Robert Guth on Craig Mundie of Microsoft
In the Wall Street Journal:
Behind Microsoft's Bid To Gain Cutting Edge - WSJ.com: Throughout its history, Microsoft has been slow to grasp some of the computer industry's biggest technology shifts and business changes. When it decides to embrace an innovation, the company has often succeeded in chasing down the leaders, as it did years ago with Lotus Development Corp. on spreadsheets that allow users to organize data, and a decade ago with Netscape Communications Corp. on Web browsers that transformed the experience of using the Internet. For years, this catch-up-and-surpass approach worked well.
Early this decade, however, companies such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. exposed holes in the approach. Microsoft was slow to see the potential in Web search and online advertising, and despite heavy investments, has so far failed to catch industry leaders Google and Yahoo Inc. It also was late coming to market with its own music player, and despite a push, remains far behind Apple. Today, a host of Web-based software services from Google and others threaten to reduce the importance of Microsoft's personal-computer software.
One year ago, Mr. Gates, the company's chairman, announced that in June 2008 he would give up his post as "chief software architect."... Mr. Mundie got the other half of the job -- charting the company's long-term technology course....
He joined Microsoft in 1992. As head of the consumer group, he helped shepherd such non-PC products as videogames, interactive television and software for cellphones. Later, he took on nettlesome tasks such as fighting piracy in China, pushing Microsoft to develop more secure software, and improving the company's relationships with governments around the world. He developed a reputation as a visionary with start-up projects, but less skilled at managing them as going concerns, he and other Microsoft executives say....
Microsoft's product groups -- business units built around products such as Windows and Office that produce much of the company's cash -- have long had enormous clout in its corporate culture. Star product-group managers, the company's so-called shippers, get the big, profitable products like Windows out the door year after year. For them, meeting deadlines is all-important; longer-term thinking about technology isn't....
Mr. Mundie has been warning his Microsoft colleagues for years about a coming shift in semiconductors that could upset the company's most important businesses. Chip makers such as Intel Corp. have been working on a way to increase semiconductor power without causing the chips to overheat. It involves sticking what amounts to multiple chips -- or "cores" -- onto a single chip, creating "multicore" chips.
Some software experts contend that the change is so radical it will require software for large server computers and PCs to operate differently than it has for decades. It is unclear, however, how quickly the change will come, and what Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, will have to do to navigate it. Mr. Mundie contends it will come sooner than many people think, and it will require new programming languages and techniques...
