Economics and Sociology at Microsoft
5 June 2008 at 2:51 pm Peter G. Klein 3 comments
| Peter Klein |
A couple of nuggets from today’s WSJ front-pager on the complicated relationship between Microsoft founder Bill Gates and current CEO Steve Ballmer:
Their relationship started at Harvard University in the mid-1970s, where the two played poker and thrived by pushing their intellectual limits. Once they skipped a graduate economics class for the entire semester, then teamed up a few days before the final exam to try to learn the material all at once. Mr. Ballmer recalls he got a 97; Mr. Gates a 99.
Who knew Harvard’s graduate economics program was so easy? And this:
One concern for Mr. Ballmer was how to preserve Mr. Gates’s role of technology visionary inside the company. Looking for guidance, Mr. Ballmer says he cracked open a book from his college years by Max Weber, the German sociologist, on how organizations handle the disappearance of “charismatic leaders.”
On March 28, 2006, Mr. Ballmer described the book to Microsoft’s board at a retreat in the San Juan Islands near Seattle, Microsoft executives say. One way for a firm to retain the charisma of a departing leader, Mr. Weber wrote some 100 years ago, is for the leader to name his own replacement.
Mr. Gates did just that.
Who says sociology isn’t useful?
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Organizations and Markets 
1.
Brian Pitt | 5 June 2008 at 5:39 pm
Many sociologists are not useful. But sociology certainly is—at least the economically-literate ones, like Weber.
2.
Admiral | 5 June 2008 at 7:51 pm
The lesson of picking one’s successor is also, on the other hand, usually blissfully obvious. It’s difficult to give credit to sociology on this one. In any event, even Weber got lucky a few times.
3.
Warren Miller | 17 June 2008 at 6:26 pm
Even when the successor is not obvious, the CEO should not be the one making the choice. That’s the Board’s job. The CEO is entitled to weigh in, of course, but that’s about it. And, as the article pointed out, when a company needs to change, an insider is usually the worst possible choice unless it’s someone like Jamie Dimon, who has a long-standing reputation of being a challenge-authority kind of guy.
The problem w/the WSJ article is that it’s pretty well-known that Gates was a Harvard dropout who never got a degree. In fact, inside the article, do the math: If Gates is 52 and Microshaft is 33, then Gates began it in 1975 at age 19. Goodness knows that he has never exhibited a shred of knowledge about antitrust, so we can safely assume he never took even an undergraduate IO course. The story about the graduate econ class sounds to me like an urban legend.
But then, that’s what I wish Microshaft itself was: an urban legend. Instead, it’s a customer’s nightmare.
Ponder this: What other industry calls its customers “users”??
Think about it.
That industry is the street drug industry. When IT is viewed through that lens, a lot of IT things that never made sense come into sharp focus, at least for me. In fact, I can make a pretty good case in favor of a 12-Step Program for Windows “Users.” Who else but an addict would tolerate such an awful, unreliable, high-overhead, and overpriced product from such an arrogant, in-your-face, contempt-for-the-customer “pusher”? :-)