(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10)
Loading ...10 changes Steve Ballmer should make at Microsoft
When I appeared on CBC Newsworld last week to talk about Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft, they asked me whether I thought the company can survive without him. I tried not to roll my eyes.
“I realize there’s a temptation to identify with the founder of a company,” I said, “but he’s put a good succession plan in place. Ford Motor Co. managed to survive without Henry Ford, and I think Microsoft will survive without Bill Gates.”
I barely mentioned Steve Ballmer, because I wasn’t sure how well he would be recognized by a mainstream audience. Although he’s a familiar face within corporate IT departments, I’d argue he’s still not a household name. Here are a few of the things he needs to do next, whether he ever becomes one or not.
1. Make user education a corporate mission. We all know there are more features in Word, Excel and Windows itself that customers simply do not understand. As a result, they spend too much time and energy working around problems Microsoft’s products already solve. Ballmer should invest some marketing dollars in a “Did You Know That Windows Can . . .” campaign that highlights the work Microsoft’s developers have done.
2. Don’t leave the technical vision to Ray Ozzie. The former Groove Networks leader is capable of great insight into technology trends and writing extremely long staff memos, but it should be Ballmer who most clearly articulates the kind of computing environments Microsoft wants to help customers build in the next decade. The last thing he should want is to be seen as merely the sales guy. As Steve Jobs proves, you don’t have to write code to offer some inspiring thoughts on the management of information. Even Gates left too much of the heavy lifting to his subordinates during keynotes. Ballmer should try to change that.
3. Open yourself up as a case study. It can’t be easy running one of the world’s largest companies, so Ballmer should be able to provide CIOs and IT managers a unique perspective on how Microsoft uses technology to align itself with business objectives. He should talk about Microsoft walks the walk.
4. Don’t bash the competition. Microsoft is still dominant in nearly every market, so it makes no sense for Ballmer to bash Google, Apple or other rivals as he has in the past. Microsoft should be more focused on improving its products and growing its business, not swatting at what, in a market share sense, are still flies. There’s no need for the Scott McNealy approach here.
5. Start an open source project. Microsoft has stuck to the same business model for years, but what if its dream team of developers actually reached out to independent ISVs and offered them the same kind of ability to tweak future products as Mozilla does with Firefox, or the way Linux evolves? The company doesn’t even need to release the result as a commercial product (call it “Office Sandbox,” for example) but it would help the company start the kind of positive grassroots following it needs. The whole “shared source” strategy has only gone so far. And although it has released thousands of documentation around Windows and Office already, it needs to communicate something about the difference that’s made to the industry.
6. Engineer a smooth transition to Windows 7. After the Vista debacle (and by extension the XP fiasco), it’s hard to imagine things getting much worse, but demonstrate a willingness to let customers upgrade at their own pace. If companies like SAP are able to offer feature packages to customers rather than demand an ERP overall, Microsoft should be able to do the same thing with its operating system.
7. Partner where it counts. Microsoft’s agreement with Novell was supposed to usher in a new era of interoperability. That may have happened for Suse Linux customers (although there’s not a lot of proof yet), but what about more popular distributions like Red Hat? They’ve held out so far, but Ballmer should be working hard to change their minds.
8. Iron out your acquisition approach. Too much attention has been focused on the buyout of Yahoo and not enough on what Microsoft is doing with the firms it actually managed to purchase. This includes Fast Search and Transfer. We should be seeing the beginnings of a new enterprise search strategy from Microsoft by now. Where is it?
9. Get friendly with the social networking crowd. So what if Microsoft invested in Facebook? Microsoft should be developing for Facebook, just like all the other ISVs that want some exposure to an often technically savvy audience. Imagine if Microsoft created something that make social networking easier, safer or easier to integrate with its applications. That would change a lot of people’s perceptions about its laggard approach to the Internet.
10. Don’t give up on spam. Bill Gates predicted the world would be free of the unsolicited e-mail scourge by 2006. Microsoft had the talent to deliver, and still has. Ballmer would make a considerable mark at Microsoft, and within the IT industry in general, if he could marshal he resources to make good on his predecessor’s promise.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Bill Gates’ last day (revisited)
This clip was widely shown earlier this year at Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ speech at the Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas, but I think with this being his official final bow it’s appropriate to revisit it. If you want more up-to-date footage than this, check out CBC Newsworld today around 2:30 EST where I’ll be discussing the big guy’s legacy and the company he leaves behind.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: IT managers star in summer blockbuster!
