We are on the same page, as occasionally happens. We'll have to wait and see how far the pendulum has swung back. That tends to be a one way street. Once the corporate culture has swung from geeks to androids (so to speak) you can't just issue a memorandum and get everyone going back the other way.

In another message I just mentioned P & G in a way that might have been taken as pejorative. All I meant was it wouldn't be a likely breeding ground for the leader of a top high tech company. P & G sell soaps and other grocery items and have been doing so very successfully for decades. They are ALL about sales and marketing. Their most brilliant insight IMO came in their very early days as manufacturers of bars of soap. Soap was regarded as a commodity item, accurately. One bar of soap was just about like any other. Their stroke of genius was brand proliferation. If there are three companies selling bars of soap, and there is no compelling reason to buy one rather than others, each will have roughly a third of the market. The genius moment was adding two additional brands to the category. So instead of having 33% of the market they had 60%. And that was even before investing billions in advertising and marketing to convince consumers the P & G bar of soap, laundry detergent, etc. was better than other basically indistinguishable products. A really brilliant and successful company. I just wouldn't look for the leader of a high tech company there.



>Not really. See http://bit.ly/LPYLt1 and http://zd.net/LqUum5
>
>Here's what I think happened. When BillG ran things, geeks were in charge. They ran pretty much all divisions and made many product decisions. When Ballmer took over, the management pendulum swung towards sales and marketing running things. After all, that's where Ballmer was most comfortable. It's now swinging back the opposite direction with geeks once again running much of the company.
>
>>http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer
>>
>>Johnf