It’s official: The Microsoft 2.0 era has begun

Chairman Bill Gates’ last day in the office as a full-time Microsoft employee has come and gone. (It was Friday June 27.)

At the Friday Town Hall meeting for Microsoft employees, Gates shared a few parting sentiments — and, along with CEO Steve Ballmer — shed a few tears. (Microsoft blogger Steven Bink has actual video footage of the Town Hall meeting and the tears — see the clips starting with “Ballmer — Changing the World.”)

There has been so much coverage of Gates and his legacy over the past week-plus on TV and radio, in newspapers, magazines and blogs, that it’s impossible to provide a full list. Here are a few of the many clips. (And yes, I am favoring clips where yours truly and the Microsoft 2.0 book got a shout out.)

The Economist: After Bill

ABC News: Geek Goliath: Gates Says G’Bye to Microsoft

National Public Radio: Gates Retires from Daily Role at Microsoft

Investor’s Business Daily: Curtain Call: Gates Exits Main Microsoft Stage

Gizmodo: Bill Gates Retirement Party (review of Microsoft 2.0)

Wired: The Many (Geeky) Faces of Bill Gates

Reuters: Life After Gates

Reuters: Ballmer becomes lone voice at Microsoft’s helm

Meanwhile, here are the internal e-mail messages that Gates and Ballmer sent to the Microsoft troops on June 27:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 10:40 AM
To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: My last full-time day at Microsoft
I want to share some thoughts on my last day as a full-time Microsoft employee.

For the last 33 years, I’ve had the ideal job. It’s been incredibly exciting to come here every day to work with the smartest people in the world to develop breakthrough software. Together, we have built a great company that has profoundly changed the world for the better.

 After today, I will be shifting my full-time focus to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation while keeping a strong connection to Microsoft.

The fact that I am making a career change does not mean that our work at Microsoft is done. In fact, the most exciting impact of our software is still ahead of us. Everything we have done up to now is just the foundation for the more dramatic breakthroughs to come. As you apply the magic of software to delivering a new generation of innovations, this company will continue to transform the way people communicate, create, and share experiences.

Microsoft is in an incredible position because we have momentum and a great pipeline of products and technologies. Even more important, we have great people at every level. In research and development we have great engineers focused on solving the most pressing challenges in computer science and turning new ideas into innovative products. In marketing, sales, and customer service, our world-class organizations keep getting better.

We also have strong leadership. As Microsoft has grown, one of the most exciting and fulfilling things for me has been to watch new leaders develop.

It starts at the very top. For the last 28 years, I have loved working side by side with Steve. Even now after all these years I am regularly impressed with his energy and insight. I think he and I have enjoyed one of the great business partnerships of all time. Steve has done a great job leading the company since he became CEO in 2000. Steve’s passion for democratizing the power of technology and inspiring customers, partners, and employees will keep us driving ahead.

I am thrilled to have Ray and Craig playing key roles in guiding the company’s strategy. For over a decade I had hoped that we could convince Ray to join Microsoft—and in the three years he has been here, he has made a huge difference in helping us focus on the challenge and opportunity of software plus services. I have worked with Craig for more than 15 years. His ability to anticipate the future direction of technology is a key asset, as is his deep interest in and understanding of emerging markets.

Of course, I’ll continue to be involved in the work of the company as part-time Chairman. As part of this I will help with a handful of projects that Steve, Ray, and Craig select.

As I reflect on the last three decades, the thing I’m proudest of is the role that this company has played in making the power of digital technology accessible and affordable. Software running on personal computers and other devices is the best tool for empowerment in human history. Microsoft founded the personal computer software business and we built the platforms that enabled the software industry to develop. Without your contributions, we would not have succeeded in making our dream of a computer on every desk and in every home a reality for more than 1 billion people worldwide—a dream we will extend to everyone in the future.

