Thursday, September 22, 2005
Microsoft. Primer for the Lates.
(video-cam grab from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, via Inside Microsoft.)
No big deal, but I'm going to talk about Microsoft. Microsoft is one of the most analyzed, critiqued, lauded, discussed, picked-apart things on the entire planet. And I know nothing I say here will add any new insights. In fact, the best I can hope for is "accurate, but not new," and even worse, everything I spit out here could be wrong. But I know some people reading this think about other things, so this is just between us. That, and I wanted an excuse to link to the Bill Gates/ Napolean Dynomite video (which goes back and forth between being available and being taken down on different sites, so go find it on p2p).
Even though I'm a Linux and UNIX system administrator, Microsoft definitely touches my world. In a way, Microsoft touches everybody's world. But for real, at the very least, the way people support, market, and develop non-Microsoft products is often a reaction to the way Microsoft handles stuff.
But lately, so much of what I've been excited about seems to not be post-Microsoft, but more like extra-Microsoft. Context-sensitive advertising, insane blog/ publishing growth, AJAX, RSS, Ruby, Wikis... sure, all this stuff may have been invented in some Microsoft research lab for all I know (and I do know at least two of these things have close MS ties), but my point is, Microsoft doesn't seem to be at all in control of how these are distributed and used, or exemplifying their usage. Does that mean Microsoft is failing, or doesn't have lots of other successful businesses? Not really. Ideally, no single entity, even a successful entity, controls much of anything. But there's still something interesting going on, and this status may be uncomfortable for Microsoft.
When talking about business "competition," people sometimes work under the assumption that everybody is playing the same game. People talk about Microsoft "beating" Netscape, or Apple "beating" Microsoft. Those are ok constructs, because at the time those observations were made, all parties involved were working with similar approaches to the production and sale of software. But right now, Microsoft has a different kind of problem- their competitors are playing totally different games! The emerging open source software industry is totally manipulating the way Microsoft talks about their software. While there's no doubt "free" software can push Microsofts pricing around, what's equally interesting is how Microsoft is feeling pressure to open up their process, roadmaps, and code.
The other game being played is with hosted applications. Google, Yahoo, and even smaller companies like 37signals are finding that people are pretty open to letting a new tool become a big part of their computing life, with hosted applications. I wouldn't say these companies are beating Microsoft. They've wandered over to a different playing field!
So... Why do I even bring this up? This week, Microsoft announced a giant reorg. Some observations:
(video-cam grab from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, via Inside Microsoft.)No big deal, but I'm going to talk about Microsoft. Microsoft is one of the most analyzed, critiqued, lauded, discussed, picked-apart things on the entire planet. And I know nothing I say here will add any new insights. In fact, the best I can hope for is "accurate, but not new," and even worse, everything I spit out here could be wrong. But I know some people reading this think about other things, so this is just between us. That, and I wanted an excuse to link to the Bill Gates/ Napolean Dynomite video (which goes back and forth between being available and being taken down on different sites, so go find it on p2p).
Even though I'm a Linux and UNIX system administrator, Microsoft definitely touches my world. In a way, Microsoft touches everybody's world. But for real, at the very least, the way people support, market, and develop non-Microsoft products is often a reaction to the way Microsoft handles stuff.
But lately, so much of what I've been excited about seems to not be post-Microsoft, but more like extra-Microsoft. Context-sensitive advertising, insane blog/ publishing growth, AJAX, RSS, Ruby, Wikis... sure, all this stuff may have been invented in some Microsoft research lab for all I know (and I do know at least two of these things have close MS ties), but my point is, Microsoft doesn't seem to be at all in control of how these are distributed and used, or exemplifying their usage. Does that mean Microsoft is failing, or doesn't have lots of other successful businesses? Not really. Ideally, no single entity, even a successful entity, controls much of anything. But there's still something interesting going on, and this status may be uncomfortable for Microsoft.
When talking about business "competition," people sometimes work under the assumption that everybody is playing the same game. People talk about Microsoft "beating" Netscape, or Apple "beating" Microsoft. Those are ok constructs, because at the time those observations were made, all parties involved were working with similar approaches to the production and sale of software. But right now, Microsoft has a different kind of problem- their competitors are playing totally different games! The emerging open source software industry is totally manipulating the way Microsoft talks about their software. While there's no doubt "free" software can push Microsofts pricing around, what's equally interesting is how Microsoft is feeling pressure to open up their process, roadmaps, and code.
The other game being played is with hosted applications. Google, Yahoo, and even smaller companies like 37signals are finding that people are pretty open to letting a new tool become a big part of their computing life, with hosted applications. I wouldn't say these companies are beating Microsoft. They've wandered over to a different playing field!
So... Why do I even bring this up? This week, Microsoft announced a giant reorg. Some observations:
(from Jeremy's Blog)Technorati, IceRocket tags: microsoft, business, operating system, open source, google, linux
For a long time, Microsoft has focused on shipping boxed software. The most obvious change here is that MSN will be brought into the core group. Can a company that had focused on shipping boxed software morph like this and still succeed? There is going to be some huge internal struggles here, that's for sure. We may see the company polarized in a way we never have before. Some within Microsoft clearly get it, but others don't. How much the ones who don't will resist this change remains to be seen. One thing is clear though - Microsoft has seen what companies like Google and Yahoo! are doing and they want in.
*****
(from Searchblog)
For all those watching the AOL/MSN/Google M&A game, Microsoft's recent reorg, covered here (NYT), is worth noting. The company is creating three divisions, and the one I find critical is what is called "Platform Products and Services". This division combines Windows and MSN, and that is an important shift - the two are increasingly interdependent. Applications like Office are now in a separate division, as are Entertainment and Devices.
