Microsoft without Gates

    Growing a giant

    The CEO hasn't been afraid to look outside the tech world for leaders or ideas. Two years ago Ballmer lured away International Paper CFO Chris Liddell, 50, for the same job at Microsoft. And around the same time, he persuaded Kevin Turner to leave his job as Wal-Mart's (WMT, Fortune 500) CIO to join Microsoft in a newly created chief operating officer role. Turner, 43, is a stickler for accountability and measurement. At Microsoft, he's developed a 30-metric "scorecard" with concrete annual goals - in everything from customer satisfaction to growing Windows market share - or every manager in 65 countries where the company sells its products. Each month Turner gets a report on what he calls ROB, the rhythm of the business. It's the list of 30 metrics, each with a color next to it - red, yellow, or green. You don't want to be a manager with more than one red.

    The challenges that Microsoft faces are - literally - enormous. At its scale, growing means confronting the law of large numbers. Ballmer notes with exasperation that to increase earnings by 15% for 2009, the company will have to create $4 billion in new pretax operating income. At that size, can Microsoft still possibly be a growth company?

    Wall Street is not hopeful about the prospects. According to Reuters, the consensus of analysts is that earnings growth will slow in each of the next two years, to 13% in fiscal 2009 and 10% in 2010. Microsoft's stock price has been more or less flat - in the mid-to-high 20s - for about six years. (Late last year it got up into the mid-30s, but its bid for Yahoo caused it to plummet back to the 20s, where it remains.) Right now Microsoft trades for just 16 times its trailing 12 months' earnings, below the S&P 500's trailing P/E of 22. Yet analysts agree that Microsoft will report earnings-per-share growth of 31% for fiscal 2008. By contrast, Standard & Poor's estimates that the S&P 500's earnings per share will grow just 8.3% this year.

    The biggest reason that Microsoft can pull off that kind of performance is that its venerable Windows operating system monopoly remains wildly profitable. Despite the problems with Vista, Windows sales grew 11.3% in the 2008 fiscal year, to $16.7 billion, according to Goldman Sachs. About 75% of that is operating profit.

    One key to Microsoft's growth plan is for the company to stay resolutely global. Two-thirds of revenues already come from outside the U.S., and Ballmer and his team expect that percentage to increase significantly. There is an enormous appetite around the world for the software Microsoft produces. IDC figures show that Microsoft's fastest growing markets are Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, as well as countries like Vietnam. In Russia, now the company's fifth-largest market, business grew 100% this year, according to CFO Liddell. He says that in conversations with Wall Street, "most discussion is driven around what's happening in the U.S. economy in the next quarter. And - well, I try not to be facetious, but it matters less and less as time goes by." According to Microsoft, there are now more people using Windows in the world than there are English speakers.