As I make the transition to focus more of my time and energy on the Gates Foundation, I am looking forward to applying the lessons I’ve learned—and, in some cases, the technologies that we have developed—to help address some of the critical issues that people around the world face in education, economic development, and health.

I want to thank all of you for your hard work and your dedication. It has been a privilege and an inspiration to come to Microsoft every day. I look forward to the amazing, world-changing innovations you will deliver in the years ahead as you continue the great work this company has always done.
Bill

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 11:40 AM
To: Microsoft - All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Bill’s Transition
I just wanted to add a few thoughts to Bill’s mail.

For the last 28 years, it has been my pleasure and privilege to work side-by-side every day with Bill to help build this great company. Of course it would be impossible to overstate Bill’s contribution as a technology visionary and business leader. Thanks to his vision and insight, Microsoft has delivered incredible innovations that enable people to achieve things every day that once seemed impossible.

For so many of us Bill has been a mentor, a colleague, and an inspiration. He has challenged us to do our very best work, and it has been an honor to try to live up to his expectations. For my part, I’ve had the incredible good fortune to have Bill as a great friend and a wonderful business partner. I’m grateful for the opportunity he gave me when he convinced me to drop out of business school to join the company. I can’t imagine a better way to have spent the last 28 years.

As much as I’ll miss Bill’s day to day presence here, I’m excited and deeply inspired by the step he is taking. The impact he will have on world health and education as he shifts his focus to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be amazing. Bill’s passion for empowering people and his commitment to making the world a better place have always been among his most important defining traits—this transition is a logical and important next step forward for him.

At the same time, we will continue to do amazing things here at Microsoft. Working together, we have created an incredible culture of innovation and accomplishment that will provide the foundation for future breakthroughs and even greater success.

During the last three decades, building on Bill’s insights about software and computing, we’ve transformed the way businesses operate and revolutionized the way people communicate, share information, and access entertainment. We helped create an industry that provides jobs for millions of people around the globe. We have delivered tools that have changed hundreds of millions of people’s lives for the better.

But for all we’ve achieved, I believe we’re just getting started. We’re in the midst of one of the most exciting periods in the history of this industry. Computing continues to become more powerful, more portable, and more affordable. Content, communications, and media are shifting entirely to digital formats. The combination of software plus services is transforming the way we create and deliver computing experiences. Online social networks are changing how people interact with each other. Gestures, voice, and other natural user interface capabilities are changing the way people interact with computers. New tools for developers are making it easier to take advantage of multicore processors and to deliver rich, connected experiences.

These trends are creating incredible new opportunities in our industry. And no company is better positioned to take advantage of these opportunities than Microsoft. No company has the tradition of innovation that we do, or the expertise across such a wide range of technologies. No company can match the breadth of our talent or the depth of our leadership.

Today, I believe that we’re poised to deliver a new generation of innovations that will have an even greater impact on people’s lives. That’s what this company has always really been about—finding new ways to use technology to make the world a better place. We’ve done that for a billion people during the last 30 years, and we’ll do it for billions more during the next 30 years.

This is not to say that we don’t face difficult challenges. But in the past, we have always done our best work when our job was to tackle the most pressing challenges. I’m absolutely confident this will be true as we move forward.

There’s no doubt that Bill’s last day as a fulltime Microsoft employee marks an important milestone in the company’s history. But the truth is that not much will change. Bill will continue to play a key role as Chairman of the company. And we’ll all continue to work together to deliver innovative products and services that improve people’s lives and create new opportunities for Microsoft, our customers, and our partners.

I want to close by extending a heartfelt thank you to Bill for his friendship, his partnership, his insight, and his inspiration.

Bill — It has been an amazing and wonderful 28 years for me, and I know that everyone at this company shares my respect and admiration for what you have achieved. We look forward to seeing what you do in the next phase of your career as we continue to build the great company that you launched more than three decades ago.

