I personally think you have pulled off the impossible. But let's be honest here: there was a lot left on the plate. Now, with Elvis really leaving the building, you are going to be facing a different set of challenges.
I realize that you and Bill have carefully selected Ray and Craig to fill Bill's shoes, but I think pure delegation would be a misconstruction of your duties as CEO. While almost all successful technology companies have this kind of tech heroes/operations maven partnership at the top, you are nevertheless entering uncharted waters. And I suggest this, firmly believing that Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie are already the world's best at what they're doing.
Even though you have a great A Team, you are about to become the one, the only CEO at Microsoft. Until now, even with the board's backing, you've been able to dictate who you'll meet with, based on the above priorities. Those days are over.
Sometime this year, Bill is going to leave office, and every problem, technical, political, operations, sales and marketing, IT, product planning, is going to belong to you. You can delegate, but, for the first time, you can't constrain.
What does MS need from you now, that it didn't during your Bill G days? It needs someone integrating the whole affair, just as Bill did when he was CEO. Although you've properly and publicly positioned the company as providing global plumbing, real success in the technology world comes from the top, from someone who sees how his employees' skills can make future products for future markets for future customers in ways they can't yet imagine.
I don't like the word "visionary," but you will have to be able to integrate global market needs with Microsoft engineering talent to solve new problems well, and intransigent problems better. You need to create a compelling need within your customers' lives for your products, not just because they all come from one team, but because they each stand for a series of high-end values.
The launch version of Vista, I think, represents the low point in company history on this score, and surely it eroded the trust aspect in the company's brand. Your job now is to make sure there are no more Vistas. That means better communication between programming teams inside the company, and with the thousands of device and software partners on your platform. You're going to have to take more responsibility in areas like this that, until now, have been essentially outside your practice.
I would suggest that, in order to make this really happen, you pick up on Bill's old habit of a week away from campus, studying what is happening outside the company. Step back, and re-define your job to include everything at Microsoft. Take a complete inventory of what you're missing on the research and product side. Invite opinions, anonymous or not, for how to improve the company. This isn't just about saving money on napkins and Coke, this is about retrofitting Microsoft to be performance-tuned to fully-integrated leadership.






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