msmobiles.com - Top Management of Microsoft in panic - visionary memos sent to Microsoft employees

msmobiles.com - Top Management of Microsoft in panic - visionary memos sent to Microsoft employeesTop Management of Microsoft in panic - visionary memos sent to Microsoft employees
November 09, 2005 [General]
While we were complaining here for several years already that Microsoft lacks innovativeness and thus is missing out on many major business opportunities, it looks like Bill Gates (de facto boss of Microsoft) and Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) have noticed it just now! Major changes at Microsoft coming! Read on!

Lately Steve and Bill have promoted Ray Ozzie to a position of CTO - Chief Technical Officer. With this catchy name and visionary statements something should be changing now at Microsoft. After all many companies with disruptive technologies and already implemented ideas, have managed to beat Microsoft: Google is offering server side e-mail and increasingly more and more functionality on the server making Windows XP and MS Office totally irrelevant, Skype has managed to dwarf any efforts of Microsot in Voice over IP (VoIP) area and RIM Blackberry overtaken push email market practically eliminating the need for MS Exchange Server.

Now once again Microsoft is playing catch-up game - i.e. trying to release the same products as competition but 2-3 years after they did that. However such primitive catch-up strategy may not be enough because adversaries this time are much more agile in the past.

To motivate troops (i.e. Microsoft employees) both Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie have sent out memos to employees (click their names in this sentence to see these memos).

While Bill Gates once again completely fails to mention (or even to understand) mobility in his memo, Ray Ozzie indeed refers to Windows Mobile issues, here are some quotes:

While we’ve led with great capabilities in Messenger & Communicator, it was Skype, not us, who made VoIP broadly popular and created a new category. We have long understood the importance of mobile messaging scenarios and have made significant investment in device software, yet only now are we surpassing the Blackberry.

[...]

Entertainment & Devices Division

a. CONNECTED ENTERTAINMENT - How can XBox Live benefit from interconnection with other services assets, such as PC-based and mobile-based IM and VoIP? How might both the PC and XBox mutually benefit from a common marketplace? Might PC users act as spectators/participants in XBox games, and vice-versa?

b. GRASSROOTS MOBILE SERVICES – How might the Windows Mobile device experience be transformed by for consumers by connection to a services infrastructure – in particular one enabled by RTC-based unified communications? How might unmediated connection to a rich services infrastructure transform mobile phones into a mass market messaging, media and commerce phenomenon?

c. DEVICE/SERVICE FUSION – What new devices might emerge if we envision hardware/software/service fusion? What new kinds of devices might be enabled by the presence of a service?

As you can see above Ozzie is pushing deeper integration of services with products. In other words: not just selling stand alone products but binding them better with server side services.

Conclusion: while it is still difficult to predict what will be influence of these major changes at Microsoft on Windows Mobile platform and products, probably integration of VoIP into Windows Mobile version of MSN Messenger will occur and Pocket MSN will be extended to cover more services.

Generally we think that these changes can only bring good results for Windows Mobile, however still Microsoft lacks any vision for clearing the situation with MVP program - still many unworthy people get this title while many worthy community contributors are blocked. One final example that Microsoft's MVP program is broken is David Ciccone, who was running Dave's iPAQ website for many years (not just news but huge forum part too) and has contributed to Windows Mobile community thousand times more than many existing MVPs. Microsoft however continued to deny him MVP title and yesterday he closed his Windows Mobile community site and moved to generic one - Mobility Today. Yes, changes are coming at Microsoft, but these changes are not deep enough yet. Microsoft must try harder!