tory is full of aggres­sive busi­ness prac­tices that have led many to label it as the devil.

Microsoft has been in the news a lot lately.  From the short­com­ings of Win­dows Vista, to the failed acqui­si­tion of Yahoo, to Steve Ballmer get­ting eggs thrown at him dur­ing a speech, Bill Gates’ retire­ment, and the intro­duc­tion of their new touch screen tech­nol­ogy called Multi-Touch, there are ample head­lines about this Red­mond, Wash­ing­ton based Goliath.  With all the tur­moil fac­ing Microsoft, I think it might be fun to ask “If I were in charge of Microsoft, the first thing I would do would be…”

For me, it would be cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem that was smaller, faster, and did much less.  The oppo­site of Vista.  I would want it to be able to per­form basic func­tions, have lit­tle vul­ner­a­bil­ity to com­puter viruses, and be extremely sta­ble.  No bells.  No whis­tles.  It would just work.  It should run on any com­puter built in the last decade, and reflect sim­plic­ity and intel­li­gence.  It would never crash, and it would be very respon­sive to the user.

I would mar­ket it to retir­ing baby boomers, who spend a lot of time exchang­ing email, look­ing at pic­tures, and look­ing up and stor­ing basic infor­ma­tion.  I would then cre­ate a stripped down suite of appli­ca­tions to run on the plaform — Office Light.  Using the 80 / 20 rule, this would only offer the most used, and most use­ful fea­tures.  It would be easy to learn, and again it would just “work.”  This would also be ideal for young chil­dren, seek­ing to learn how to use a com­puter — that would be a sec­ond tar­get mar­ket.  This could yield a new crop of low end, value priced com­put­ers, built to pro­vide basic ser­vices and reli­able per­for­mance, and a whole new mar­ket could be cre­ated for products.

If I were in charge of Microsoft, that is the first thing I would do.   What about you?  What is the first thing you would do if you were in charge of Microsoft.  Would you try to buy Apple?  37Signals? Would you make a play for Ask.com?  Yahoo again?  Face­book?  LinkedIn?  Would you get out of the soft­ware busi­ness or focus solely on enter­prise appli­ca­tions?  Would you fire Steve Ballmer?  What is the first thing you would do?  Please chime in and share by leav­ing a com­ment, and look for more posts like this to follow.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121193874854224859.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us