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Comment by Solstinox | Hacker News Reader

I guess Microsoft may drop ~$30 billion on this poisoned chalice out of goodwill.

I think Bill Gates is worried that assets acquired in a $30B deal may take inordinate amounts of time and attention from senior leadership, at the expense of the rest of a $1600 billion business.

He's chairman of the board. He can stop it if he wants to.

Not any more; he stepped down earlier this year.

https://news.microsoft.com/2020/03/13/microsoft-announces-ch...

He is no longer part of the board. He isn't chairman since 2014 and left the board in March this year.

I can totally see this happening.

This is the pathology of large business executives - once you have a mature business, it is boring, and pretty much anything else seems exciting, and so you focus on this new thing, and worse, start promoting it internally as a model for everything _that's actually successful_.

Due to my career wanderings, I've seen this a few times, and many times the hot new thing has been a mountain of technical debt that has spent the last few years doing everything possible to juice growth and spinning amazing stories to investors, the press, etc. They've been selected for telling a great story. The executives at OldCorp tend to have a natural immunity to the messaging and scheming of their interior ecosystem, but they are not used to these invasive species.

If this is what Gates is getting at, I think that's very astute of him.

Boiled down to: nobody ever gets a promotion for maintaining the success of something that's already successful.

Which is a shame, but the corporate game theory optimality of leapfrogging between hot projects has held true at essentially every company I've ever worked for.

I think it's more complex than the stewardship problem - that problem, specifically, is internal, and the executives who engage in change for the sake of advancement usually do so knowingly.

I'm talking about something completely different - the executives in this case are not knowing participants, they are in the state of mind to be snowed.

I haven't seen much difference between the two, if I understand what you're differentiating, as the type of executive that tends to project hop doesn't generally care about the underlying project, past its ability to further their own aims.

So whether it's an external acquisition or internal project is somewhat immaterial.

It's the difference between being a knowing and un-knowing participant. Having been quite close to people in this tier, the difference is very significant.

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