Uncle Vista flip-flops towards the grave

HE SEEMS TO want to bomb the opposition by throwing everything at them so that his lot can be in charge. He's been the premier for quite a while now but people are starting to get fed up with him and think somebody else could do a better job of running the show. He talks a lot but afterwards you wonder what he meant.

Everybody knows he has ploughed a lot of money into trying to get a new system on the Internet that works properly but the numbers haven't stacked up. He travels the world trying to convince people he is right. Even some of his own people think there's somebody else who would be better. He's very soft-spoken - ah, finally, a way to distinguish Steve Ballmer from Tony Blair.

Will Vista prove to be Ballmer's Iraq, NHS and Prescott? Taking the view that there's no safer time to kick a man than when he's down, Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed bog yesterday laced up the 18-holers.

"With today's news that Microsoft's Vista could indeed slip further into next year, as I had promised would happen, there is only one rational response from Microsoft's board: Fire Steve Ballmer. He has long been an erratic force inside the company -- someone with real strengths, but also horrible deficiencies (among which is being utterly tone-deaf) -- and it is finally clear that the latter permanently outweigh the former. Of course, Ballmer had any decency he would simply resign. The odds of that happening, however, are very low."

Kedrosky is not alone in his unhappiness with Ballmer's Microsoft and -- as the recent attempts to quell employee discontent and the Mini-Microsoft dissenter's bog make clear - it's not just media filler copy.

One of the most disconcerting things about Ballmer is his tendency towards flip-flopping and hinting. The will-they-won't they Vista release date comedy of errors this week is a case in point. Microsoft's repeated suggestions that it will wait on Beta 2 feedback are a tacit admission that Vista could, and probably will, slip again.

Microsoft saying it is still on schedule - albeit a recently revised schedule - to release Vista really isn't good enough. If it is confident it will hit the mark it should say what it always said in the past when it was sure it was ready to go - ‘only a show-stopper will stop us'. In the old days, there never was a show-stopper.

Microsoft messed up royally by having to delay Vista and miss the Christmas gold-rush for retailers but it compounded its sin by then setting itself a deadline only slightly later. The exact release date had ceased to matter so Microsoft could have bought itself time to breathe but the company today seems to go one from one unnecessary PR foul-up to another.

Failures of execution cost CEOs jobs or at the very least lead to lots of unpleasant, distracting flak. McNealy gone at Sun; unhappiness with Otellini at Intel; and even Dell going against the grain with purchases, shops and AMD blessings. Strange days indeed. µ

See Also:
Vista will be late
Vista won't be late
Vista will be late