Microsoft Ceo Quotes

Well, the results are in, and once again Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is the richest man in America. Gates says he is grateful for his huge financial success, but it still makes him sad when he looks around and sees other people with any money whatsoever.

Nine had heard whisperings that the secretive Bilderberg Group was effectively the World Government, undermining democracy by influencing everything from nations' political leaders to the venue for the next war. He recalled persistent rumors and confirmed media reports that the Bilderberg Group had such luminaries as Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. Other Bilderberg members sprung forth from Nine’s memory bank. They included the founders and CEOs of various multinational corporations like Facebook, BP, Google, Shell and Amazon, as well as almost every major financial institution on the planet.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier Macworld magazine columnist (and former Apple software evangelist) Guy Kawasaki had published a parody press release joking that Apple was buying NeXT and making Jobs its CEO. In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?” Jobs responded, “Because I’m now a father, I needed a steadier source of income.” The release noted that “because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring a newfound sense of humility back to Apple.” It also quoted Bill Gates as saying there would now be more innovations from Jobs that Microsoft could copy. Everything in the press release was meant as a joke, of course. But reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire.

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Consider a forecast Steve Ballmer made in 2007, when he was CEO of Microsoft: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer’s forecast is infamous. Google “Ballmer” and “worst tech predictions”—or “Bing” it, as Ballmer would prefer—and you will see it enshrined in the forecasting hall of shame, along with such classics as the president of Digital Equipment Corporation declaring in 1977 that “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” And that seems fitting because Ballmer’s forecast looks spectacularly wrong. As the author of “The Ten Worst Tech Predictions of All Time” noted in 2013, “the iPhone commands 42% of US smartphone market share and 13.1% worldwide.”1 That’s pretty “significant.” As another journalist wrote, when Ballmer announced his departure from Microsoft in 2013, “The iPhone alone now generates more revenue than all of Microsoft.”2

What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes. This sort of relationship is hard to pull off if you don’t control as much of the lifestyle as possible. PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s. They also could not respond in time as Apple took this expertise to new areas and hooked people on its applications. You

forecast Steve Ballmer made in 2007, when he was CEO of Microsoft: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

Stephen Hawking warned against the creation of artificial intelligence saying it could be mankind’s biggest mistake and expressed fears that it may enslave or exterminate us.488 Billionaire tech guru Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, warned that creating A.I. would be like “summoning a demon.”489 Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also expressed concern about it,490 as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

Bill Gates, for example, was famous during his time as Microsoft CEO for taking Think Weeks during which he would leave behind his normal work and family obligations to retreat to a cabin with a stack of papers and books. His goal was to think deeply, without distraction, about the big issues relevant to his company. It was during one of these weeks, for example, that he famously came to the conclusion that the Internet was going to be a major force in the industry. There was nothing physically stopping Gates from thinking deeply in his office in Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, but the novelty of his weeklong retreat helped him achieve the desired levels of concentration.

Many in Hollywood view Disney as a soulless, creativity-killing machine that treats motion pictures like toothpaste and leaves no room for the next great talent, the next great idea, or the belief that films have any meaning beyond their contribution to the bottom line. By contrast, investors and MBAs are thrilled that Disney has figured out how to make more money, more consistently, from the film business than anyone ever has before. But actually, Disney isn’t in the movie business, at least as we previously understood it. It’s in the Disney brands business. Movies are meant to serve those brands. Not the other way around. Even some Disney executives admit in private that they feel more creatively limited in their jobs than they imagined possible when starting careers in Hollywood. But, as evidenced by box-office returns, Disney is undeniably giving people what they want. It’s also following the example of one of the men its CEO, Bob Iger, admired most in the world: Apple’s cofounder, Steve Jobs. Apple makes very few products, focuses obsessively on quality and detail, and once it launches something that consumers love, milks it endlessly. People wondering why there’s a new Star Wars movie every year could easily ask the same question about the modestly updated iPhone that launches each and every fall. Disney approaches movies much like Apple approaches consumer products. Nobody blames Apple for not coming out with a groundbreaking new gadget every year, and nobody blames it for coming out with new versions of its smartphone and tablet until consumers get sick of them. Microsoft for years tried being the “everything for everybody” company, and that didn’t work out well. So if Disney has abandoned whole categories of films that used to be part of every studio’s slates and certain people bemoan the loss, well, that’s simply not its problem.

Girish Mathrubootham, the CEO and cofounder of FreshDesk (cloud-based customer support platform), had a secret way to motivate himself during the early days of the company after watching the padayappa movie. Before starting to the office he would watch the song 'Vetri kodi kattu' (Hoist the flag of victory) from the movie and then step into his office every day. It motivated him a lot his company (Freshdesk) won the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge within six months and helps over 50,000 businesses and organizations around the world offer better, more personal support to their customers.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has pointed out: In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, “the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention

Steve Jobs was known for the clarity of his insights about what customers wanted, but he was also known for his volatility with coworkers. Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

My host, GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the “Git” got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a “distributed version control system” that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. Torvalds’s Git program allowed a team of coders to work together, all using the same files, by letting each programmer build on top of, or alongside, the work of others, while also allowing each to see who made what changes—and to save them, undo them, improve them, and experiment with them.

