Independent? Yes – Intelligent? Maybe – Impartial? Never
A lot of people keep asking me why I am switching from management back to software engineering. After all, management as a profession was quite successful the last 15 years for me, wasn’t it?
In fact, yes, it was very successful but it also came at a cost.
(This was an article I wrote in April 2nd, 2010 and sent to the Nokia Executive Board – Times have changed and, as the saying goes, “The Rest is History”)
Today, we face what might be seen one day as the biggest and sharpest crisis in Nokia’s history: we’re being attacked on all fronts – being a big market leader, as a friend put it, sucks: you are usually attacked at high-end, middle-range and low-end at the same time – you have to fight battles on many fronts and nobody in human history ever won many battles at the same time. If Nokia cannot find a niche, however big it might be, it is condemned to either shrink significantly, become a supplier for other mobile phone companies or … something even worse.
But how could this have happened? What are the reasons and what might be the remedy?
Thank God he is gone… well, he is going.
The problem with Steve Ballmer was or is that he never was a product guy. Steve Jobs said so, as mentioned in in his authorized biography. The reason, I am pretty sure, why Microsoft declined lies directly with the fact that Ballmer was not a product guy. He put revenues and profits before good or excellent products. He sacrificed long-term growth and long-term revenues for short-term profits. And the stock market, showing for the first time some intelligence, reacted with stable or declining share prices.