How Chairman Qwerty would run Microsoft

Part of being a pundit is absolute honesty and evenhandedness. My readers can spot bias, and they hold me to a high standard. I speak for the truth.

But sometimes even the smart players don't want to hear the truth. They get entrenched, become unwitting box-thinkers. Solution? A megadose of truth. That's what I'm here for.

Today's subject is something you'll be hearing a lot about in the next six months, but it's just cusping the buzz threshold. It's something my deep contacts have been passing along for a while now, but I've kept it under my hat until people were ready for it.

I think people, some people, are ready for it today. It will sound too shocking at first, so I have to ask you to promise to read to the end of the article and think it over before you make any judgments. If you're ready to think about things the way they are, instead of the way they should be, you'll agree with me.

This hit me when I was boothing at a certain industry conference this fall. I'd known it for years, of course, but it was brought home in a flash.

Microsoft is doomed. The assholes, retards, and tardholes running the company can't see it, of course. But the clues are there and the smart players are paying attention. A friend of mine who invented the modern ISP business model calls it "more obvious than the sun itself".

Here's what I'd do if I were running Microsoft, and it's the only strategy that would work:

1. Fire Microsoft Research. Since the days of Bell Labs it's been fashionable to hire a bunch of theorists, academics, demoscene washouts, standards-writers, and assorted other wankers to lend some credibility to the core business. Putting the "labs" in a Cambridge is de rigeur. Experience shows it's a losing proposition, and the smart players have always known this. Hear much about Bell lately? Not since they merged with Packard and went under.

2. Buy Linux. Microsoft has about $40,000,000,000 in cash on hand. This is more than enough to hire Linuc Tovarld, who owns the trademarks but doesn't enforce them, rename him to Microsoft Research, and use Linux for Vista SP1.

3. Get out of the software business. In reality Microsoft has never truly been about software, and anyone who disagrees isn't looking at the facts. Everyone likes the Microsoft Mouse. My kids love their Xbox. Microsoft branded computers would sell like crack croissants. Especially if they run OS X 10.5, which will be capturing 25% market share and rising by this time next year. Microsoft is a computer company, and it should sell computers.

If this plan isn't implemented by Q2 2007, Gates and Ballmer should board up the windows and give the money back to the shareholders. It would save the last few months of the decade-long crash we've been witnessing.

See you in the next column, readers.