Gates/Ozzie challenge Microsoft to “alter its business”

unless of course the guy working on the rudder gets sick, then the turn will be delayed 3 weeks.

I’m enjoying it from afar. portable object oriented internet connected components – gosh it would be nice to have an API which can place ICC’s into object classes and manage their interactions/UI…

RIP Microsoft. The post-Microsoft era starts now.

Christopher: it’s ironic you say that given your other post you just made where you argue with me about listening to college kids. The companies who are doing best in the services space are run by college kids.

The companies who are doing best in the services space are run by college kids.

Spare me your Web 2.0 mashups, social software, and other assorted search-engineish rot. I am talking Enterprise/ERP, mission-critical service software, not something you know much about. Reminds me of all the dot.com straight out of college ‘click vs. brick’ hype. Or the ‘college daytraders’ taking on Wall Street. History repeating itself.

Let’s see: Market Cap of Google: $108 billion.
Market Cap of SAP: $13.24 billion.
Market Cap of Oracle: $65 billion.

So, those little college kids are kicking ass over the Enterprise Plays. You might look into why.

Well RIP if they can make it work, which they won’t, so that will become an ironic saving grace. But the fast-growth turned into mature company, mature company turned into insecure angst, with eternal ranting blogger armies. And to really make Services work, you will need a whole new company, so RIP again. Buy out SAP, SAS, slew of ERP, and clunk in some Unix base…and maybe yes, but that’s a whole new company. So RIP.

Gawd, your understanding of Economics is flawed, market cap is not a good plank to stand on, have you not learnt a thing from Bubble 1.0? And Google is not a SERVICES company, they are an ADVERTISING company.

Christopher: um, they are an advertising company that uses services as bait.

Disruption? You Scoble must be talking about partner disruption because I wonder how they are going to make money now that Microsoft has moved to higher grounds.

Not that Microsoft has solved that problem either with their server .NET thing.

It’s a good time to be in this industry.

I’m getting serious deja vu here. Looks like Google is the new Netscape, but with better management and smarter people. Windows is looking kind of obsolete at this point – certainly not core to the new strategy.

Lots to see here but MS will require a huge shift in thinking and will have to find the courage to launch itself into space from the top of its current revenue model and try to learn to fly without the support of the old business.

Its a long way down but others have crashed attempting lesser feats from similarly lofty heights.

The memos are an interesting read. Unlike other companies, what helped MS stay relevant for the past 30 years is due to memos like this where the top management understand the problems and try to rally everyone to change course

Chris – so you’re saying RIP to Microsoft because it’s going to be replaced by a new, better Microsoft?

That’s how Microsoft got where it is today… by adapting to meet the needs of its customers.

The fragmentation of the market continues to accelerate. Microsoft has to make this play or the sifting sands will run through their fingers.

Please tell me what is the value prop for Partners? Clark saw the future again — MS is going vertical and may take the ISV deck out to boot.

Does evolutionary economics kind of dictate that we have a Wal-Mart thing going on here too?

Brandon…do you really think anyone’s going to care until it’s in code and working correctly?

No.

Live.com didn’t matter until it worked in Firefox. Period. Now, I look, and I see nothing that I can’t get from other products like Liferay, which not only gives me widgets, but lets me run it on the server setup of *my* choice, and, even better, is licensed under an MIT license, which is tons more open than the GPL, so I can use it in commercial code and the decision to release the new source is mine, not made by the barrel of a gun.

You don’t get it at all. you’re too new to realize that MS has no credibility in this industry whatsoever beyond what you can buy *NOW*. If it’s not available *NOW* it’s bullshit. You know why we have that attitude? Because we spent the 90s and early 2000s trusting Microsoft, and came away screwed, used, and tattooed, and what was Microsoft’s thank you for that? Licensing 6.0.

MS, can you see the finger? Good.

Your company is still run by greedy, insecure kids who cannot comprehend sharing for a second. They have to own ALL the balls, or they own NONE of the balls. Even in Ray Ozzie’s memo, it’s there, he’s already been indoctrinated.

But MS is a fascinating historical case…watching it make the IBM mistake of the Akers years, careening from product to product, strategy to strategy, doing well only because its sheer size has such inertia. MS still clings to CALS, because it’s what BallmerGates wants. You just can’t stop screwing over your customers, it’s in your company DNA, and will be until BallmerGates is gone.

