Ballmer’s retirement a Pyrrhic victory for Microsoft investors

Microsoft investors were jubilant today as the stock rallied (7.5% at time of writing) on the news that Steve Ballmer will be retiring within a year. I think they’re getting a little ahead of themselves: while Ballmer’s failings have been well chronicled, I think the bigger picture’s getting overlooked.

The small picture is that the man presided over a litany of strategic disasters like Windows Vista, 8, RT and Phone; the Surface surplus; the doomed Zune and Kin; and the monetary black hole that is their Online Services Division. Throw out the guy ultimately responsible, the sentiment presumably goes, and look forward to a return to the good old days.

But the bigger picture is that Steve inherited a company that literally set the agenda for the whole tech industry, and now bequeaths one that struggles to stay relevant. The forces that kept Gates’ company strong through the PC age – being able to destroy competition through existing market dominance – are the same forces that are now keeping Ballmer’s company weak in this new post-PC age, and it would be fanciful to think that a change at the helm has much hope of reversing that.

Gates’ Microsoft was a company that achieved monopoly status over a modern necessity, and wielded its power ruthlessly (even illegally) to crush competition and expand into new market segments. The MO that got them where they were went something like this: find a third party’s software product that looked to be gaining success (Lotus 123 or WordPerfect, let’s say), and throw money at a competing product (Excel or Word) until the incumbent could no longer compete. The odds were always stacked in Microsoft’s favor since the Windows tax enabled them to sustain loss-making products longer than their competitors could survive price competition. Meanwhile the Windows tax itself was protected via threats of punitive license pricing to OEMs who dared to sell non-Windows PCs.

The strategy worked enormously well for the company. While the crushing of Netscape Navigator by IE landed Microsoft in legal hot water, the eventual settlement, negotiated down from a breakup of the company to a legal slap on the wrist, emboldened the new CEO, Ballmer, to continue on the well-trodden path.

Over a decade of me-too-ism followed. Google’s success begat Bing, the PlayStation begat the Xbox, the iPod begat Zune, and so on it goes. To Ballmer’s surprise, no doubt, leveraging the Windows monopoly wasn’t enough to make these products a success. Bing never got close to Google’s market share; the Xbox, though now stable, suffered year after year of ten-digit losses; while the Zune was finally thrown away after the whole portable music player segment entered terminal decline.

Moreover, when the company’s culture is to embrace, extend and extinguish their competitors’ offerings, it’s probably inevitable that vision would be the one trait you’d expect to be absent.

In a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma, Ballmer chronically neglected to innovate in segments that could disrupt Windows’ monopoly (notably, cloud computing, smartphones and tablets). Awakened by the success of Apple and Google, it was already too late: throwing your weight around in the style of Microsoft-of-old just isn’t going to work when you’re playing catch-up.

And let’s face it, having seen how Microsoft behaves once they build a dominant platform, there’s not going to be a whole lot of goodwill towards the erstwhile tyrant of the tech industry in their struggle to conquer the mobile segment. Wounded despots don’t tend to get a whole lot of love from their subjects. They get pitchforked.

For sure, Microsoft’s best days are behind them. Steve’s squandering of their potential chances in mobile has denied them the position to ever again wield the kind of power they had when he took over. And for that I think we all owe the man our deep appreciation.

As for today’s share price spike, look at it this way: through its activity as a patent troll, Microsoft’s future revenues seem closer tied to the success of Android than to Windows Phone. If you’re looking for a recent precedent, may I suggest SCO as a case study?

Breaking the habit of a lifetime

Of everything I miss about England (friends and family excepted) good Indian food has long been at the top of the list. Back in London, it was a habit of mine to order takeout pretty much every Friday night, and save enough leftovers for ‘breakfast of the gods’ the next morning. But here in the Bay Area, the state of Indian cuisine is pretty depressing. My favorite meat dish, the chicken dhansak, is virtually impossible to come by; the onion bhaji (by far the most popular appetizer in any British Indian restaurant) I have literally never seen on a menu here; and even of the dishes that are available, that magical curry house taste just isn’t there.

It took a few years for me to act, but at the end of last year I could take it no more.

I finally kicked the habit of a lifetime – that of never, ever, ever cooking for myself – and set out on a mission to recreate the flavors I missed so badly.

First, let’s clarify that mission. What I’m trying to recreate is a style of cooking for which the usual label ‘Indian’ isn’t really suitable. The more accurate term would be ‘British Indian Restaurant’ cuisine, or ‘BIR’, a label that seems to have stuck among its fans. Not only is it clearly different from the traditional family cooking of Indian culture, it’s also increasingly not actually Indian, its recipes being shaped in large part by Pakistani and Bangladeshi influences.

