Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. For his job to be promoted to general counsel, his PowerPoint presentation to the board is just one slide that has one sentence on it. It’s time to make peace. That is totally what he goes and does. He says, okay, I’m going to figure out what settlements we can live with and I’m going to go settle everything. This company just needs to move forward. it doesn’t matter that we all feel it wasn’t fair. It doesn’t matter that we all feel this was a sham of a process. We just have to move on, and we have to live in a new reality. And you need a new set of people to do that. It’s amazing that Steve was part of the old guard and the new guard do this because how can you say, I’m going to put how unfair I feel this was aside and just focus on moving forward. That is an extremely difficult compartmentalization exercise. For Brad to come in and say like, I’m going to be the guy who is able to disregard the past and figure out how we—I use this phrase in the first episode—become a trusted partner to governments around the free world, how crazy is it that this Microsoft that we just talked about for the last hour became the Microsoft that can do no wrong from a regulatory perspective. The only one that’s not under active antitrust investigation today by the federal government. The one that is a massive provider of software and services to the US and its allies at the government level. The reversal here is it doesn’t get talked about enough what an amazing job Brad and the company did to reverse this perception. That leaves job number three on Steve’s agenda of be successful—continue to have Microsoft be a leading technology company and hopefully still grow revenue and profits.…

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