The geek who saved Microsoft's bacon

In the hubbub accompanying Microsoft's 25th anniversary, the spotlight naturally focused on the remarkable collaboration between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. To be sure, the accomplishment of this duo in building the industry's most successful software company certainly merits special consideration in any retrospective.

Yet, the public's infatuation with the folk-celebrity status of the two college chums-turned-billionaires overlooks the real hero of the Microsoft story: a rail-thin, bearded former executive named Brad Silverberg whose prodigious labors made Microsoft what it is today.

Brad who?

Now that we're living on Internet time, history easily becomes even more of a blur. So it's easy to forget how Silverberg was twice asked to step up when it counted most: the first time, when Microsoft found itself in a dogfight with IBM; the second time, when Microsoft found itself in a dogfight with history.

When Silverberg joined Microsoft (msft) from Borland International in 1990, this was a very different company from today's colossus. After two flubs, the company had finally delivered to market a version of Windows that was a hit with the public.

But the Windows business still only accounted for about $50 million in annual sales. What's more, Microsoft faced formidable competition from OS/2 following an acrimonious row with erstwhile partner IBM.

That would all change with the launch of Windows 95, a project Silverberg developed and drove to completion. Windows 95, the Über-hit that became a gold mine for the company, was the franchise product rollout.

Following the Windows 95 launch in August 1995, the Windows operation finished up the year as a $3.5 billion business. Windows became the center of a veritable ecosystem of companies old and new that created trillions of dollars of new value. For better or worse, the constellation of power in the computer industry had irrevocably changed.

Or so it seemed until the emergence of the Internet threw the mother of all frights into Microsoft -- and for good reason: The Internet had scrambled everything and threatened to relegate latecomers to also-ran status. With the Windows-centric era of computing coming to an end, Microsoft needed to embrace the Internet and embrace it fast.

That job again fell to Silverberg.

I've always believed that the Internet overhaul of Microsoft was worthy of a Harvard Business Review study. This was a prodigious effort in which Microsoft was forced to change direction 180 degrees while conducting its other businesses as if everything were normal.

It was anything but normal. The fights for resource allocation and the coordination between competing business groups (not to mention the inevitable bureaucratic backstabbing) would have taxed the patience of even the best of managers.

Of course, it did not hurt that Microsoft was not your average startup. Company IT directors who decided to adopt Microsoft's Internet technology knew they would be making a safe choice. And as detailed during the company's antitrust trial, Microsoft eagerly -- in the judge's wording, illegally -- leveraged its desktop monopoly to combat rival Netscape.

All of that shouldn't obscure the significance of the turnaround. A Herculean effort was needed to make up for lost time, but Microsoft clawed back into the game.

For those of a hypothetically minded bent, consider how history might have changed if Silverberg had fumbled. At the very least, Bill Gates would have entered the 21st century at the helm of a much changed and much weaker Microsoft.

That Silverberg pulled it off meant his boss would never need to face that headache.