After the big re-org and watching the company meeting webcast, I guess my first impression is that I'm glad our top management isn't quite as out of touch as they sound to the outside world, though that's not saying much. I thought Ballmer came across horribly in last week's Business week interview, completely in denial, dodging tough questions without giving any substantial answers, and simply being a rah-rah cheerleader. And internally both Gates and Ballmer have came across as completely being out of touch, not truly seeing Google (and Apple and Yahoo) as worthy competitors, and ignoring valid employee complaints about overladen process, bureaucracy, lack of innovation, etc.
At least they are now seeing Google as a worthy competitor, because they absolutely are. I'm glad they finally acknowledged Google's "web as a platform" strategy (not that it's hard, everyone and their grandmothers can probably see it by now), w/ their maps API, gmail, storage, personalized search & content, etc. I have my doubts as to whether this MSN and Windows marriage is going to counter that strategy effectively, given their drastically different cultures, but at least they are finally addressing this threat. Furthermore, they keep speaking of this amazing "innovation pipeline", but I'll believe it when I start to see real products that make me go, "man that's (bleep)ing cool (bleep)."
I still think Google has the edge though, they are what msft used to be 15-20 years ago: young, smart, arrogant, and hard-working as all hell. It's no wonder the msft offer acceptance rate at Stanford is ~50%, hell I'm surprised it's even that high. I do think it's an interesting case study whether msft can avoid the fate of IBM, HP, Merck, and other successful tech companies who became victims of their own success as they grew big and old. But I'm not sure I personally want to be part of this experiment. There are still execs whom I respect tremendously here, particularly Chris Jones in Windows, Steve Sinofsky in Office, and J Allard in Xbox, but whether/when this 2nd generation leadership will really get to call the shots at msft still remains to be seen. btw, Steve's got an excellent post on becoming a general manager that I just have to point out.
So in summary, it's "I'm glad they (Bill and Steve) are not complete morons." But they'll have to show me a lot more to convince me they are worthy of the god-status bestowed upon them around here.
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Sometimes the better part of innovation is responsiveness, listening to your customers. People sometimes ignore the fact that we put a Windows XP SP2 version (an update to the operating system with improved security features) out into the marketplace, which was an incredibly major release. It doesn't have an incredibly major release name, but it's an incredibly major release relative to the concerns and issues people were having about security. That took time, that took effort, that took energy.
Hmm, he makes it sound like SP2 was due to customer "concerns and issues". I thought it was more like a plethora of security holes that should not have been there in the first place.
It was a horrible interview. Perhaps he should run for political office from the way he dodged questions.
yeah, that was definitely a terrible interview. i'd much rather he admit that we dropped the ball, and people have kicked our asses in some areas. but we will re-dedicate ourselves to dominate the market again. at least that's honest.
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