Are 70,000+ Microsoft employees that useless? Or the 1,000+ Senior Management has no clue? Can’t believe that Microsoft would pay 85% premium and fork out $6bn dollars! They could have bought Salesforce.com for that money and saved $500 million to acquire several smart startups in search and online advertising space. Microsoft could have successfully negated Google’s further foray into the growing on-demand business and may have brought raw energy to Redmond.
However, by the time, Microsoft figures out the monetization model for Search and online ad market, Google would start making significant inroads into the on-demand business and productivity applications. Why don’t they focus on solving problems? Well, it’s the big company syndrome; I’m a manager-I don’t solve problems-I get vendors/acquire companies. What a pity.
Does any B-school offer a course on intra-preneurship? Take a leaf from Google or even HP has a lesson to offer from their recent release of the NeoView Business Intelligence product.
Archive for the ‘Bill Gates’ Category
Microsoft’s desperate acquisition of aQuantive: What they could have done instead
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Bill Gates, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Winner?
Tuesday, June 20th, 2006Global Health Programs $5.8 billion dollars, Education $2.6 billion dollars.
Imagine the huge impact of this money; Not just grants to spend on basic life support, but money being used for fundamental research. What if an AIDS Vaccine comes out of one of the labs using the grants. The education grants also go a long way in improving the literacy ratio. What if a research comes out in 5 years that a country’s literacy rate went up as a result of the grants.
Why 2011? 3 years after Gates’ transition from Microsoft in 2008 and 5 years from now, Gates Foundation will have enought time to see it’s philanthropy bring results.
I’m not the first one to think about this, David Coursey originally enivisioned this in a 2001 article. David Coursey envisions further that someday a “Gates Prize” will be awarded to leading humanitatians of the world.