Exit Interview with Microsoft's E&D Chief

Q: Any lessons learned over the past 20 years that really stick with you?

Bach: I think the first thing for me, and I mentioned this already a little bit, (is that) people matter the most of all things. Strategy is all good, technology is all good, and of course very important, but to me the quality of our work has always been -- and this sounds obvious, but it's always better when we have great people working on it. It doesn't matter how good the original idea is, you've got to have great teams.

So, if I think about the times when we've been successful, when I look at what we did with Office, that was an amazing team of people, and many of whom are still here: Steven Sinofsky, Jon DeVaan, myself, Hank Vigil. I mean, those are all people who have been here for a long time, and then a bunch of other guys who I didn't even mention. Certainly there were good ideas there, good strategies, the sales team did a great job executing, but the people made a lot of that go.

And that's why when I talk about the future of interactive entertainment and also mobile, those are the things I'm most excited about. I look at the team Andy has put in place to really revamp and re-jump start our mobile business, that's a great team. I mean, it's a really good team. When I look at what Don has done, now being reinforced with David Treadwell coming over to the organization, that's a great team. So, I think one lesson I certainly take away is people.

The second lesson I take away, this is really a personal mantra for me and always has been, is persistence and the willingness to take on hard problems and know that you're going to figure out a way to solve them is super important. Not everything I've worked on started out easy, and, in fact, a lot of the things I worked on started out really hard, but the ability to be persistent about that, to keep attacking, keep working at it is important.

And then the third thing I think -- and this is probably more over the last 10 years lesson -- innovation is powerful, new ideas are powerful. So, when I think of Xbox Live, when I think of Natal, when I think of the user experience we're about to ship with Windows Phone, those are really powerful innovative ideas. And yet for every one of those you have two or three that just don't work the way you expect them to work, sometimes for good, sometimes not, but innovation is tough to hard, and you've got to really stay at it.

I look at all of what we've managed to do across the company and certainly in my experience in E&D, and we keep focused on that. We're doing innovative new things every day. Not 100 percent of it lands perfectly squarely, but our hit rate is phenomenally high, and I think that's important.

Q: Is the Courier device in that category?

Bach: Well, Courier -- Courier, first of all, wasn't a device. The project and the incubation and the exploration we did on Courier I view as super important. The "device" people saw in the video isn't going to ship, but that doesn't mean we didn't learn a bunch and innovate a bunch in the process. And I'm sure a bunch of that innovation will show up in Microsoft products, absolutely confident of it.

And you know, it's hard internally because we have some -- we have a strong shipping culture. People want to create products and ship it, which is really cool. But you have to make sure when you're doing incubations that people understand, hey, sometimes the power is in the ideas you learn and the things you carry forward, not necessarily just in shipping something. And I think venture capitalists understand that, it's easier in their world to understand this. In our world that's something we've had to get our heads around.

Q: With your experience at the company and your position, some might have put you in line as a potential CEO candidate when Steve leaves.

Bach: Right.

Q: Did you aspire to that?

Bach: I should be really clear. First of all, I think Steve does a fabulous job at what is a really big, complex company, that's really good at what it does, but it's a tough job. I mean, being CEO of Microsoft is a world class scale job, and there's only, I don't know, four or five jobs like it in the world, in my opinion. And I think he's uniquely qualified to be able to do it. It's sort of the right combination of sales and marketing expertise, technical and mathematical aptitude, and people skills to actually make that happen.

It was not something I ever thought I was qualified for, nor something I ever even thought I would aspire to. I don't have the same set of skills that he has.

Q: But you can see where my head is going, and I imagine this will happen, people will think, oh, this means that Robbie was told he wasn't in line for the CEO --

Bach: No, Steve and I have never discussed it, never discussed it.

Q: So, you didn't get any kind of --

Bach: Never asked. You know, he's known for a long time that I love what I was working on and love E&D and the consumer space, and things we're excited about. And I think I have a great job. I mean, that's not -- this isn't about the job, it's more about my personal future than it is about the job itself.

Part 1: Why Bach is leaving after two decades

Part 2: How Project Natal could impact the Xbox business

Part 3: Lessons learned, and thoughts on Microsoft Courier

Part 4: Did Microsoft spend too much developing Xbox business?

Earlier Today: Bach, Allard Leaving Microsoft in big shift for consumer business ... Microsoft CEO Ballmer's memo on Bach, Allard departures.

Read/Post Comments