14 DAY TRIAL // Just three months after Bill Gates retired from his day-to-day role at Microsoft, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer is divorcing the company from the motto that helped put it on the map. Ballmer revealed during a Q&A session at The Churchill Club the past week that the Redmond giant had outgrown Bill Gates' famous mantra “A computer on every desk and in every home” which is virtually synonymous with Microsoft. The CEO indicated that the software company's mission had evolved past putting a computer on every desk in every home.
“We're working on a broader agenda than that, and I love that. It's still my favorite mission statement of all time, because it was a mission, it was a vision, and it was a scorecard. Our people loved it, you could count up every day, how are we doing, how are we doing, how are we doing? But, in a sense when you look at the footprint of the things we work on today it's almost like each business deserves to have its own equivalent. And in a sense maybe we should make that formal, I think our enterprise business has a mission, our advertising business has a mission, our phone and TV business, our devices business has a mission,” Ballmer revealed.
However, at the same time Microsoft is not renouncing to the slogan completely. Ballmer revealed that as far as the Windows operating system is concerned, the Redmond giant is indeed laboring to continue the original mission set in place by Bill Gates. However, as even the Windows without Walls $300 million marketing campaign illustrates, Microsoft and Windows are no longer about just the PC.
“We are, in our industry collectively, we get to change the world, we get to give people tools to allow them to be more productive, more creative, more effective, more in touch, more in contact. And whether it's in a phone, or a PC, or a server, or in the cloud, I think that's kind of the core value proposition of information technology,” Ballmer added.