Today I saw Steve Ballmer’s blog post on The New Efficiency and was quite surprised to see how much sense it made. Or at least the opening paragraphs made sense.

See, Ballmer talks about doing more, with less (or rather in his more Shakespeare-ian way: “With less, do more”) and how new IT development can make that happen. And he’s right, we’re riding the beginning of an amazing third wave of productivity resulting from revolutions in computing (the first one being the introduction of the mainframe, and the second being the popularization of the personal computer) but I somehow get the feeling he’s on the wrong side of the gap.

Just like the ice harvesters in the late 19th and early 20th century tried to fend off the onslaught of the home refrigeration technology, Ballmer is talking about some company not needing an expensive VPN solution because it adopted Windows Server 2008 R2 – the equivalent of the ice harvester’s sharper knives and better insulation to keep the ice from melting – when the real revolution is not needing any servers at all since the services are hosted in the cloud – just like the refrigerators were the next thing back then.

And just like ice harvesters, Ballmer’s company can’t leave its existing business model and make the leap over the gap, because it would damage existing business, which is required for funding new development. Companies with lower cost structures and no legacy are better equipped to compete in this market, as is the case every time technology revolutions happen.

I have lots of respect for Microsoft’s products, and think that company, along with other companies that participated in the PC revolution, had an enormous positive impact on the global economy.

It’s just time to stop sharpening that knife.

- Gummi