Steve

Posted in Bill Gates, Corporate strategy, Management | 2 Comments »

More on Microsoft’s future

I’ve been doing a number of book-publicity-related events, as of late. If you prefer your information delivered via podcasts, videocasts and via other multi-media channels, here are a few links you might want to check out:

Microsoft futures of interest to institutional investors: The Citi Software folks graciously hosted me on a dial-in call for investor clients. The full Q&A is available by dialing in:

Replay: 888-203-1112 or 719-457-0820
Passcode: 4192523

Fox Business on the Microsoft vs. Apple tech rivalry: A video clip of my recent appearance on Fox Business, where I was charged with “defending” Microsoft against two Apple-friendly tech folks (Leander Kahney of Wired.com and Arik Hesseldahl, tech writer for Businessweek).

Windows 7 secrecy: My ZDNet blogging colleagues Larry Dignan, Ed Bott and I chat in this video clip about Microsoft’s decision to clamp down on all information pertaining to Windows 7 — and what that strategy means to customers and partners.

Posted in Windows, Windows 7 | 2 Comments »

Can Microsoft learn to innovate?

Microsoft execs don’t miss any opportunity to claim that Microsoft is one of the biggest innovators in the tech world.  Officials routinely cite Microsoft’s multi-billion annual research and development spending as proof that Microsoft is an Innovator (with a capital “I”).

As I note in Microsoft 2.0, R&D spending doesn’t necessarily translate to more/better innovations. Plus, many of the “innovations” to which the Softies point aren’t seen by the rest of the industry as anything to write home about. And Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has thrown his weight behind more than one concept (voice/vision-centric input; SPOT watches; Tablet PCs, Surface multi-touch tabletops) that haven’t panned out so well.

Privately, some Softies acknowledge that Microsoft needs to find new and innovative ways to innovate. In my book, I touched on some of the incubators, greenhouses and other new business ventures, products and initiatives Microsoft is testing as possible new innovation channels. A few of these had yet to go public by the time I submitted my book manuscript. But now there is more public info on some of them, specifically:

Microsoft’s Live Experimentation platform (ExP). The ExP team describes the platform as something that “enables product groups at Microsoft and later on will enable developers using Windows Live to innovate using controlled experiments with live users.”

Officelabs. A year ago, I was hearing talk about a new incubator in the Microsoft Business Division that was trying to become more agile and open. It took Microsoft until late April 2008 to acknowledge publicly the existence of “Office Labs.” One of the first Office Labs projects to see the official light of day is ”Search Commands,” a tool that was codenamed “Scout” — an add-in for navigating more easily Office 2007’s new Ribbon interface.

There are still other as-yet-unannounced innovation projects at Microsoft. Stay tuned for more….

Posted in Office, Research, Windows Live | 5 Comments »

Yahoo: All that hedging for nothing

As I mentioned in the conclusion of Microsoft 2.0, I had just submitted the final version of my book manuscript a week before Microsoft announced its $44 billion bid to buy Yahoo.

Disbelief was followed by utter despair — and not just on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s part. All I could think on February 1 was I was going to have to go back and revise every single one of my 300-plus pages. 

I did go back in and update my chapters to reflect the possibility Microsoft might end up buying Yahoo. Then I revised again to say Microsoft did buy Yahoo (given that much of the press in February made it sound like it was pretty much a done deal). Right before my drop-dead go-to-printer date, I revised one last time, saying that Microsoft might or might not buy Yahoo.

Well, as we now know, on May 3, Microsoft withdrew its takeover bid, after being unwilling to meet the higher per-share price that the Yahoo board was demanding.

As I noted in the book, if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, it would have taken the companies years to integrate. While Microsoft officials were predicting an almost immediate impact on their shared online services/online advertising strategies, few outside observers believed that the buy would result in any immediate changes — in Microsoft’s Online Services Business or any other parts of the Redmond software maker.

