Who’s on first

FOR YEARS WATCHING Microsoft has been a little like watching the Soviet leaders on top of Lenin’s Tomb on May Day. It’s easy to spot No. 1; he’s the guy in the middle. But handicapping the succession list is another story — watching the grainy telephoto pictures for signs of rising status or oncoming flu.

Soviet leaders typically emerged from one of three power bases: the military, the KGB, or the municipal government. So it is at Microsoft. The power flows from the largest traditional sources of revenue: Windows, Office, and the servers. Some are more equal than others. Windows chief Jim Allchin has survived more putsches than any other executive, beating back attacks from the late ’90s Internet Explorer faction of Brad Silverberg to the .Net era’s HailStorm gang of Mark Lucovsky.

Silverberg walked the plank for trying to set up the browser as a platform replacement for Windows. He went on a two-year sabbatical in 1997 and returned only briefly. And Lucovsky came under fire when his HailStorm architecture built pressure for an open standards overhaul of crown jewel Word and the Office platform. Most recently, Lucovsky has been reported working at an undisclosed location “somewhere on the Windows team” under 24-hour armed guard near the Tomb of the Unknown Distinguished Engineer.

This tactical jockeying seems far removed from the queue for Bill Gates’ desk at the center of Microsoft. Steve Ballmer’s ascension to CEO in January 2000 was designed to separate Gates’ dominance of technical policy from Ballmer’s management control. Since then, lieutenants such as Eric Rudder have been floated as the “New Gates” to little effect. Instead, the Kremlin-watchers might want to pay more attention to pretenders to Steve Ballmer’s throne.

As Ballmer chatted with InfoWorld Editor at Large Ed Scannell and me last week at Microsoft’s Fusion partner conference, he focused on the key channel issues of licensing and a half-billion-dollar investment in Microsoft’s partner relations (see interview ” Ballmer in charge “). As we talked, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that we are entering the Ballmer Era. That’s not to say that Bill is now reporting to Steve — Gates is chairman of the company and as chief software architect is firmly in control of the bits.

Does Steve get to tell Bill what to do sometimes? “In terms of setting the technical agenda, no,” Ballmer says. “Any good leader listens to smart people, and Bill is smarter than I am.”

But notice how Ballmer describes Gates’ workflow: “[He’ll ask,] ‘What are the cross-cutting scenarios that I want?’ and then get all the right product groups together and bring these things in front of the SLTT [Senior Leadership Technical Team].”

“People talk about what it takes to be a good manager,” Ballmer continues, “being a good coach and getting people to like you. In a large organization those things are important, but you get to a certain level and … the most important thing you can do for your people to make them better is to give them a framework where they can work in harmony with the other people in the company.

“From Bill’s perspective it is the technical road map and the SLTT process, it is the scenarios,” Ballmer sketches a picture in midair. “From my perspective it is the P&L structure and the multiple businesses. Given how we work, giving people a framework that gets them to make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts will mean we have better offerings.”

Make no mistake, Ballmer says, this is not a democracy. “People have to come together and ultimately make some decisions. This is not a voting process here. The agenda of what we think is important, we get a lot of input on. Once it is decided, people don’t get to vote with their feet.

“Our customers want us to… simplify concepts by unifying them. The customers don’t say they want us to do that, but when we do do that, they go ‘Ahhh, I get it. That makes sense.’ I don’t want to go to six more meetings where people say, ‘Is your workflow strategy BizTalk … or what’s your Office workflow strategy … or why is synchronization in some ways better for e-mail and Outlook than it is for file folders and Web pages?'”

Ballmer brings it full circle. “So we have been talking about unifying storage… [getting things] to work just one way. Then you just keep tuning one set of parameters instead of having a thousand flowers blooming.” Of course, XML Web services offer a convenient rallying point for this new scenario-based approach.

For all his success at bringing Microsoft’s warring constituencies together, there are still things beyond Bill and Steve’s control. “I was in a hotel in Sun Valley last week that was not wired,” Ballmer recalls. “So I turned on my PC, and XP tells me there is a wireless network available. So I connect to something called Mountaineer.

“Well, I don’t know what that is. But I VPN into Microsoft. It worked! I don’t know whose broadband I used,” he chuckles. “I didn’t see it in Bill’s room. I called him up and said, ‘Hey, come over to my room.’ So soon everyone is there and connecting to the Internet through my room.”

Chalk up another good day for Steve Ballmer, CEO. Bill Gates may be the chief software architect, but as Microsoft matures in the Ballmer era innovation in software shares the spotlight with teamwork.