Like I said, you cannot even write a complete mission statement for MS in less than a page unless its:

“To be the only company left selling computer software, the only company selling game consoles, and to control the Internet.”

That’s not a company mission statement, that’s a megalomaniacal guideline. I still see no evidence of MS making “Plays well with others” a core philosophy. It’s still, with one exception, all about forcing you to use Windows and IE.

I can’t understand your enthusiasm, Scoble. This is classic propaganda. .Net is in _% of Fortune 500 businesses? So? Make vba vba.net and it would be 100%! This is a meaningless number and you should know it – like pages indexed vs. actual audience. You can run .Net for free, you can run a single page on an intranet, and it would come up in this number.

I want a serious statement about how M$ proposes competing with their own customers without losing them. All your developer tools and APIs are going to look bad if you can’t get ahead of Google and you can’t sell tools to online competitors. So far, Live.com is just a duded up my.yahoo.com

This is all about .Net. You can’t play both sides successfully. Look at Kodak, who now competes with camera manufacturers – you fit their situation exactly. Their market share and profits will never return. Neither will yours. You are as late in technology time as Kodak was in the 90′s, and you have the same dilemma. The new technology destroys the old vertical integration. You’re aligned with IBM more than Intel now.

And how can investors have confidence you understand advertising? This memo isn’t automatically a good thing just because of press coverage and it’s seeming agreement with your outlook on life.

Microsoft reinvents itself every 5 years – if Don means a upgrade cycle between OS releases – then he is right

I just don’t know if Don’s today post is a joke or he is serious.

When was the last time a memo paid the bills?

I remember another famous Microsoft memo where security became “top priority”. It now takes 12 minutes for a windows computer to become infected (http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1511).

Memos aren’t shipping products. Memos are strictly PR tools, just like this blog. Making a generic version of a copied product is not innovation and does not inspire passion, no matter how many memos you intentionally leak.

Ray hit the nail on the head – because you can’t have true portability/modularity of services without a services platform to support it.

Big question for me: will Microsoft treat this new “services platform” like an OS and embrace competitors’ APIs?

20. That hypertension is going to kill you. Yes, Microsoft does present .NET adoption statistics that reflect as positive a scenario as possible. Yes, most big corporations with a profit motive do the same thing. Yes, unlike yourself, most adults can see the forest for the trees and parse the data as such.

Just from my personal experience, it’s used in actual, real-world meaningful ways at places like Morgan Stanley, Lehman Bros, Bloomberg, Citicorp, AIG, etc. (Guess what industry I work in…)

So don’t let yourself go around spouting zealous dogma that doesn’t really link back to the facts. I would say J2EE and good old C++ still power more of the world’s financial markets by far. At the same time, if you think .NET is only being used like php to power a few trivial-ish web sites here and there, then you’re as dumb as you sound. (And yes, php like .NET powers some significant web sites, we’re simplifying things for young rex.)

I’m a developer. The API looks fine to me just like it did 5 years ago. The rest of your statements strike me as sophist handwaving. Yes, anyone can make statements laden with bombast and fury, but the world assigns more value to well-reasoned words that don’t have a lot to lose or gain.

The memos are interesting, they don’t change anything. The blogosphere hates Microsoft, yet the majority of the world still uses their products. The buzz around these memos speaks more to the collective concerns of the be-PowerBooked bloggerati wincing at the 800,000-lb. ostrich pulling its head out of the sand.

This comment was written on a PowerBook by a .NET architect too jaded for hype and religion.

24. “Making a generic version of a copied product is not innovation and does not inspire passion”

Unless, of course, it’s a linux distro or openoffice– then I am so empassioned about it I could just shit my drawers with a quickness!

If all this means is nothing and Microsof is as moribund as everyone has claimed for the past 10 years, then why the self-flagellating indignation?

“Scenario owners” and then a kick to a blog. Oh
pluuuze. Co-opting advertising as a model? These guys
on planet Earth? Those memos are channeling a jet-lagged bad photocopy of Esther Dyson. Blogging really has damaged their brains.

But wow was SQL, VS and Biztalk like total mum.
Real stuff and they ruined the press and marketing cycle with the Live.com and these obviously intentionally-leaked fluff-piece memos.