Today, I have just read an article, which discussed about the “getting out of Microsoft” of Bill Gates. The author wants to raise the question about the position of the leader in a software company nowadays. The discussion is “Do you need to be a programmer to run a software company?” He pointed out two opinions.
“What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables — and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.
Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.” - Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software
Let take a look at another way of thinking:
“Gates is probably getting out of technology at the right time. Funnily enough, it’s not really a business for nerds anymore. Gates was at the center of the personal-computer revolution and the Internet revolution, but now the big innovations are about exactly the things he’s bad at. The iPod was an aesthetic revolution. MySpace was a social revolution. YouTube was an entertainment revolution. This is not what Gates does. Technology doesn’t need him anymore.” Lev Grossman, Time Magazine Author
This topic is really an interesting to me. I think that both of Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software and Lev Grossman are not wrong. However, does it make sense to compare Microsoft, a desktop-based application company with others (Google, MySpace, YouTube …) internet-based company? I am an addict of web 2.0 application. I can’t imagine how my life goes on without Google, BaseCamp or WordPress. Grossman talked about the revolutions, but does he recognized that the biggest revolution still belongs to Microsoft Windows and Office. Is there any technical person, who has never used any kind of Microsoft‘s product? The fact that Microsoft is losing on the online battle, but it is still invincible to the desktop-based market. Linux are really good (I love Ubuntu), Leopard is outstanding and attractive but almost people can’t live without Microsoft software.
My conclusion is that if you intend to run an internet-based company like MySpace, you may not be an amazing technical guy (but, you still need to understand fundamental knowledge about programming), the thing you need is an extremely out-standing idea with some luck additionally. If you intend to produce desktop-based applications like VMWare, Lotus Notes … You really need to be a master of programming and software architecture to be successful.
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Last week, my firm has received two first projects at the same time. I have learnt important lessons from these deals.
