At the request of Steve Balmer, 23 year veteran of Microsoft, Bob Muglia is leaving the company. He was closely aligned with Ray Ozzie who departed last year because the vision he saw for Microsoft was not be recognized and the company appeared to want to remain king of the desktop. The important value that Bob brought to the company was the revenue that his division created. That division was heavily involved in the Cloud strategy for Microsoft, so a change like this at the top is going to impact things for a while.
This action has caught many as a surprise, especially the way that this was handled, such as Steve Balmer writing “I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB. This is simply recognition that all businesses go through cycles and need new and different talent to manage through those cycles.” That comes across as rather cold with no recognition as to the value that Bob has done for the company.
Being responsible for the servers and cloud area of the company, he has been guiding things for years and that success is reflected in the gains in revenue he has generated, accounting for about 24% of the companies overall revenue. With his departure, things will go into suspend mode until someone else is chosen. By all reports, he was exactly the kind of person you wanted in that position and the revenue proves his value. Some have speculated that this is about politics and determining a successor to Steve Ballmer.
What ever the case, the current directions for that division may change here in the future and this creates uncertainty in the market for Microsoft products. With other previous departures of prominent people from Microsoft, it makes one wonder about the future of some of the key product directions that have been happening. This is becoming a brain drain of key people at the top who worked together and now there are many new players moving in trying to make their name when the more important goal should be focusing on the Cloud.
With all of this going on and the way it is being handled, is this an attempt by Steve Ballmer to blame someone else for the failings under his leadership? If that is the case, it appears he picked the wrong person to remove.
Richard Pike