Steve Ballmer is a very successful man.

You can watch him, if you like ­ – the Net Events TV site has a bunch of recordings, including a very recent one where he’s giving an “inspirational” speech to Microsoft employees in London. There was something ghastly about it and, in one sad way, it reminded me of someone else.

Long ago, far away, in another part of the forest there was a young writer called Guy Kewney who had an idea: “I’ll bet these microcomputers would work in my house! I wish I had one.” He went on to become pretty well known. That was back in the 1970s, and by the mid-80s, things were pretty good for him. Then…

Well, things carried on getting good, but by the early ‘90s, although he was at the height of his fame, and although he was eagerly head-hunted by the top publishing company of the time, things were already going wrong. Some of those things are nobody else’s business. Personal stuff ­ private miseries.

But watching Ballmer address Microsoft employees at a London conference, I realised that he was, as I had been, in a hole professionally ­ – and sinking deeper into the mud. Things that I should have been dealing with, I was ignoring, or hiding from.

And Ballmer, like me in those days, is able to hide from issues that really matter to Microsoft, simply because the company is making a lot of money. In my case, my salary levels were enough to make me feel that things were going OK. How wrong I was. Some of the bad stuff was outside my control.

I assumed that there would always be rich, powerful media companies that wanted my services and would be prepared to pay. Wrong on both levels. Many of the media empires were about to go into meltdown.
The other assumption I made was that if they had money, I’d be their first choice to hire. I always had been, so why would things change?

Ballmer’s video goes on about “people are our best asset” and how the “greatest people want to work with winners” and so on. All his points boil down to “we’re winning, so we always will win”. Wrong. Microsoft’s revenues are fine, but when it comes to customer satisfaction, it has never known it so bad. To quote one consultant who just bought a new laptop: “The old one was getting so cluttered it was impossible to use.

'The amount of work involved in fixing it was overwhelming. Much easier to spend £300 on the ‘bargain of the week’ and get a clean platform and start again.” The “wild success” of Vista is the result of bullying of computer builders, forcing them to include it in the price of a new PC.

I know that people are always reluctant to change for change’s sake, but previous iterations of Windows always offered me something new. Everybody wanted Windows for Workgroups or NT 3.51 and queued up to get the early test versions. That’s not happening today, even a year after Vista’s appearance.

To quote another customer: “When suppliers like Sony are forced to include an XP Pro downgrade disc in the packaging, not just a note saying you can have one if you ask, you know that the army isn’t marching behind its leaders any more.” Does Ballmer realise he’s walking out beyond the cliff edge?

Another video shows him shouting (he always shouts!): “Developers, developers, developers, developers…” over and over. Yes, developers are Microsoft’s greatest asset: hundreds of thousands of coders, all steeped in the .Net framework, Visual Basic, C# and the Windows way. But is it enough to be programmer-friendly?

In the days of MS-Dos, we all accepted that Unix was better for the programmer but sadly, not easier for the user. These days, the see-saw has made Windows the heavy guy, close to the grass roots of programming; Linux is the airy, user-oriented, compact environment and Apple (a Unix variant) the truly friendly one. Apple succeeds despite charging over the odds for hardware.

It can do this not because it’s flawless, but because people see it as being worth it. Microsoft can’t march into the future unless its customers are happy, not just buying because they have no choice. Ballmer must see that or he’ll lead the company straight back into the past.