No One at Ford Is Laughing Anymore

This morning, Bloomberg News had a story on Alan Mulally, the chief executive officer of Ford Motor Co. who is suddenly in the running for the top slot at Microsoft after Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down without first figuring out who his successor would be. The story focuses on the impact on Ford, which is not good:

This is interesting in its own right as a business story about one of the biggest corporations in the U.S. But it's also a remarkable commentary on the economy. When Microsoft was founded in 1975, such a thing would have been impossible to imagine. The auto companies were at the apex of American industry. Leaving to go to a company that didn't even make computer hardware, only the instruction system for running that hardware, would have seemed incredible -- all the more so because chief executive officers didn't usually switch industries. Now it seems entirely reasonable that the CEO of a major U.S. automaker would go to a big software company -- and not even the most successful software company, but a torpid titan whose most innovative product is a video-game console.