Bob Muglia moved on from Microsoft this week, and I for one was not a little surprised. You see, Bob is one of the few Microsoftees that sits (sat) across the two worlds of Microsoft. One is the old world, of Windows and Office and the predominant position in the technology community. The other is where the company sits today. Bob was comfortable in both places, in a way that no-one has been since, well, Bill Gates roamed the halls.
That’s not to say that Bob is a direct peer of Bill, but rather that Bill was able to sit across old and new through sheer force of saying it was so and therefore making the distinction irrelevant. Bob had a more parochial role, but his understanding of the underlying dynamics, what the strategy was and would be, was comprehensive in its ecumenical flavor. When he and Ray Ozzie played doubles with the media, they fit together in surprising ways.
Such was Bob’s skill that he would turn a softball aimed at Ozzie into a screamer hit back at the unsuspecting questioner. Ask Ray whether Silverlight was going to replace Windows Presentation Foundation and effectively subsume Windows into an Internet OS, and he would say no by saying yes. Then Bob would say yes by saying no. Put the two together and you got one answer. Tuesday that answer changed.
When Ray Ozzie quit, there was a reasonable interpretation that things would continue as planned. When Bob Muglia quit, you could no longer make that assumption. Ray had Bill’s blessing, Bob had a business unit with growing revenues. In effect, he was a consigliore to Ozzie, the guy that could manage the often challenging relationship between what makes money at Microsoft and what that would have to become in the Cloud era. Put another way, he could walk into a poker game with Sinofsky and put some chips down to call a bluff.
The bluff is that Windows revenue trumps everything, that Windows Phone will get its share, that a Microsoft tablet will stop both Apple and Android from eating the heart out of Office. As we found out on today’s Gillmor Gang, Google is being called on another such bluff. Namely, that yanking H.264 from Chrome is all about the open Web. That WebM will stop Apple from eating the heart out of Android and Chrome and maybe YouTube. Already Google is re-explaining the move.
But not soon enough to stop Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek and me from having some fun on the Gang this week. Danny Sullivan’s filibuster about who is the better friend of the user is worth the price of admission alone. Robert Scoble is getting smarter by the week, and Kevin Marks, well, it was fun to see the ex-Googler voice outrage at Google’s moronic move. Even noted Android fanboy John Taschek recognized that the more pressure Apple puts on the carriers, the happier users get regardless of which phone they buy.
In the good old days of tech media, Microsoft led the charge in impossibly convoluted contortions around self-interested maneuvers. Today Google has taken over that role. And the new Microsoft stands as a pale shadow of itself, fighting tooth and nail to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory. With Steve Ballmer as Donald Trump: Nice job, Bob. You’re fired. Thanks for the material, guys.
Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor. Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine,...
Kevin Marks is a software engineer. Kevin served as an evangelist for OpenSocial and as a software engineer at Google. In June 2009 he announced his resignation. From September 2003 to January 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati,...
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. Scoble joined Microsoft in 2003, and although he often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors like Apple and Google. Scoble is the author of Naked Conversations, a book on how blogs are changing...
John Taschek is vice president of strategy at salesforce.com. He is responsible for corporate product strategy, corporate intelligence and market influence. Taschek came to company in 2003, bringing over 20 years of technology evaluation experience. Taschek currently is also the editorial director for CloudBlog - an independent blog run as an adjunct to salesforce.com’s web properties. He occasionally is on Steve Gillmor’s The Gillmor Gang enterprise web video-cast. Previously, Taschek ran the testing labs at eWEEK (formerly PC Week) magazine....
Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade. Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they...
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