I think Silicon Alley Insider Henry Blodget had the best analysis of why a Microsoft-Yahoo combination would take forever (if ever) to begin to gel. Based on comments from many Softies, Yahoos and industry/market watchers, Microsoft’s ultimate failure to buy Yahoo may have been the best thing that could have happened to MIcrosoft, for a variety of reasons. The dissolution of the deal does beg the question, of course, of what Microsoft now plans to do to build its online ad inventory (and search market share) — the primary reason Ballmer & Co. said they wanted the deal in the first place.

Will Microsoft swoop back in later this year and try to buy Yahoo again? Will the Redmondians buy another online-advertising player instead? Will Microsoft do the seemingly unthinkable and completely withdraw from the online advertising business? Stay tuned….

Posted in Advertising, Cloud Computing, Yahoo | 1 Comment »

Windows Live Wave 3 Planning Memo (August 2007) — Part 2

When Microsoft began rolling out its primarily consumer-focused Windows Live service line-up, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the company’s plans. Enter Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Experience. In 2007, Jones, along with colleagues David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, and Brian Arbogast, Corporate Vice President of Mobile Services, began trying to bring some discipline and regimentation to the Windows Live development effort.

In the summer of 2007, that gang of three issued a Windows Live Wave 3 planning document that
demonstrated just how much they planned to change the modus operandi of the Windows Live team. The thinking: Theme planning, milestones, vision checkpoints, and other Windows-like conventions, if successfully implemented, will make Windows Live services more predictable and reliable. (The addition of these more rigorous quality gates also risk slowing the Windows Live development pace, however.) Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if and when Microsoft ends up acquiring Yahoo — or even if its acquisition bid ends up a distraction more than a reality — how these milestones and policies are impacted.

The internal Live Wave 3 Planning Memo Part 1 is here.  What follows is Part 2.

Delivering High Quality Connections

What are the new creative ways to drive connections to our services, other services, or merchants? Most people agree that the ideal is experiences that are relevant to the customer and drive theright traffic to the referee.  The specific things we’d consider include:

* What features will we design that drive more traffic across the network?

o To MSN
o To Search instant answers, etc.
o To advertisers or other merchants

* What features create new opportunities for merchants or delivery of value added services?

o Photo printing, events, affinity groups, lists

* For display advertising, how do we improve and target?  How do we manage the experience for customers (prevent irrelevant ads)? 

o How do we avoid “selling all the inventory at any price?”  This is the channel 35 late night TV example
o How do we create an experience that allows for the systematic collection of customer data about their location, preferences and interests that can be fed to the ad platform for better targeting which results in better quality of ads and increased yield.  This extends to having them add more information about their contacts and driving up the attributes per contact metric is currently low implying good breadth but not enough depth.

* How do we track and measure effectiveness?  How do we improve based on what we know?
* How does education and x-sell work in tandem? What is our SEO strategy for the suite, and itscomponents?
* How do our products (and specifically our user-generated content) effectively show up in our search results without violating user trust?
* Cross team – AdCenter

First Class Mobile Experience

* How do we create a compelling end to end mobile experience for users whose mobile device is their primary access point to the internet? (Particularly pertinent to certain markets such as China and Japan).
* How can we use mobile features to drive engagement with our services in the PC? And vice versa?
* How do we balance the need to reach every mobile user with the depth of experience with more capable phones?
* Phone number as a Live ID, phone number for SMS reset
* SMS, MMS, VOIP interop
* Contact roaming
* Taxonomy of mobile devices
* Onboarding and promotion
* Relationship with mobile client software team
* Messenger to mobile interop
* Relationship with network operators
* Can /should we do anything for location based services?
* What is our monetization strategy and role of our partners and how does that differ by market specially where online advertising is not as well developed but mobile use is increasing POP, IMAP, and other standards for connecting to non-Windows Mobile devices
* Cross team – Windows Mobile, Mobile Platform

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Live Mesh, Office, Supporting Documentation, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Live | 2 Comments »

Windows Live Wave 3 Planning Memo (August 2007) — Part 1

When Microsoft began rolling out its primarily consumer-focused Windows Live service line-up, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the company’s plans. Enter Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Experience. In 2007, Jones, along with colleagues David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, and Brian Arbogast, Corporate Vice President of Mobile Services, began trying to bring some discipline and regimentation to the Windows Live development effort.

