Some interesting reading tonight.  Well, if you're into corporate ineptitude that is.  See, I just started some intensive readings on the Kin failure and I have come to one conclusion:  heads must roll.

See, to me, a head must roll when a person presents more risk to the company than he or she is worth.  A noted example of a head already rolled:  Robbie Bach.  Head of Entertainment and Devices division for several years now he recently retired.  According to his Wikipedia page (and confirmed by his MS bio page) "He led the division that is responsible for the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune, Windows Games, Windows Mobile and the Microsoft TV platform."


Now, think about that.  The one possibly reasonably "successful" product still cost the company billions of dollars not just to develop but in damage control from extremely unreliable hardware (we have 12 360's where I work and 5 are broken and out of warranty).  Nothing else has matched its commercial success but I don't believe anyone since Kenneth Lay has earned so much money losing money (excluding banks).


But he's gone!  What does it matter now?
Well unfortunately not every poor decision can be laid at his feet (I actually might not blame the Xbox problem on him, I just don't have the information necessary for that choice).  I have heard several other major names mentioned, mostly from the Danger group now leaving or just departed Microsoft.  The list I have seen includes but is not limited to:


Robbie Bach
J Allard
Matt Bencke
Roz Ho


Let me take a moment to especially single out that last one.  Roz Ho has been mentioned over and over again for failure in various capacities.  I have heard that the Danger team was lied to about their role post-acquisition, that Roz and Matt were responsible for deciding to acquire Danger and start the z(une)Phone project.  So just to be clear, a massively expensive team of highly talented and motivated developers (Danger) were bought solely to speed development of a mish-mash of a failing music player and a failing phone in an attempt to out-iPhone the iPhone.  All this was done just before Windows Phone 7 work commenced using a totally different, more capable base.  Roz was responsible.


As evidence of her incompetence as a leader, I'll let poster WilliamTruthTeller of the Ars Technica forums give you his opinion:
"Roz Ho was in charge of the entire PMX/Pink effort. This was her very first (and assume last) mobile effort. Previously she was in charge of the Mac office efforts at Microsoft. I have never met a less competent leader. She was shallow and completely self absorbed and will find any excuse to talk about herself. She made it clear to the entire team that she has a lot of money and loved to talk about it. She has houses in Redmond, the Los Altos Hills, a condo at Squaw Valley and an apartment in Chicago. She has more than 4 cars one of which is an Audi A10. We only knew these details because she was always talking about them. Nobody cared but she couldn't help it. The ultimate expression of her clueless pomposity was than during the heat of the development battle, when the project was struggling mightily with technical and personnel problems, she took three weeks off to hike to the top of mount Kilimanjaro . . . Just so you understand how terrible these two were in their roles as leaders, both Roz and Matt were assigned executive coaches to review their communications because they didn't have the internal ability to detect when they might destroy morale through their clueless statements."
So morale was down.  Roz was responsible.


Management didn't know how to handle technical issues.  This is evident in the almost vaporware status of Windows Mobile Phone 7 and carries over also to Pink/KIN.  Another post:
"In the middle of this mission to save WM7, Roz shows up with some of the PMX folks and says they are going to need his support. They are using a different chip set and will need changes made in the core to support it. PMX not only needed changes in the core, but also needed WM personnel to act as engineering support to PMX. And Terry M. correctly said "No and hell no." . . . MX made its own mess and would have to pull itself out."
Roz was responsible.


Noticing a pattern here?  There are plenty of other examples of Roz and also others making gross managerial mistakes but in my view, none tops this.  The title reads, "Microsoft's Pink/Danger backup problem blamed on Roz Ho."  Trimming the fat, the article says that she was told by the SAN provider that there should not be a problem doing an in-place upgrade on existing equipment (realize that this is expensive equipment and takes 6 days to back up because of the volume).  She decided two days into the backup that money could be saved by not backing up.  Since there was only room for one backup and the last one had been deleted to make room for the one in progress well...  headlines were made.  The biggest mobile data loss in history and I can tell you from experience that the service hasn't been the same since (Calendar and email syncing problems existed for me as a new customer in January.  I kept the phone for five days.).


So probably every manager in the department should be fired.  But that's unlikely.  Seeing someone as visible and with as deep a history at Microsoft as Roz leaving would be a good start.