With the news that Ford Motor CEO Alan Mulally won't be riding to Microsoft's rescue, many Microsoft investors are disappointed. However, that doesn't mean Mulally, the favored candidate, won't be a board member when he retires from Ford.
Any new CEO of Microsoft will need Chairman Bill Gate's blessing and the board is seeking a leader with a strong technical background along with the work ethic Gates had while he was CEO.
An article about Bill Gates described how he deliberately carved out two “Think Weeks" a year while he was CEO of Microsoft. He would work seven days a week, eighteen hours a day, in self-imposed seclusion devoted to doing nothing more or less than reading and thinking. When he was doing that, he devoured journals, papers, and ideas submitted by his employees, which he considers carefully. By the end of his week, he says, he would have read one hundred papers, sent emails to hundreds of people, and written a "Think Week" summary for his executives. The results have been impressive, among them a college campus tour resulting in an idea that led to the development of the Internet Explorer browser (which sealed Netscape’s doom).
Going back in personal computer (PC) history, Microsoft was once a small programming company that IBM had engaged to write the disk operating system (DOS) for the first IBM PC. Then, after a few years of selling their PCs, IBM decided it was time to sell new PCs by upgrading to a new PC operating system (OS) and asked Microsoft to design and program OS/2.
While developing the OS/2 DOS upgrade under contract to IBM, Gates and his management team recognized that the large installed base of DOS personal computers provided an opportunity for upgrading these PCs to a new graphical user interface (GUI) technology. That strategic understanding led to Microsoft entering two software horses in the race to satisfy the consumer's PC needs: the new IBM OS/2 and a GUI upgrade to be called "Windows."
Proactively, Microsoft established strategic alliances with as many independent software vendors (ISVs) as possible to provide new Windows-based application upgrades to the large DOS machine customer base. Microsoft distributed beta test Windows software to ISVs long before the Microsoft Windows operating system was introduced to the marketplace.
This concept of collaboration and developer support led to more Windows application software being available to PC manufacturers and upgraded PCs than any other application software. Providing Windows Office process automation for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, etc. resulted in wide user distribution that is still providing profitable income to Microsoft today.
However, since Bill Gates left his Microsoft CEO position to lead the Gates Foundation with his wife, Microsoft has not matched the strategic marketing impact of the Windows Office suite of software.
That is why Gates may decide that he has to temporarily turnover the sole Gates Foundation leadership to his wife and return full time to the CEO position at Microsoft for the next five years. During those five years, he will focus Microsoft on becoming profitable in the mobile computer software market while developing a select group of emerging leaders to take over corporate management in future years.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 27, 2014: Bill Gates, saying he would not return to Microsoft as CEO, "My full-time work will be the foundation for the rest of my life."