In the summer of 2007, that gang of three issued a Windows Live Wave 3 planning document that
demonstrated just how much they planned to change the modus operandi of the Windows Live team. The thinking: Theme planning, milestones, vision checkpoints, and other Windows-like conventions, if successfully implemented, will make Windows Live services more predictable and reliable. (The addition of these more rigorous quality gates also risk slowing the Windows Live development pace, however.) Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if and when Microsoft ends up acquiring Yahoo — or even if its acquisition bid ends up a distraction more than a reality — how these milestones and policies are impacted.

Here is Part 1 of Microsoft’s internal Windows Live Wave 3 Planning Memo.

TO: Windows Live Experience Team; Live Platform Services Team
FROM: Chris Jones, David Treadwell, Brian Arbogast
RE: Planning Windows Live Wave 3

INTRODUCTION

As we are nearing the completion of Windows Live Wave 2, we want to congratulate the teams on their work to date.  Windows Live Wave 2 delivers the first version of our integrated suite of software services.

Our mission is to deliver the essential suite of software and services for individuals around the world, designed to help them stay connected (browse, create, manage, and share with the people they choose, on any device) and protected (provide safety and security for their information, their families, and their devices), built on the leading platform for developers, merchants, and advertisers. We believe that users of these services will create a web of user defined content that will improve the traffic to Windows Live Search, create a valuable audience for advertisers, and enable the next generation of software and content publishers.  We believe our investments in safety, security and PC health will differentiate our experience and dramatically increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.  At the same time, we believe this combination of software and services will be an incredible benefit and differentiator for the Windows PC and Windows powered devices.  Finally, we believe that it is the work of the community of developers and content publishers that will enhance and uniquely differentiate the experience for customers.

This document is the planning memo and it outlines the shared assumptions in our planning work across Windows Live Experience and related teams in Live Platform Services and Mobile Services:

* It covers the state of the market – including customers, partners, competition, and challenges. 
* It outlines our strategy for Windows Live. It sets the shared themes and bets that span all the features in Windows Live Wave 3 and investments for Wave 4. 
* It outlines the feature teams and areas for investment in Windows Live, as well as the questions to be asked and answered as part of team planning. 
* It sets the timeline and schedule for both our plan and Wave 2. 

Together we will build a plan that spans the work in Windows Live Experience and Live Platform Services and supports the business priorities established by the Online Services Group.  This plan will cover the work and commitments for the teams over the next year.  A wave describes the deliverables that happen throughout the year, including smaller improvements that are made to our services on an ongoing basis.  As we plan, it is important to recognize that the platform group needs more notice and time to build out both back end infrastructure and operations.  So when we plan Wave 3 we need to also look out enough to plan the platform work for Wave 4. We are making a few changes from Wave 2 based on our experience as a team.

* We are going to focus our planning work on themes that span feature teams.  We hope in doing so to improve the experience for customers when using our suite together.
* We are going to enter planning as a team with a clear definition of planning themes, including click-through prototypes.  As we do this we will front load design of major cross Wave dependencies.
* We will have clear entry and exit criteria for MQ, and use MQ to invest in design and implementation of major cross team dependencies.

The following figure illustrates our planning process.

This planning memo starts our planning process and is intended to be used by teams to develop the vision and the feature set for their areas.  It describes bets and themes for Wave 3.  These themes in many cases span experience and platform, client and service, and are used during planning to structure our investigation of what to build.  In some cases, this means we will decide not to pursue a theme.  In other cases, we will merge themes together.  In others, we’ll narrow our definition.  And in some cases, a new set of scenarios will emerge.  As we investigate the themes, and scope what is possible, we will write the vision document, which defines the pillars for our release.  As with Wave 2, the vision document describes our team commitment to deliver.

