It must be tough being Satya Nadella sometimes. To be more precise, it must be tough being Satya Nadella at those times when his predecessor Steve Ballmer talks to the press. Thankfully for Nadella, Ballmer doesn’t spend a lot of time talking to the press but he does it just about enough times to be a nuisance.
In his latest intervention, Ballmer has been opining to Business Insider on what Nadella might do with Microsoft’s mobile device business. It might come as a surprise to hear that Ballmer thinks Nadella should be doing something similar to what Ballmer was doing before he left the company.
This latest intervention comes just over a month after Ballmer was quoted by Bloomberg as saying “That won’t work” at Microsoft’s annual general meeting when Nadella was outlining the software giant’s universal Windows app strategy.
That’s not to say Ballmer’s interview with Business Insider is overly critical of Nadella. He praises his successor for the work he’s done with the transition to Office 365 (“started when I was there”), the transition from server software to Azure (coincidentally another thing started when Ballmer was at Microsoft) and the work with Surface, HoloLens and Xbox which is “absolutely essential to the company’s future” (all started when Ballmer was at Microsoft).
He also credits Nadella with doing “a very good job” in the public positioning of the company “in a way that I don’t think would have been possible for me to do even if I’d seen it that way, to really talk about this mobile-first, cloud-first world”. But, and it’s quite a big but, he says this strategy needs to be backed up with “a sense of what you’re doing in mobile devices”.
Nokia fallout
You won’t be surprised to hear that Ballmer thinks he had “put the company on a path” by buying Nokia and he makes it clear that “the company, between me and the board, had taken that sort of view”. He makes no bones about the fact that Nadella has “certainly changed that” before adding: “He needs to have a clear path forward. But I’m sure he’ll get there.”
The underlying implication seems to be that Nadella doesn’t have a clear path forward yet despite the fact Ballmer and the Microsoft board had “put the company on a path” before Nadella’s elevation. But was that path particularly successful? The Nokia acquisition has been a costly mistake for Microsoft with the company writing off $7.6 billion on the $5.4 billion purchase. To add insult to injury, in its most recent quarter, revenues from Surface surpassed mobile phone revenues.
The difficulty is that whether the answer to who has the best Microsoft mobile strategy is Ballmer or Nadella, right now the company is struggling to make itself relevant as a smartphone operating system developer in a market where Android and iOS reign supreme. Not many people believe it can. At least not as an operating system provider.
The differences between old and new CEOs stem from the fact that Nadella’s approach seems more in tune with the views of people outside Microsoft while Ballmer’s is more in tune with Microsoft’s heritage.
So while Ballmer may be right that Nadella doesn’t have a clear path forward for mobile devices you could equally argue, looking at the state of play when Nadella took over that, to quote the old joke about the man looking for directions, he would have been justified in answering any questions over whether he had a clear strategy with: “Yes, but I wouldn’t start from here.”
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