Three top 20 investors think that Gates will block adoption of new strategies.
by Peter Bright
Reuters is reporting that three of Microsoft's 20 largest investors want company founder Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the board.
The investors claim that Gates as chairman blocks the adoption of new strategies, and similarly that he will tie the hands of whoever is chosen to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO. Gates' role on the committee to find Ballmer's replacement is cited as evidence for this.
The Microsoft board has already said that Ballmer's Devices and Services initiative will continue under the new CEO.
There is also concern that Gates is more interested in his charitable work and that his influence is more significant than his shareholding should imply. Gates is still the largest single shareholder, owning about 4.5 percent of the company, but he is set to reduce his stake to zero by 2018.
It's hard to know what "new strategies" Gates might be blocking. Microsoft, lest one forget, is a company that became powerful on the back of selling perpetual software licenses to hardware companies, enterprises, and end users.
Over the last decade or so, this traditional model has been joined by numerous others: subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (Office 365), usage-based Infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (Azure), advertising (Bing), consumer-oriented living room hardware (Xbox), limited consulting and enterprise support (Enterprise Services), and vertically integrated hardware offerings (Surface, and imminently, Nokia).
There's no strategy that Microsoft hasn't tried, and while not every approach has been an overnight success (the Surface write-down was embarrassing, and while Bing is heading in the right direction, it's still not profitable), the claim that there's some substantial impediment to implementing new strategies seems ill-supported. This is true even when those new strategies risk upsetting existing businesses (Office 365 could jeopardize sales of Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync) or existing partners (Surface and the Nokia purchase may well displease the hardware OEMs).
At the risk of sounding cynical about the nature of corporate investors, one might think that the problem is not a lack of willingness to engage in new strategies but rather a lack of willingness to engage in an old one: selling off bits of the company. There have been observers calling for Microsoft to, for example, sell off Bing (in spite of its large and increasing strategic importance to Windows and Windows Phone), sell off Xbox, and give up entirely on the consumer market (in spite of such companies as Apple and, er, Microsoft using the consumer market as their entry into the enterprise market in the first place).
Such sell-offs are designed to improve the next quarter's results and bump up the share price, at which point the investor can safely dump the shares and then sit back and watch as the company's strategic plans are wholly derailed and long-term irrelevance assured.
But of course, the bright minds of Wall Street would never push for such a thing, would they?
Courtesy: arstechnica
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