Some people have asked “what’s the difference between a theme and a pillar?”  Themes are used in planning, and outline the areas of exploration for a Wave.  By design, we have more themes than we can fit in a Wave.  In the course of planning, we will refine the themes into work that can be achieved in our release timeframe.  This exploration, based on detailed plans from the feature teams, results in the pillars for the release.  It is possible for a theme to become a pillar.  It is also possible that in planning we merge themes or come up with a new set of scenarios that become a pillar.

In Wave 2, themes were provides as guidance to feature teams.  In Wave 3, themes will be the foundation of our planning process.  Each theme will have an owner (generally a GPM and/or PUM), a product planner, and, in most cases, a design lead.  Each theme owner will produce a presentation and a high-fidelity click through prototype for each theme.  The role of the owner will be to coordinate the investigation of each theme, working with product planning, product management, design, development, testing, and other discipline leaders.  They will work across dependent teams as they are writing their drafts and make sure that scenarios or features that span teams are covered end to end.  They will outline the proposed scenarios and customer promise.  We expect to hold these theme checkpoint meetings in late October with the theme owners. 

These theme checkpoints provide scoped and refined themes to the feature teams, who will then work on planning their work for Wave 3.  Once we have scoped the themes, we will have a set of feature team checkpoints, where the teams will describe what they believe can be delivered for Wave 3 based on our themes.  These feature teams are the experts on the scenarios and specifics for their area and are responsible for building best of breed solutions to meet customer demand.  Any conflicts or disagreements between teams should be resolved as part of the checkpoint meetings. We will hold checkpoint meetings with each feature team in December, where the feature teams will outline their plans for Wave 3. 

Following these checkpoint meetings, we will decide on the pillars for Wave 3 and write the vision document.  The GPMs and/or PUMs will work with Chris Jones and David Treadwell to create a single draft vision document that spans the work in Windows Live Wave 2.  This will include the value proposition, tenets, top level schedule, shared bets, and feature commitments across our teams.  We will load balance as required across teams to make sure that the themes and scenarios are delivered for the Wave.  We expect to publish the vision document in December.

The feature teams will use the vision document and resource plan to build the final feature list and schedule for their area.  Following their detailed schedules, we will have a vision week with team members and partners where we walk through the vision, demonstrate the prototypes, and commit to the shared schedule.  For Windows Live Experience teams, we will then move into M1 and coding for Windows Live Wave 3….

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Posted in Cloud Computing, Supporting Documentation, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Live | 20 Comments »

Translucency vs. Transparency Blog Post

When long-time Windows chief Jim Allchin passed the Windows-development torch to Microsoft veteran Steven Sinofsky in late 2006, many things changed. One of the biggest was Microsoft’s policy on “transparency.”

Following a couple of service pack code and information leaks in July 2007, Sinofsky wrote a post on his internal blog explaining why he believed “translucency,” instead of “transparency,” is the best approach for his team and for customers. Because Sinofsky’s philosophy is so integral to how Microsoft 2.0 is attempting to operate, I decided to share it. This blog post was provided to me by a source, who asked not to be named.

7/9/2007
Transparency and disclosure
 
Transparent. Easily seen through or detected; obvious.
Translucent. easily understandable; lucid.
 
Today was a pretty exciting day for the folks working on servicing Windows Vista as there were a number of breathless stories about SP1 including dates and features. These stories caught us (management) by surprise since not only have we not announced any of the things in these stories, but much of what was reported was not or will not be the case. This is not a good situation to be in and I thought I’d offer some words on how we think of “transparency” relative to disclosure.
 
One topic I have been having an interesting time following has been the blogs and reports that speculate about how Windows will go from being an open or transparent product development team to being one that is “silent” or “locked down”. Much of this commentary seems to center around me personally, which is fine, but talks about how there is a Sinofsky-moratorium on disclosure. I think that means I owe it to the team to provide a view on what I do mean personally (and what I personally mean to do), of course I do so knowing that just by writing this down I run this risk of this leaking and then we’ll have a round of phone calls and PR management to do just with regards to “Sinofsky’s internal memo on disclosure”. But I thought it would be worth a try.
 
