Microsoft News Tracker

In my posts yesterday on the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2007, I focused on the concrete announcements and eschewed the high level pronouncements because frankly I was hard pressed to be sufficiently acerbic without appearing unduly negative. I don’t know that I have really resolved the quandary, but here are some thoughts on Microsoft’s new business initiatives as promulgated at FAM 2007 by Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach and Kevin Johnson.

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Knowledge@Wharton has published an interview with Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie and while not particularly startling or technically revealing, it certainly inspires confidence that the man nominally charged with plotting Microsoft’s future technical direction in an increasingly connected landscape knows what he’s about:

In any successful enterprise you have to “keep the trains running on time,” as your primary obligation to shareholders and to the market. The biggest, most significant businesses that Microsoft has are the Windows business and the Office business, although the server and tools business is growing fairly rapidly. Those businesses need to continue to innovate, but I’ll say innovate with a “small i.”
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These are just innovations within the core of what those products are intended to do. Then you step back and say, “Environmentally, what is changing that might fundamentally reshape these things?” And that’s why I separated the “small i” from the “big I” of innovation. As long as I’ve been in this industry, every five, six, or seven years there has been some fundamental change in the environment that gives one the opportunity to step back and say, “Could we serve those needs in a dramatically different way?” Today that really is all around services.
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But the fact that so many people have high bandwidth [lets] us figure out how to balance what part of an application should be in a data center — somewhere “in the cloud” — and what piece of that solution should be on a desktop or on a mobile device. The right balance varies based on the application.

But that balance is far different moving forward than it has been in the past. When you have a very thin straw to a service, you tend to balance things differently than when it’s a higher bandwidth pipe.

So each group within Microsoft — and in our industry — is at a point where we should be saying, “If we’re aspiring to deliver productivity to a customer, how should we best weave that into services that are deployed through a browser? What aspects do you want mobile? What kind of synchronization should automatically be built in?
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In each solution within our business, the people who are running those businesses should look at their customers and say, “Given these new tools at my customers’ disposal, how should we reshape this?”

The reason I say “nominally” is that while Ozzie may be Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, he has neither the actual nor moral authority of his predecessor, Bill Gates, and there are lots of other powers and principalities at work within Microsoft:

The first thing I have to embrace to be successful is to go where people are and help them understand how to reshape themselves for the future on their terms. The Office group has a different culture than the Windows group, [which has a] different culture than the Xbox group. They do development differently; they do planning differently. So that’s number one.

Number two is that it’s highly social. We have to use a combination of center and edge in order to affect things. I may talk to the leaders of a group and ask them what their plans are. I use storyboarding, so I might map out a storyboard for how I would see things panning out moving forward.

At the same time, the people on my staff work directly with the people within the organization [who work for those] leaders so they can get the message in a less threatening way than having this guy at the top come in.

Things always occur through both leadership and grassroots mechanisms.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but not all flies want to be caught. We’ll all get to see how good Ozzie is at fly catching.

Yesterday, Ray Ozzie answered questions for the analyst and investor community at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas and the good news is that he didn’t tank the stock price (always a risk when Microsoft execs talk to analysts these days) although other market news lowered everyone’s boat quite nicely. The bad news is that Ozzie didn’t really have all that much to say. I listened to the webcast and and my only takeaways were:

• The search technology acquired with Medstory earlier this week has broader applicability than just in healthcare.
• Watching Google Inc. rake in advertising revenue “was a wake-up call within Microsoft.”

Not exactly uplifting stuff. What was conspicuously not forthcoming from Microsoft’s Chief Architect was any real vision of Microsoft’s future or even of just the nascent ad-supported online services initiative that he fathered. There’s nothing wrong with playing your cards close to your chest, but undoubtedly investors would have a warmer feeling if they had been tossed some hints that everything was on track. MSFTextrememakeover summarizes:

If this was meant to be MSFT’s Software+Service strategy equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, it fell short - and that was despite [perpetually wrong on MSFT] analyst Rick Sherlund’s repeated attempts to throw Ray a slow pitch in hopes he would knock one out of the park. He didn’t. It’s not that I can fault anything Ray said per se, it was all reasonable enough. It’s just that he didn’t say much that was concrete wrt plans or timeframes and it all sounded pretty conceptual at this stage…

Plus, comments like GOOG giving MSFT a “wake up call” … is hardly stock Viagra, especially when folks look at the fact that GOOG actually makes money on this “continuous investment” effort whereas MSFT doesn’t - at least so far.

The net is that while Ozzie survived his trip into the lions’ den, it wasn’t a bravura performance for himself or Microsoft, and did nothing to dispel the nagging doubts about Windows Live and the other new “Live” initiatives.

(Via Slashdot) .NET Developer’s Journal reports Microsoft Snags Don Ferguson, Former IBM Chief Architect – “Father of WebSphere”:

Don Ferguson, who guided IBM’s strategy and architecture for SOA and Web services, and co-authored many of the initial Web service specifications, has been hired by Microsoft. He is now Microsoft Technical Fellow in Platforms and Strategy, in the Office of the CTO.

As AJAXWorld 2007 (East) speaker and fellow Microsoftie Alex Barnett points out, Ferguson’s old blog (and out-of-date bio) is currently still up at IBM.com, but his new bio is here at microsoft.com.

According to the Microsoft bio, Ferguson will be focusing “on both the evolutionary and revolutionary role of information technology in business.”

” Understanding the trends, architecting and piloting the implications for existing and new products and evangelizing Microsoft’s vision are the key aspects of Don’s job,” the bio gushes.

At IBM, he was an IBM Fellow and Chief Architect for IBM’s Software Group, providing overall technical leadership for WebSphere, Tivoli, DB2, Rational and Lotus products.

Ferguson also was chairman of IBM’s Software Group Architecture Board.

Barnett suggests that the “Office of the CTO” is Ray Ozzie’s team, but while Ozzie and Craig Mundie were co-CTOs at one point, they are currently Chief Software Architect and Chief Research and Strategy Officer respectively. The only Microsoft CTO that comes to mind is David Vaskevitch who is Senior Vice President, Chief Technical Officer, Business Platform. Undoubtedly elucidation will follow.

If you thought Microsoft’s marketers had run out of projects on which to slap the “Windows Live” brand, you were wrong as LiveSide reports:

No this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. Windows Live Barcode enables users to store their own data in QR codes, which are already present on Spaces for markets like Japan.

From the homepage:

What is Windows Live Barcode
Windows Live Barcode is a set of services that transfer information between various media (PCs, billboards, magazines etc.) and handsets via Quick Response Code (QR Code), a two-dimensional barcode. It provides a new method for people to exchange information and enjoy various online services on handsets. Windows Live Barcode aims to enhance handset utility and provide you with more convenience and flexibility.

Reading through the Web site and taking the tour, it seems mostly to be yet another way for the geeky set to exchange business card information although Microsoft apparently has higher aspirations. All of this is fine, but Ray Ozzie’s vision of ad-supported online services seems to be stretched very thin in this “Windows Live” offering which on a good day is at best a nerdy geegaw. I especially like the part where you can put the barcode on a Web site. So much for Live Clipboard, eh Ray?