Many years ago, back when I still worked at Sun Microsystems and Scott
McNealy was still in charge, he had what turned out to be a very bad
idea: to turn the company that put All The Wood Behind One Arrowhead
into a more decentralized set of self-contained business units. The
idea was to replace supposedly strategic decisionmaking within
individual units with choices that made not just sense, but dollars
and cents. No more "We're doing this because it's right for the
company." Instead, it was to be "We're doing it because the money we
spend will come back tenfold," or more, or whatever the factor was
determined to be.
Why was this such a bad idea? First, it reduced efficiency by a whole
lot, as each unit had its own marketing and sales and advertising,
mostly targeted at the same set of Sun customers. Second, it make
decisions very narrow, as my own developer tools business unit
concentrated on eliminating competition for software development on
Sun, rather than on increasing the success of Sun as an application
development and delivery platform. And third, it forced these new
business units to take on agreements from the old days, agreements
like a third party Cobol compiler that was a money loser for the
development tools unit but which was intended to (and did) make lots
of money from server sales.
Two years later this business unit model was undone, as were many of
us who had participated in it. It was acknowledged to be a bad and
very expensive brain fart on the part of our CEO, and became an
entertaining part of our shared history. Buy me a drink some time
and I'll tell you of some sadly funny examples of what seemed to
someone like rational decisions.
I mention this because something reminded me that the business unit
idea wasn't entirely a bad one. That something is Microsoft's late
and not terribly lamented Kin mobile device, the last gasp of their
acquisition of Danger, inventor of T-Mobile's Sidekick. The Kin took
two years to develop, and lasted about a month and a half before being
shot at sunrise. How, one wonders, can any organization, even one so
famously screwed up as Microsoft, get a product so wrong that they
have to kill it so quickly?
There are many answers, as there generally are, but one big one is
that Microsoft still subscribes to Sun's All The Wood Behind One
Arrowhead philosophy. With Sun that arrowhead was its SPARC
processor; with Microsoft it is Windows. And one of the reasons Kin
took so long to arrive, and so missed its moment when it did, was the
corporate decision that running some form of Windows was more
important than getting out to customers. Two years to rewrite the
Java-based software that came with Danger, to fit a corporate
philosophy of Windows Everywhere. Even, as in this case, if Windows
provided no benefit. Even if it wasn't going to matter, or even be
visible, to the device's user.
In short (yeah, I know: too late), Microsoft sacrificed its Kin on the
altar of Windows. As it is doing with phones, not that anyone's left
to care. Sun abandoned SPARC as its only processor, although that
decision came too late, and after other developments made them less
and less relevant. I expect Microsoft to come to the same conclusion
about Windows, although it's likely already too late. And yes, I know
that Apple has its mostly unified OS strategy with Mac OS X and iOS.
Apple seems to know how much to share and how much to make different
in a way Microsoft never seemed to learn. Or maybe it's a matter of
taste, which Apple has.
Disorderly Content