In a nutshell, since the 1950s, Britain has done to curries what America did to pizza. We took a style of cuisine we liked, adapted it over decades to suit local tastes, and innovated around the theme to produce an authentic new style of cooking that stands on its own and became the new national cuisine.

As a Chicago deep-dish pizza is to ‘Italian’, so is a chicken tikka masala to ‘Indian’. The many people who tell me they’d expect the Bay Area’s curries to be pretty good on account of the migration of tech workers from India are kinda missing the point. There are sizeable Japanese populations in parts of South America, but I doubt you’d find many entertaining knife-juggling teppanyaki chefs there.

(These are terrible examples by the way. I’m really not a huge fan of Japanese-cooking-as-theater, nor, ironically, of the chicken tikka masala, but you get the point).

To my mind, once a style of cuisine has reached a critical mass of local acceptance, there’s a baseline of quality that takes root in the public consciousness (and also hegemony of spelling, though BIR isn’t quite there). A poor quality curry house in Britain simply wouldn’t last long: locals are too familiar with the baseline to stomach anything that falls below it. But here in the Bay Area – and dare I say the rest of America? – Indian food remains niche enough that a ‘common knowledge’ of baseline quality just isn’t there. And hence my absurdly ambitious goal:

I aim to cook mediocre British Indian restaurant food

…because, and please forgive my arrogance, if I can reach the level of ‘mediocre’ BIR cuisine, I’ll have exceeded the level of any of the Indian restaurants I’d be dependent on locally.

(And, once that’s achieved, I then aim to cook some truly great British Indian restaurant food. Gotta have a stretch goal).

9 months in…

Trying to solve the riddle of BIR cuisine seemed tough at first. Anyone who’s ever tried following recipes from an Indian cookery book, or bought ready-made Indian meals or sauces from supermarkets, knows that they taste absolutely nothing like restaurant food. Unlocking the secret to those magical tastes meant finding instructions from people who’ve actually worked at restaurants.

One of my earliest references was Dave Loyden’s excellent Undercover Curry, a write-up of the lessons learned by a curry fan so dedicated that he ‘quit his day job and invested three years working undercover in UK curryhouses’, as the back cover tells it. Dave’s book was an excellent starting point, but as a total newcomer to cooking I needed a lot more reference.

I discovered the work of Julian Voigt, a man who used Dave’s book as a starting point (if I understood correctly), trained himself as a curry chef and opened his own takeaway. His ebook, The Secret to that Takeaway Curry Taste (new edition due soon), is a great complement to Undercover Curry, and best of all, his YouTube videos are a great learning resource: text recipes just can’t compare to the expressive power of video demonstrations.

(A shout out also to Mick Crawford’s ‘British Indian Restaurant Style Cooking’, which had some good nuggets of useful information that the others were missing. And there’s one or two other good references too, which if you’re curious, get in touch).

So, nine months into this little endeavor, here’s where I stand:

• Pilau rice – generally good
• Chicken madras – usually bad and wildly unpredictable
• Chicken dhansak – reliably good
• Chicken korma – reliably great (I’ve really nailed this one!)
• Chicken tikka masala – bad (I think Dave Loyden’s recipe was a cruel joke. ‘Half a can of fruit cocktail’ is plausible at least, but ‘a third of a pan of ghee’ is not!). Need to try someone else’s recipe, but I was never a CTM eater in the first place, so I have little reference.
• Chicken dupiaza – once great (best dish I ever made), but I was never able to reproduce that greatness. Usually pretty good though.
• Sag aloo – reliably decent but never great
• Bombay aloo – reliably good
• Brinjal bhaji – usually good but somewhat unpredictable
• Mushroom bhaji – always at least decent
• Onion bhaji – sometimes great, sometimes poor. Usually good, but I make too many that just crumble apart, and I’m still learning how to fry them just right.

One thing I really need to work on is my pre-cooked chicken. One of the things BIR restaurants really get right is the marinade (while restaurants here in the Bay Area seem to not bother at all) so I’ve been paying particular attention, but I just can’t get the flavor right. My texture’s a little off too: aiming for juicy and tender, but too often achieving rubbery and powdery.

The beginnings of a base gravy. A pot full of onions, with a few other veg sprinkled on top.

The base gravy having stewed for a couple of hours, having been blended, diluted, and with the spices added. In another hour or two this'll be the common foundation to pretty much any curry dish. There's enough here for nearly 30 portions; it helps to make it all in one go.

Bombay aloo

Brinjal bhaji

Chicken dhansak