Wrong Guy for the Job
In Godfather , right before entering the mafia war, Michael Corleone fires his childhood friend, Tom Hagen. When asked why, Corleone tells Hagen he isn’t “a wartime consigliere” . I read this 2012 article by Kurt Eichenwald titled Microsoft’s Lost Decade that describes why Microsoft had devolved from being: “one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products” So much so that: “One Apple product (the iPhone), something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975.” You might say companies rise and die; so what’s new? Well, for one, Microsoft didn’t miss many of those opportunities. They spotted them, acted on them, even had prototypes ready and then never productized them! Why? Steve Stone, a founder of Microsoft’s technology group, sums it perfectly: “Windows was ...