Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone; Xbox 360 and Kinect; the Surface tablet and new versions of Office, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, you may have noticed that Microsoft, a traditionally engineering-centric company, is undergoing a design revolution. But the origins of Redmond’s newfound sense of design are difficult to trace, not least because Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer is said not to be driving the change.

I don’t think Steve [Ballmer] could even spell the word design.

While Microsoft’s upper management may have realized the value of design, as manifested in its recent series of elegant and refreshing products, it’s not where the company’s design direction is coming from. Ballmer has not donned a black turtleneck and a pair of New Balance 991s. Rather, Microsoft’s shift toward a more design-centered culture has been a slow, bottom-up slog catalyzed in recent years by industry disruptions, mainly from Apple. (See: iPod, iPhone, iPad.) During my reporting for Fast Company‘s feature on design at Microsoft, which is part of our October design issue, I learned that many believe Microsoft has long suffered from never having a CEO who champions design at the company, as Apple did with Steve Jobs. As one former longtime Microsoft manager told me, “I don’t think Steve [Ballmer] could even spell the word design …There’s a large number of Microsoft employees who are just fed up that Apple continues to kick their ass.”

To hear insiders tell it, Ballmer had little to do with the radical redesign of Windows 8, Microsoft’s flagship operating system, whose previous versions boast more than a billion users. For example, according to sources, there was never any meeting between Ballmer and the Windows 8 team to green-light the software’s redesign. “There have been no meetings where we’ve ever talked about the UI or features with Steve,” explains one high-up source. Adds another, “Certainly he gets a copy of every memo, and gives us feedback on every memo, but there’s no ‘go’ or ‘no-go.'” (Windows president Steven Sinofsky is said to keep Ballmer abreast of the team’s progress.)





When I ask a slew of top former and current designers at Microsoft whether Ballmer is involved in the company’s design direction, their answers are almost all the same: “No.” “Not at all.” “Very little.”

But some argue that the lack of top-down design direction has afforded Microsoft a uniquely democratic culture. “It’s not a case where there’s a top-down mandate: everyone go do this,” Windows Phone SVP Joe Belfiore once told me. “There are few cases where senior management says, ‘Everyone is going to do this.’ Those [instances] are the exceptions rather than the rule.”

“Unlike other companies that maybe have one person at the top, we don’t have a [design] czar at Microsoft,” says Julie Larson-Green, VP of program management for Windows. Of Metro, Microsoft’s modern and well-received design language, she adds, “It’s not like Steve [Ballmer] decreed it.”

Others believe this fragmented, bottom-up approach to design has hurt the company.

Still, others believe this fragmented, bottom-up approach to design has hurt the company. “If the importance and value and DNA of design aren’t trickling down, they sure as hell are going to have a hard time trickling up,” says Ian Sands, the former senior director of Microsoft’s product long-term vision and strategy, who left the company in 2010. “The lack of a design czar certainly becomes problematic at some point in the process of building a strong culture and an ecosystem of solutions across all of the different divisions and product groups. There was no one to speak of at the executive-office level who would champion design.”