The most important thing I believe we owe our shareholders and customers relative to how and what we communicate is that whatever communicate to people be accurate and truthful relative to the work we have going on. This does not mean free from ability to change down the road. It does not mean silence until the very last minute. What it does mean is that we should recognize the potential impact our communications can have on customers, partners, and our industry and we should treat folks with great respect because when we do disclose what we’re working on people pay attention—and they do more than listen as they make plans, spend money, or otherwise want to count on what we have to say. When we have to change our plans, modify what has been said, or retract/restate things we not only look like we don’t have our act together, but we cause real (tangible) pain to customers and partners. One need look no further than the Longhorn/Vista product cycle and the cost to the PC ecosystem of us being out there talking broadly before we really were able to speak with the accuracy our customers and partners assumed. Plans were made. Plans were remade. And then finally people just decided to wait until we really delivered, with some folks not really believing us until the DVD was in their hands, which meant they were no on board with drivers, compatible applications, or the support their customers expected. That example is close at hand, but we can look at examples for Server 2008, ship dates that came and went for any number of products, or even recent examples with Windows Live. This is a challenge that spans all of Microsoft, not just Windows.
 
All of these challenges come about because there is a mismatch between expectations and reality—that mismatch or gap is the heart of customer dissatisfaction. What we can do is be thoughtful about planning and then just as thoughtful about how we communicate those plans. That is what we are doing.
 
Customers and partners want to know about SP1 for Vista. Actually they need to know. We want to tell them. But we want to do so when our plans and execution allow that communication to be relatively definitive. We are not there yet. So telling folks and then changing the plans causes many more challenges than readily apparent. While it might sound good on paper to be “transparent” and to give a wide open date range and a wide open list of release contents, we all know that these conversations with customers don’t end with the “we’ll ship by <x> date and we’ve prioritized <quality>”. Folks do want to know “did you fix this <example> bug?” That is reasonable, but we don’t have all those answers and thus we cannot have a reasonably consistent and reliable communication…yet. We are working towards that. While there is clearly a challenge in the near term in not offering details, this challenge is much less than if we get the wrong information out there and we have to reset and unset expectations. Even among our enterprise customers, for whom this type of information is routine, we have a long history of really scrambling these most valuable customers with “information” that turned out to be “misinformation”. The difference we are trying to highlight is the difference between transparency in what we’re “thinking” and transparency in what we’re “doing”. Everyone wants to know what we’re thinking, but making it clear that those are thoughts versus “doing” is a subtlety lost on a mass audience.
 
So our goal as an organization is to be much more thoughtful and considerate with what we disclose. Premature disclosure might make us feel like we were helping. Heck it might even make some customers and partners feel good, and some partners might even understand of the challenges we face in managing our projects. But on the whole it did not make Microsoft a good citizen of the ecosystem and it certainly did not make us good enterprise partners. Being thoughtful and considerate means we will be just as open and just as transparent about roadmaps and plans as we ever were (meaning the contents we disclose) but we are going to work to eliminate the premature disclosure that has low reliability and high error rates—we will have the right materials for enterprise customers, brief industry analysts, and work with partners all with valuable and timely information. Notice that these audiences are our customers and partners and that a non-goal is allowing the news cycle or needs of the press to drive disclosure timing and contents.

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Posted in Supporting Documentation, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Vista | 20 Comments »

Think Week Paper: Edge Computing Network

Twice a year, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was known for going off on sequestered “Think Weeks” to read papers submitted by Microsoft employees with ideas for new products and technologies which they believed Microsoft should be considering, going forward.

In the early Microsoft days, these papers were secret. But in the middle of this decade, Microsoft began sharing these Think Week papers publicly inside the company, allowing employees to comment on them and to see Gates’ and other key Microsoft executives’ comments on them.

