Ballmer's Last Stand

Moving sucks. Our furniture arrived late last week so I’ve been off the clock for awhile and there is a lot of catching-up to do.  We’ll start with Microsoft and Windows 8, which I’ll argue are going to be formidable competitors in the tablet space, primarily because it’s that or start spending all that cash on diversified investments to turn Microsoft into a Berkshire Hathaway. This is probably Ballmer’s last stand as a high tech CEO.

It was entirely by coincidence that I interviewed both Jon Shirley and Bill Gates in their last weeks as Microsoft CEO. In Shirley’s case it was his final day and I’ve never seen a guy more eager to get out […]

By |September 19th, 2011|2011|85 Comments
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What's a Yahoo to Do?

This is my promised follow-up to How Not to Run Yahoo, so I suppose this should have been titled How to Run Yahoo, but I’m too much of a smart-ass for that.  I spoke to a bunch of smart people (past and present Yahoos) some of whom even allowed me to print their names, and here’s our consensus view on what the next Yahoo CEO really has to do to turn the company around. I’m sorry it all sounds so negative, but it is toward a positive end, remember.

Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that I attribute to former CEO Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents to insulate the former Hollywood studio boss from […]

By |September 11th, 2011|2011|60 Comments
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To a Man With a Hammer: Some Thoughts on the Pentagon and World Trade Center Terrorist Attacks

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here is my column originally published September 13, 2001.

My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. And then that tower, too, was gone. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is too great to ponder, so we are left […]

By |September 11th, 2011|2011|113 Comments
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How Not to Run Yahoo

I seem to be writing a lot of these What the heck was that? columns explaining recent news events. This time it is the firing of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo. I’m not here to defend Bartz, whom I would have fired long ago (or more probably not hired in the first place), but I want to make the point that for all her failings, Bartz was mainly fired for being a hardass.  It’s not what she did or didn’t do as much as her style while doing it.

Carol Bartz is, like beer, an acquired taste.  I like her, but she has a long history of bothering sensitive geeks. The old-timers at Autodesk (a […]

By |September 8th, 2011|2011|93 Comments
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Be a Hero, Barry

This is the third of three columns on human behavior and systemic problems.  The first column covered in general how our complacency allows us to be taken advantage of, especially when information technology is involved.  The second column, based in part on my friend Ralph’s mortgage problems, showed one example of how a class of investors has been able to keep millions of Americans trapped in high cost mortgages, creating a sort of economic time machine that benefits one group at the expense of the other and the nation. This third column, addressed to President Obama, is about a cure for that specific mortgage problem — a cure that would also […]

By |September 3rd, 2011|2011|155 Comments
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