Okay, maybe blockbuster is stretching it a little. This is an animated trailer for a live-action short film that’s probably coming to a YouTube channel near you. It’s hard to glean a lot of plot details here, but the Dawn of the Dead-meets-Revenge of the Nerds premise looks promising (It certainly can’t be worse than War, Inc., which I saw last night. ). The help desk hasn’t seen this kind of big action since the Y2K crisis.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Eat, pray, love, compute
The train broke down near Oshawa, Ont., and stayed there for more than an hour. Once all the grumbling and emergency cell phone calls to friends died down, it suddenly sounded like I was sitting in an office. All around me people were opening up laptops, fingers dancing over keyboards and making the most of the time. It was all the more extraordinary, therefore, to not only be sitting next to one of the few other people on the train who decided to read, but that we were reading the same book: Eat, Pray, Love.
My seatmate and I didn’t get a chance to discuss the book – she promptly pulled her jacket over her chest like a blanket and fell asleep – but she probably wouldn’t have been interested in my take on it anyway. Eat, Pray, Love was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who tells the story of getting over a messy divorce by spending time in Italy, India and Indonesia. A self-described “seeker,” she takes up a serious interest in prayer and experiments with a variety of ways to find God. However one passage, about mid-way through the book, struck me as not only relevant to IT managers but offered an exercise worth trying.
While in Italy, Gilbert admits to a friend that she doesn’t feel she could ever live permanently in Rome. Her companion, who was born there, tells her that may be because she has a different word for it. His theory is that every city “has a single word that defines it, that identifies most of the people who live there.” Rome’s word, he informs Gilbert, is SEX. This prompts her to think about the key words for other cities (New York’s is ACHIEVE, she decides, while Los Angeles’s is SUCCEED) and for herself. “I know it’s not MARRIAGE,” she writes. “It’s not DEPRESSION any more, thank heavens . . . my word might be DEVOTATION, though this makes me sound more of a goody-goody than I am and doesn’t take into account how much wine I’ve been drinking.”
IT managers probably have their own words. Some might describe them as a group, while others might encompass the totality of their lives. As a profession, there are a few that readily come to mind, like INNOVATE, though that may be more “aspirational” than a reflection of reality. For a lot of them it’s more likely FIX, unfortunately. Depending on the kind of projects that make up much of their time, it could be IMPROVE, which combines a bit of both.
A number of large enterprises are more geographically distributed than cities, and a few employ nearly as many people as a metropolis. They don’t tend to boil down their essence to a single word but elaborate on it in a mission statement, but those who work there or deal with the company could probably offer up some suggestions (my word for Vial Rail Canada, for example, would be CHUG, which is not a compliment). Much like Gilbert’s quest for a sense of belonging, IT managers might want to think about how well their word matches with that of their surroundings.
I don’t think it gives much of Eat, Pray, Love away to say that Gilbert eventually chooses her word, ANTEVASIN, which is Sanskrit for “one who lives at the border.” That may work for a seeker, but technology professionals are on a different kind of journey, one that should take them closer to the center, and where they need to feel more at home.
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(3 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Why IT ignores the information agenda
When I arrived at the St. Regis Hotel in New York earlier this week, there was no information package waiting in my room from IBM about its Information on Demand strategy. There wasn’t anything in the lobby that suggested a special event that would be taking place the next morning. Only a driver at the airport holding a sign that said “Welcome Rob Ashe,” assured me that the former Cognos president and I were in the right place. This is one of the few times Big Blue has left me, or anyone else, so uninformed.
At the press conference discussing IBM’s integration of the Cognos business intelligence (BI) product line, the company’s general manager of information management software, Ambuj Goyal, tried to explain why the company was taking this path. “We ask companies about their application agenda, and they tell us all about their ERP, their CRM, and so on,” he said. “When we ask them about their information agenda, we don’t get a consistent answer.”
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Family comes first
I realize that most people are just getting back from the holidays, but I have to take a brief hiatus on blogging until the middle of next week to deal with some family issues. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading this blog so far. I’ll have lots more to say when I return.
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(6 votes, average: 8.5 out of 10) Loading ...Vista a year later: Why IT managers clung to the status quo
It didn’t feel like anyone was really rooting for Vista last year. Seldom has a product been launched with such low expectations from industry observers – expectations that in some respects had little to do with the vendor or even the product itself.
On this, Vista’s anniversary, the occasion feels less like a cause for celebration but a ritual in self-righteousness on the part of those who want to prove how astute they were. I’m not going to bother, because Vista’s prospects weren’t that difficult to forecast. It’s a crappy market for upgrades, especially operating systems. Companies are cheap. XP is still doing a decent job. Instead, why not explore an alternate scenario: What if Vista had taken the enterprise market by storm?