One of these papers, shared with me by a source who requested anonymity, provided a good sense of some of the “cloud-computing ” infrastructural issues with which Microsoft has been — and needs to be — grappling.

Because Microsoft is spending so much on building out its datacenters and people in the online business space in order to gird for the Web 2.0 and 3.0 battles, the issues described in this paper are especially interesting. And there are some hints about the still-under-wraps Microsoft CloudDB and Blue technologies that are also rather intriguing.

An Edge Computing Network for MSN and Windows Live Services
Author: Jason Zions
Date:  12/15/2006

Abstract

Microsoft’s online properties create and monetize rich content and innovative end-user experiences. To meet their business objectives while providing the quality of service needed to attract and delight an audience, they must overcome a variety of technical and operational challenges. Many of these challenges arise from the current architecture of the properties themselves and from limitations of the infrastructure which supports them.

The Edge Computing Network (ECN) extends Microsoft’s existing core network and data center infrastructure with intelligent computing nodes at the “edge” of the network cloud. This distributed computing network provides a set of net¬work, com¬puting, storage and management resources and services closer end users.  The ECN goes beyond traditional Content Distribution Networks to enable a wider range of application architect¬ures that offer improvements to performance and robust¬ness and reduction or elimination of some operational challenges.

This document identifies the challenges faced by Microsoft’s on-line properties (as well as some problems created by current implementations), lays out the vision for the Edge Com¬puting Network, describes the progress already made towards achieving the vision, and works through two scenarios showing how the ECN could be exploited by a property.
 
Challenges Faced by On-Line Properties

Microsoft has roughly 150 on-line properties covering a tremendous range of scale, customer base, and functionality. Despite that huge variation, they each face a fairly consis¬tent set of challenges that fall into a few broad categories.

Network Challenges

Any internet-facing service has to deal with network latency, which degrades the usability of the service. The larger the latency, the worse the problem; the usability impact is mul¬tiplied by the number of round trips. Common web site development can results in tens or even hundreds of round-trips to display a fairly complex page; each separate graphical element gets retrieved independently. Various technologies have been created to deal with this. Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) like Akamai and Savvis sell distributed small-object caching services, relying on a global network of points-of-presence (POPs) housing web servers which serve static graphical elements. These POPs are located so as to have much lower latency (with respect to the end user’s browser) than that of the owner of the actual on-line service.

Similar problems arise for streaming video, although the problem is due more to packet loss and variation in packet delivery times than in pure latency. Streaming as well as straight downloading of large files raise issues of bandwidth provisioning; serving many downloads and streams from a single origin would require very large (and very expensive) egress from that origin to the Internet, and the Internet’s backbone itself isn’t growing in capacity as fast as Internet traffic overall is growing. CDNs sell services which solve those issues as well, serving large files and streams from many distributed POPs around the world.

The past few years have seen the rise of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in which a large army of zombie attacking nodes attempt to overwhelm a single service. While usage of CDNs can protect static content from DDoS attacks, a single origin hosting dynamic content is still vulnerable.

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Welcome to my (other) Microsoft blog

Welcome!

You’ve come to the right place if you are looking for the book site/blog that is meant to complement the book Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. The book is due out in early May 2008 from John Wiley & Sons, just a couple of months before Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates relinquishes his day-to-day duties at the company he founded more than 30 years ago. As of July 1, Microsoft officially begins its next, post-Gatesian chapter.

This site will include information about the book; supporting material that didn’t make it into the printed pages and regularly updated information on the products, people and strategies detailed in Microsoft 2.0. Because I had to submit the final manuscript earlier this spring — shortly after Microsoft made its $44 billion acquisition bid for Yahoo — the book had to be “frozen” in that moment of time. But as Microsoft’s acquisiton moves forward (or doesn’t); as more Softies quit (and new ones join); and as Live Mesh, Windows 7 and other new products begin to take shape, I’ll be covering all that and more on this site.

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