Microsoft’s Ballmer: On Longhorn and other regrets

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„When I look at it and I say, okay, what’s the thing that I did that I feel — that I regret the most, not just in my CEOship but my whole time here, it’s absolutely ‚Longhorn becomes Vista.‘ That was the single biggest mistake I made,“ Ballmer told me during a sit-down interview in his office in Redmond at the end of November 2013.

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„And what we wound up with (was) a period of let’s say seven or eight years where we had the A-team — not all of the A-team but a bunch of our best people — tied up not driving. We did not make years progress in eight years, and there were other things those people could have been working on, (like) phones,“ he conceded.

Da muss man sich nach der Lektüre des Beitrages schon fragen: Warum spricht Ballmer – nachdem er seinen Rückzug erklären musste – plötzlich so offen und ehrlich gegenüber einem Journalisten über seine großen strategischen Fehler? Ist das eine Botschaft oder gar Handlungsanweisung an seinen Nachfolger? Oder will der Mann irgendwelche Sympathiepunkte gutmachen? Und ob!