Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
A FASCINATING piece of reporting in this month’s Vanity Fair picks over Microsoft’s woes. Most people are acquainted with the bare facts. Microsoft was once the world’s biggest publicly-listed firm but has been stagnant for years. Around the turn of the century it had a market capitalisation of over $600 billion; today it is not even worth half of that (see Daily chart). Sclerosis took hold thanks to a slew of missed opportunities. Potential riches from e-readers, digital music players and tablet computers all went to competitors because it could not get its products to market quickly enough.
