After a very long 12 years it looks like Steve Ballmer is calling its quits at the helm of Microsoft. Actually it will be 13 or years when he retires. 

No need to add to the speculation on possible successors - internal, external etc. the question really shareholders should be asking is - can you find an individual to successfully lead the diverse Microsoft businesses? Are they potentially not synergistic to each other? And ultimately - would Microsoft being split into separate businesses not be a better return for shareholders?

To give credit to Steve Ballmer (and Bill Gates who may becoming more prominent these days and coming months in Redmond, after all he is getting into the age where most managers become CEOs...) - they tried to sort this out by focusing on devices and services. But that was too abstract and the devices are too diverse - it's different to sell smartphones vs game consoles - and the service portfolio was too wide, too - provisioning servers in Azure is different than taking orders in Dynamics.

So time to untangle Microsoft - here are the suggestions...

  • Operating systems (Windows in all its flavors)

  • Cloud (Azure)

  • Productivity (Office, outlook.com etc)

  • Business Applications (Dynamics et al)

  • Gaming (XBox & co)

  • Consumer Products (if you like keep venturing with the Surface, maybe a phone etc). 

Now, finding a CEO is never easy - but if you think about it  - it's much easier to find six CEOs for the above entities than for all or Microsoft. And you make keep some in place that are running entities that are similar to the above - like e.g. Nadella for cloud and Tatarinov for Dynamics.

And you could still cross license, subsidize across these entities. But each of them would be able to position themselves with their own marketing, decide where to sell with their own sales force, build their own products, have their unique support experience, select their best partners etc. And you could still have perfect fights over cross charges and bad delivery and partnership - in short keep the press entertained.

Finally - and this is all speculation of course - I think investors will trust more and hence vote with their security purchases - into the six entities - than into Microsoft as a hole. Microsoft running on full steam with six entities as it's offspring - may achieve more for customers, partners, employees and mankind than the behemoth it sometimes is these days.

Now I can only hope Bill Gate reads this...

Missed my takeaways from Build 2013? Read them here

Business Research Themes

Future of Work, Tech Optimization

Roles

Chief Customer Officer, Chief Executive Officer

Tags

microsoft