Microsoft: Is Bill Gates the Right Advisor for Nadella?
The buzz surrounding Satya Nadella’s coronation as the third chief executive in Microsoft’s (MSFT) 38-year history and director John Thompson’s ascension to chairman of the board was noticeably louder than the chatter about Bill Gates again walking the company’s halls in person rather than in aura.
The buzz surrounding Satya Nadella’s coronation as the third chief executive in Microsoft’s (MSFT) 38-year history and director John Thompson’s ascension to chairman of the board was noticeably louder than the chatter about Bill Gates again walking the company’s halls in person rather than in aura.
But Gates’ return may be equally as big a deal as Nadella’s and Thompson’s ascensions. Not only did he agree to step away from making nice with Wall Street and investors as chairman, he signed on officially as Nadella’s technology advisor, reportedly willing to show up on campus a number of times a week to counsel the new chief on product development and strategy. Nadella is said to have told Microsoft’s board that advice from Gates would help him to be successful in his new job.
Is Gates the right person to be the birdie on Nadella’s shoulder? Will his presence stifle the company’s vision rather than fuel it? Or, will he offer the inspiration many believe Microsoft needs?
While there’s no denying Gates’ power at Microsoft, the company is vastly different from the one he stepped away from six years ago. It no longer is steeped in PC lore but instead struggling to find equilibrium in the mobile and enterprise cloud arenas, where Nadella already has said he intends to focus. When Gates left, Google (GOOG) wasn’t a competitor, now it’s much more than merely a thorn in Microsoft’s side. The same can certainly be said of Amazon‘s (AMZN) Web Services.
Nadella’s strengths don’t extend to consumer products and it’s unclear if that’s where Gates will help him the most, or if the founder’s input will zero in on services rather than devices. In his heyday, Gates’ reputation in the industry was driven as much by his ruthless marketing as it was his technology vision—competitors feared his tactics more than his product strategy.
That Microsoft was perilously late to the Internet and barely recognized mobile was seen by insiders to be as much Gates’ failing as former chief Steve Ballmer’s, even though he had stepped aside from his day-to-day duties by that time.
Because Nadella is an insider raised on the company culture Gates and Ballmer crafted it’s likely he wanted some continuity connecting what is with what was. Still, for Gates, after being mostly absent from IT for the past six years running his philanthropic foundation, the question isn’t how fast he can get back up to speed, it’s can he read the industry’s tea leaves as adeptly and accurately as he once did?
