How Ballmer Missed the Tidal Shifts in Tech

By now, you’ve probably heard: Steven A. Ballmer will soon be stepping down as chief executive of Microsoft.

It’s supposedly a voluntary retirement, but that holds about as much credibility as a public official’s leaving a job “to spend more time with family.” Microsoft has been flailing, and many prominent voices have been calling for Mr. Ballmer to step aside.

Many of the factors in his departure â€" stock price, internal politics, shareholder pressure, public relations â€" aren’t my area of expertise. I’m a tech critic, a reviewer of products. But even from my particular angle of examination, Mr. Ballmer’s time as the head of Microsoft has been baffling.

He completely missed the importance of the touch-screen phone. (“There is no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he said in 2007.) He missed the importance of the tablet, too. Yes, Microsoft now sells attractive phones and tablets, but they came years too late. They have minuscule market share and little influence.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand why Microsoft missed these tidal shifts: It’s always been a PC company. It helped to create the PC revolution, its bread and butter was the PC â€" and so of course the company kept insisting that the PC was the future.

It would have taken an exceptional thinker, an out-of-the-box visionary, to admit that the company’s foundation was crumbling. Mr. Ballmer wasn’t that guy.

Indeed, his instinct to cling to the past is also responsible for the train wreck that is Windows 8. Under Mr. Ballmer, Microsoft created an elegant, clean, easy-to-use, unnamed new operating system that I call TileWorld; it’s the touch-screen face of Windows.

But Mr. Ballmer and his team lacked the courage to break completely with the increasingly complex, bloated desktop version of Windows. So they created Windows 8 simply by grafting TileWorld onto the old desktop Windows. The result is exactly twice as complicated as before, because now you have twice as much to learn.

As I wrote in my review:

“You have what feels like two different Web browsers, each with different designs and conventions. In TileWorld, the address bar is at the bottom; in Desktop Windows, it’s at the top. In the desktop version, your bookmarks appear as a Favorites list; in TileWorld, they’re horizontally scrolling icons. TileWorld has no History list at all (only autocomplete for recently visited sites).

“Settings are now in three different places. In TileWorld, basic settings like brightness and volume are accessible from the panel that appears when you swipe in from the right. A second set of settings appears when you tap Change PC Settings on that panel. A third, more complete set still resides in the Control Panel back in Desktop Windows.”

How could Microsoft not see that this was a design disaster?

Windows 8 computers haven’t sold well; Microsoft’s Surface tablets have bombed; Windows Phone has about 4 percent market share. The dawn of the touch-screen-PC era that Microsoft predicted hasn’t come to pass, either. And PC sales, all over the world, are way down. That may be partly because of the phone-and-tablet revolution â€" but the Windows 8 mess certainly didn’t help.

In some ways, Microsoft has been frozen in time since Mr. Ballmer took the helm 13 years ago. It’s still raking in money from its big three cash cows: Office, Windows and XBox. Even if it did nothing but rearrange the toolbars in each year’s new versions, they’d still sell.

But most of Mr. Ballmer’s initiatives haven’t fallen on fertile ground.

As the New York Times article about Mr. Ballmer’s resignation makes clear, it won’t be easy for his successor, whoever that turns out to be. Microsoft is a sprawling empire without a particularly clear vision, other than, “Keep Windows, Office and XBox alive.”

But here’s hoping that whoever takes his place will have the courage to break with the past, to make the big changes that Microsoft would need to become a tech leader again. Right now, the company’s ship is chained to the traditional PC â€" and it’s turning out to be a very heavy anchor.