What the departures of Apple, Google CEOs mean for Microsoft

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It has been a week of major executive departures in the tech industry, with news of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' leave of absence followed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's announcement yesterday that he's handing over the reins to co-founder Larry Page.

That translates into major changes in the CEO offices at two of Microsoft's biggest competitors. So what do the departures of Schmidt and Jobs mean for Microsoft from a competitive standpoint?

I ran that question by analyst Wes Miller, a former Microsoft MSN and Windows Core program manager who now tracks the company for research firm Directions on Microsoft. His take, in brief: Schmidt's departure could give Google a different focus that could impact Microsoft in some ways. But Jobs' leave from Apple probably won't change much on the competitive front, especially not in the short run.

Continue reading for Miller's take on the issue, via email.
I feel Larry was brought back in to the role of CEO to help refocus Google engineering. If you look at 2010, it was a good year for Google, but not stupendous. Google has been losing key staff to Facebook and the SV VC ecosystem, and has been criticized for losing focus on search while it focused on everything else. Larry being brought back in means a renewed focus on engineering and quality (potentially including projects that would threaten Microsoft, such as Google Apps and Chrome OS).

With Apple, the loss of Steve Jobs, whether for a short duration or a longer period of time (at some point, he will have to retire – he’s human), means a lot to the press from a symbolic perspective. But at the end of the day, Apple is a design company that pushes technology boundaries. They have a strong, focused engineering team, strong business leadership in Tim Cook, and design leadership in Jonathan Ive. I don’t see Apple going into “cats away, mice will play” mode – in fact, I think the opposite will occur.

So what have you got? You have two companies with new or temporarily acting CEOs. One of whom will be renewing focus on search, the other who will be continuing to innovate on new smartphone, tablet, and convergence (Apple TV) devices, as well as releasing a new OS this summer that begins to merge their mobile and desktop story (something we won’t see from Microsoft until mid/late 2012 at the earliest, unfortunately).

I see the competitive landscape continuing to be strong for Microsoft in the server and apps world, especially with the release of Office 365 this summer (we may see a defocus of Google on Apps/Chrome OS which would be beneficial to Microsoft). With a renewed focus on search (and mobile-related search), I believe Google has a chance of taking back much of the share Bing may have achieved over the last year, and will work to do so during 2011. I also think Page may continue to focus the company on the Chrome browser, which will be the primary combatant IE9 will face when it finally ships.

Apple has likely arrived at the key design components for the next iPhone and is likely done with the 2011 iPad. Any tectonic shift due to the absence of Steve Jobs likely won’t be felt to the benefit of Microsoft until at least 2012, if it is at all.

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