Microsoft: Don't Trust Anyone Over 40

Under its aging leadership Microsoft has become disconnected from its own inventiveness.
By Dana Blankenhorn ,

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Technology has always been a young person's game. When I started covering technology, in 1982, so was leadership at Microsoft (MSFT) - Get Report.

It was in that year, as a Microsoft corporate timeline

at

Thocp.net

notes, that Jon Shirley was brought in from

RadioShack

(RSH)

-- Radio Shack! -- because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer needed "adult supervision."

The entrepreneurs who created the dot-boom in the 1990s were also young men and women. So was Larry Page, throughout the last decade, while he and classmate Sergey Brin were building

Google

(GOOG) - Get Report

.

Technology happens on campuses, and campuses are ruled by the young. The very best scientists make their great discoveries before they're 40, and it's a cliché that they then spend the rest of their careers teaching, coaching and managing their successors. It's mostly true.

Over the last few weeks I've written about

how much pressure Microsoft is under with the launch of Windows 8, how

we should worry more about their aging leadership than about, say, Google.

Shareholders lost a reported $10 billion in equity Tuesday with the sudden resignation of Windows head Steven Sinofsky,

as reported by

Mashable.com

.

The knives have since come out for him. He was supposedly after his boss's job,

writes

Business Insider

. He's supposedly abrasive and off-putting,

says

TheVerge

.

The whole thing is adolescent, but getting closer to adolescence is what Microsoft most needs.

Sinofsky's replacements are two executives in their 40s, neither of whom started their careers at the company. Julie Larson-Green told Mary Jo Foley of

ZDNet

that she applied to Microsoft after college,

but was turned down and worked at

Aldus

until 1994. Tami Reller came to Microsoft with

Great Plains Software

and only moved to Redmond in 2006, according to a 2006 profile

at Microsoft's

Channel 9

site.

Despite everything, Microsoft remains inventive. Microsoft recently demonstrated real-time, spoken-language translation a two-step process of first, turning speech into text, and then translating the text.

Microsoft often comes up with cool things like this. What it lacks -- what it

has

lacked since Windows 95 -- is a strategist who can turn what comes out of the lab into products people will demand.

A good example is the company's Kinect interface. It's not just a way to play games with gestures. It's a transformative technology, as

TheVerge

writes, something that gives robots a way to interface with the world, and something that could

as

Technology Review

notes, launch a host of start-ups.

So where is Alex Kipman, the Brazilian who incubated the technology? Microsoft handed him a nice award when he was in his 30s. Why isn't Kipman's technological vision being trumpeted now?

This is the kind of person who should be getting the keys to the Microsoft kingdom. Someone in touch with the future, not the past.

I believe Microsoft's problems are deeper than the present technology, and more important than even the fate of Windows 8. Microsoft's executive pipeline needs repair.

Microsoft needs to trust a new generation of leaders with new visions, who have demonstrated technical and marketing creativity.

Microsoft shouldn't trust anyone over 40 with its future.

At the time of publication, the author was long GOOG and MSFT

.

Follow @DanaBlankenhorn

This article is commentary by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.

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