Apple’s founder reportedly fired employees in the elevator and screamed at underperforming executives. Perhaps there is something endemic in the fast-paced technology business that causes this behavior, because such intensity is not exactly rare among its CEOs. Bill Gates used to throw epic tantrums. Steve Ballmer, his successor at Microsoft, had a propensity for throwing chairs. Andy Grove, the longtime CEO of Intel, was known to be so harsh and intimidating that a subordinate once fainted during a performance review.

Persson did not create Minecraft because he wanted to create a billion-dollar company; he loved video games and kept his day job while developing it. When the game soared in popularity, he started a company, Mojang, with some of the profits, but kept it small, with just 12 employees. Even with zero dollars spent on marketing and no user instructions, Minecraft grew exponentially, flying past the 100 million registered user mark in 2014 based largely on word of mouth.2 Players shared user-generated extras like modifications (“mods”) and custom maps with each other, and the game caught on not only with children but their parents and even educators. Still, Persson avoided the valuation game, refusing an investment offer from former Facebook president Sean Parker. Finally, he and his co-founders sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, a fortune built on one man’s focus on creating something that people loved.3 On the other end of the spectrum is Zynga, one of the fastest startups ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.4 The social game developer had its first hit in 2009 with FarmVille. Next came Zynga’s partnership with Facebook that turned into a growth engine. The company began trading on the NASDAQ in December 2011 and had 253 million active users per month as late as the first quarter of 2013.5 Then the relationship with Facebook ended and the wheels started coming off. Flush with IPO cash, Zynga started exhibiting all the symptoms of ego-driven, grow-at-any-cost syndrome. They moved into a $228 million headquarters in San Francisco. They began hastily acquiring companies like NaturalMotion, Newtoy, and Area/Code. They infuriated customers by launching new games without sufficient testing and filling them with scripts that signed players up for unwanted subscriptions and services. When customer outrage went viral, instead of focusing on building better products, Zynga hired a behavioral psychologist to try to trick customers into loving its games.6 In a 2009 speech at Startup@Berkeley, CEO Mark Pincus said, “I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which . . . I downloaded it once — I couldn’t get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.”7 By the spring of 2016, Zynga had laid off about 18 percent of its workforce and its share price had declined from $14.50 in 2012 to about $2.50.

What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes. This sort of relationship is hard to pull off if you don’t control as much of the lifestyle as possible. PC makers that farmed their software out to Microsoft, their chips to Intel, and their design to Asia could never make machines as beautiful and as complete as Apple’s. They also could not respond in time as Apple took this expertise to new areas and hooked people on its applications. You can see Musk’s embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla’s abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn’t have “all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars” sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that’s what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they’re ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.

You hired for the generic position. There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. That position is not the same as the same position at Microsoft or Facebook. Don’t look for the candidate out of central casting. This is not a movie.

By the time I got back to my desk, I had no time or emotional reserves to think about pricing. I cared about each of these people, but I also felt worn out- frustrated that I couldn't get any "real" work done. Later that day, I called my CEO coach, Leslie Koch, to complain. "Is my job to build a great company," I asked, "or am I really just some sort of emotional babysitter?" Leslie, a fiercely opinionated ex-Microsoft executive, could barely contain herself. "This is not babysitting," she said. "It's called management, and it is your job!" Every time I feel I have something more "important" to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie's words: "It is your job!" I've used Leslie's line on dozens of new managers who've come to me after a few weeks in their new role, moaning that they feel like "babysitters" or "shrinks."p4

About 30 percent of founding CEOs in the billion-dollar group had not worked for anyone other than themselves before. Of those who had, about 60 percent had worked at companies with very well-known brands, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey. Those “tier-one companies” are famous for their rigorous hiring processes and their tendency to employ the best. Another 28 percent worked at “tier-two companies,” which I define as large and well-known companies that were less sought-after by top talent. Only 14 percent of founders of billion-dollar companies had worked solely at companies that were not well-known brand names.

The original idea, favored by Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, was that every company should aim for a certain level of turnover, whatever the consequences. The system was rife with perverse incentives. Peers who sabotaged others’ work could save their own jobs; managers might hire less-capable people on their teams to keep from having to fire existing employees whom they favored. Despite the system’s drawbacks, Welch’s influence was so far-reaching that stack ranking was adopted at many of today’s tech giants, where it wreaked havoc on morale and productivity for decades. Eventually, its negative effects became well known enough to make the practice a liability at companies chasing workers whose specialized talents made them scarce, such as engineers. In the mid-2010s, companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon abandoned it.

like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture. As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission.

