Another vote for the wall

So, almost as soon as I posted "Microsoft: Around the corner, or still headed for the wall?", Microsoft announces the departure of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (perhaps acknowledging that no internal announcement to staff stays internal for long, the solution apparently is simply to announce things to the world by just posting the internal e-mail directly on the public website).

You can read the linked PI article for a pretty good breakdown of what all might have lead up to this decision, as well as the general challenges faced by anyone attempting to fill that role, a role roughly designed to make up for the fact that Steve Ballmer as CEO could never deliver the sort of technical leadership that Bill Gates was capable of in that position. But Bill's status as both founder and visionary may have been unique, and expecting that Ray could fill those shoes without corresponding authority may have always been a bit quixotic.

So perhaps Ray wasn't getting the job done, but it's hard to pin all that on him, and indeed I would tend to attribute the failure more to internal culture and a sort of arrogance than on Ozzie's capacity to deliver. It's noteworthy that no replacement is being sought, an acknowledgment perhaps of the impossibility of providing overarching technical leadership in a company as massive as Microsoft has become. Ballmer's memo says "...the CSA role was unique and I won’t refill the role after Ray’s departure. We have a strong planning process, strong technical leaders in each business group and strong innovation heading to the market." But none of those strengths have been enough to excel in any of those categories in any of those business groups over the past four years. The question is, did Ozzie somehow confound the great things that might have come out of them, or was he keeping them from being even more muddled than they actually were in that time?

For my money, Ozzie had his eye on the ball way ahead of any of the individual business groups at Microsoft, and the efforts that he has been credited with spearheading (Azure, Windows Live, Office online) have all been efforts in the right direction. They have not, generally, been fast enough, committed enough, or complete enough to impress, but that is exactly the sort of drag in execution that one can often lay at the feet of competing executives who are frightened of change. Ozzie made all the right noises, and while I can't claim to know it for sure, my hunch is that he just got smothered by the ever-increasing inertial bureaucracy over in Redmond. I had high hopes for the company when he stepped into the CSA role. My thought was that if Ballmer could keep the trains running on time, Ozzie might be able to get the track laid to the right places. But it hasn't happened, and I fault Ballmer more than Ozzie.

This is not a positive step for the company. What they were doing may not have been working, but it had at least some of us asking the question whether or not they were finally starting to turn the corner. This is another sign that the answer is no, they have not. They're still headed for the wall.