I want to shadow Steve Jobs

It’s more than a week now, enough time to reflect about the visit to school of the other Steve: Borg Steve, M$ Steve, Crazy Jump and Scream Steve, Squirt Steve or just Steve Ballmer.

So what did he talk about? The 10 day reflection didn’t really help to figure out if it was relevant. Agreed, the other Steve has a pretty impressive track record. Joined M$ in 1980 and went up all the way with them. No worries for his retirement, I think.

But what did he say? Oh, yeah, about leadership and what that means at M$. Leadership is about long term goals. Good. The examples? The big M$ successes: Windows (1.0 sucked, 2.0 sucked, 3.0 was a success), the browser war and games (XBOX). Now what is common in all of these examples? I bet Microsoft was able to be successful in all of these markets just because they have such amounts of cash that they can afford to have any long term strategy they want. And what else is a pattern in these examples? Pushing (or trying to push in the case of XBOX) a superior product out of the market by sheer financial, marketing and other power, some of them investigated by antitrust authorities.

So, let’s sum it up: long live long term strategies, provided you have the financial muscles to support them. Very easy, Borg Steve.

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