Satya famously said he wants to move away from having a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” culture. He's a big advocate of diversity and inclusion, collaboration instead of ruthless competition, being open minded, encouraging other perspectives and ideas, and of doing good. Instead of the constant infighting that Microsoft was known for, Satya wanted to create a culture based on empathy. One of his first acts as CEO was to ask his employees to read the book “Nonviolent Communication.

Evans was as skilled with computers as Gates and Allen. Lakeside once struggled to manually put together the school’s class schedule—a maze of complexity to get hundreds of students the classes they need at times that don’t conflict with other courses. The school tasked Bill and Kent—children, by any measure—to build a computer program to solve the problem. It worked. And unlike Paul Allen, Kent shared Bill’s business mind and endless ambition. “Kent always had the big briefcase, like a lawyer’s briefcase,” Gates recalls. “We were always scheming about what we’d be doing five or six years in the future. Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?” Whatever it was, Bill and Kent knew they’d do it together. After reminiscing on his friendship with Kent, Gates trails off. “We would have kept working together. I’m sure we would have gone to college together.” Kent could have been a founding partner of Microsoft with Gates and Allen. But it would never happen. Kent died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated high school.

Microsoft’s newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella wasted no time inviting Bill Gates to become his consigliere, a shrewd use of the founder and former chairman’s expertise in technology and experience spanning four decades as the A.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has famously declared his intention to cultivate a “learn-it-all” culture rather than a “know-it-all” culture.

including Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, who grew up in Hyderabad but has lived for decades in the Seattle area of the USA. Satya Nadella is a brilliant man, but his early cultural training carves deeply his thinking about how women should behave at work. At a conference to celebrate over 8000 female engineers in Arizona, USA, Nadella was asked what advice he would give a woman on how to ask for a salary raise. He said, ‘It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise . . . that might be one of the “initial superpowers” that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.

If you were a venture capitalist, this just did not make sense anymore,” said another executive privy to the decision-making. But Bezos wanted to forge ahead. “Jeff is master of ‘this isn’t working today, but could work tomorrow.’ If customers like it, he’s got the cash flow to fund it,” this exec said. In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill.

Nadella has struck a powerful balance—aligning the Azure ecosystem, where Microsoft is clearly the leader, while allowing partners in the ecosystem to leverage their participation toward progress elsewhere. His goal is not to create the operating system for the intelligent car, for example, but to be the infrastructure that processes the information (at least for now). As Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman explained when announcing his choice to shift the data and applications of his fifty-one-hospital system to the Azure cloud, he chose Microsoft over Amazon, Apple, and Google because “[Microsoft isn’t] trying to be in the health-care business, but [is] trying to make it better.

2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove.

The Country Ambassador versus the Country Manager Some companies experiment with an interesting profile: a country chairperson who is a weak overlay over the business and largely plays an ambassadorial role. However, statesmanship and ambassadors are best left to the realm of diplomacy. These roles are a legacy of an era that no longer exists. GE tried the model over the past decade with limited success and finally abandoned it. A ceremonial role, with no accountability for the business and the responsibility only for engaging government, industry associations, and other CEOs, is usually not effective. Everyone—employees, customers, business partners, government officials—will quickly see this role for what it is and dismiss the person as lightweight. This does disservice to the incumbent and the role. The ambassadorial country manager who smells opportunity, but is powerless to act, can become intensely frustrated. Increasingly, the connections among strategy and execution, business, reputation, and regulation are tightening, so an artificial separation of these functions is suboptimal. Bringing accountability for these together in a single leader is vital for growing competent and well-rounded business leaders, who are capable of even being the CEO someday. If the business does require wise counsel, access, and influence and a senior public face, a strong advisory board headed by an iconic leader who serves as a nonexecutive chairperson may be a more prudent approach. We followed this model at Microsoft India with considerable success; the approach is gaining popularity at companies like Coca-Cola, Schneider Electric, and JCB.

favored moving toward open-source software like Linux, while Musk championed Microsoft’s data-center software as being more likely to keep productivity high. This squabble may sound silly to outsiders, but it was the equivalent of a religious war to the engineers,

I mean, this is going to sound like heresy in a sort of Silicon Valley context, but you can program faster, you can get functionality faster in the PC C++ world. All of the games for the Xbox are written in Microsoft C++.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one,

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

In 1903, the president of a leading bank had certainly leaned out when he told Henry Ford – the founder of Ford Motor Company – ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.’ In 1992, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, had clearly leaned out when he said: ‘The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a pipe dream driven by greed.’ And the former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer had certainly leaned out when he laughed at Apple and said, ‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.