Leaked Memo Gives Microsoft New Direction?

daria42 writes "An e-mail memo sent from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to top execs at Microsoft has been leaked, revealing the executive wants his company to hurriedly change its focus and start to tap online advertising and services as new revenue sources. In the e-mail, Gates cites another, earlier memo, sent from MS exec Ray Ozzie, in which Ozzie also warns MS of the importance of focusing on the online medium. 'It's clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk,' Ozzie wrote. 'We must respond quickly and decisively. We should've been leaders with all our web properties in harnessing the potential of Ajax, following our pioneering work in OWA (Outlook Web Access),' he continued. 'We knew search would be important, but through Google's focus they've gained a tremendously strong position.'"

Comments

Next up

[SilverspurG]

fp

In the memo, Gates cites an earlier missive from Ray Ozzie, outlining the importance of tapping online advertising and services as new revenue sources.

Next up for Windows Longhorn: A brand new desktop popup ad API complete with billboard-type access to the background pic. No more questionably ethical malware required--it's now part of the OS.

Oh, and you, the user, don't get the revenue. That is reserved exclusively to MS. It'll be in the EULA.

Microsoft is proposing its own rival to PDF, known as Metro, with Windows Vista, its new operating system that is due out next year.

That's just what we need: another "me too!" document format. Oh for crying out loud. Windows is fast becoming the toilet with a toaster, cordless drill, leaf blower, and pencil holder built in. It's the Chewbacca Defense of featureware.

Gates, Ballmer, Ozzie, et al: I'm going to give you a hint which will help you. I'm not supposed to do this because I'm a Linux fanatic but I'm going to do it anyway because you seem to be retarded and it makes me feel good inside to help those who are less fortunate than I am. Do you really want to stay in the game? Figure out what your job is, define it, simplify it, and do it well before you try to branch out like some mutating cancerous amoeba. Drop all the featureware that's in your OS and concentrate on simplifying, standardizing, and securing the 600 layers beneath what the users see. There, I've even invented a new 3S meme for your PR campaign--and I claim full IP on it right here on /. You can start paying me the moment I see it used in your quarterly report.

Young, energetic, and emerging Linux devs would do well to follow the same advice before they take Linux down the same path that MS forged years ago.

Re:Next up

[khakipuce]

I guess when you are worth $40 billion you can tell Bill how to run his business.

Fact is that most people don't care about the locking mechanism of their car, or it's cylinder diameter or stroke; they didn't by their DVD player because of its tech spec; they don't know the soil type in their garden or the geology unerlying their house. And ... (hope all the Slashdotter's are sitting down) ... they don't care about OS security or a few bugs.

If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough. For most people the computer at work is reasonably well locked down and works 95% of the time. The home machine is a toy, if it fails they can't play for a while and I know many who are happy to assume that, like a lot of consumer electronics, when it stops working you go a get a new one (even if it stopped because it was shot through with viruses and bugs). Most people have too much other stuff to consume their time to care about quality of the underlying technology/infrastructure/design/geology...

Bill knows this and knows what sells, "wasting" time on fixing security holes and the like does not deliver more profit to the shareholders. And as for making Slashdotters happy - why should he, he'll never persuade some people to use his software because they are ideologaiclly opposed to Microsoft, whatever it does.

Re:Next up

[jkrise]

Fact is ... And ... (hope all the Slashdotter's are sitting down) ... they don't care about OS security or a few bugs...

Fact is.. this is Slashdot. For the rare Joe ServicePack reading these pages, he ought to be better informed. Not mis-informed.

Bill knows this and knows what sells, "wasting" time on fixing security holes and the like does not deliver more profit to the shareholders.

If enough developers got informed about the real Directions at Microsoft and stayed away from the Windows platform, the shareholders would turn a pck of hungry wolves. Ordinary users would have few, if any worthwhile apps to run on their Windows boxes.

Once they start using Firefox and Opera and get comfy with the interface, they'd rapidly change the engine as well.

-

Re:Next up

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I honestly think that's less true than it used to be; in the last few years I've heard a lot of non-technical people complaining about how insecure and unstable Windows is. They may not always -- in fact usually don't -- use the terminology correctly, and they're often clueless as to how to prevent problems or fix them when they occur, but they're aware of the problem ... and that a lot of it is not "just the way computers are," that there are other OSs and that maybe "throw it away when it breaks and get a new one" is not really a solution they should need to resort to.

It's like with cars. First they were the toys of hobbyists, who expected to have to tinker with them all the time just to make them run. Now they're quite reliable for a very long time, as long as the user does very simple things to keep them running; even if you can't do anything more complex than filling up the gas tank yourself, you know where to go for anything else the car needs, and maintenance is pretty standardized these days. But there was a long, long intermediate period in which cars were very common if not universal, clearly consumer goods rather than the domain of specialists, but were still terribly unreliable and it it was a good idea for anyone who drove one to carry a complete toolkit and the knowledge of how to use it. And if you didn't? Well, sooner or later you'd be stranded on the side of the road. People bitched about this state of affairs, but they still drove -- but when truly reliable cars began coming on the market, there was no question about what they'd prefer.

In case the analogy isn't entirely clear, I think personal computing in general is starting to move into the third stage. Microsoft is quite firmly stuck in the second. They may very well be able to change this -- Ford did; perhaps more relevantly, IBM did when business computing underwent the same transition -- but it's going to take a real effort, and I don't see much sign of it so far.

Re:Next up

[hey!]

I have to disagree on quite a few points here.

First of all let's get this out of the way:

Soil type: acidic loam.
Geology: Granite ledge
OS Security: Perfectly acceptable, even on XP as I keep the firewall on keep my various apps patched, and don't use any Microsoft software if it can be avoided.

Now the key point.

Bill doesn't know what people want to buy. Microsoft has got a huge tin ear when it comes to consumer preferences. When it comes to consumers, their basic approach is to look for somebody who's figured it out (e.g. Palm). They then wage a hellish and assymetric war of attrition in which, backed by their resources, they have considerable leeway for making mistakes, but the opponent has none. When Microsoft does try to dream up stuff on their own (e.g. Bob), they're pretty much always laughably wrong.

I'm not saying they aren't smart. They're very good on big picture startegy and, perhaps, organizational psychology. They know how to get IT managers to do what they want. They know how to do business deals and how to use advantages they have in one market to advance in another. But understanding consumers? Nope. Are you itching to buy into their online music service? Anyone?

If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough

This is very, very wrong. I'd place the bar for "happy" closer to 95/100, not 7/10. People accept 7/10 because they aren't aware there's any choice. Ignorance covers a multitude of sins.

Think of the people who "hate" computers. There's tons of them. How can this possibly be? Computers are one of the most amazing, fascinating and spectacular inventions humanity has ever made. It's more than an invention -- it's a meta-invention, a think that can reinvent itself from being a calculator to being a music player to being a toy to being a communications device. Drawing on Steve Jobs, who gets consumer behavior, does anybody hate bicycles as a technology?

No. It's not computers that people hate. It's Windows.

The reason Windows sucks is that Microsoft is not consumer driven, nor does it have to be. It can afford to follow it's own independent strategic imperatives, and it lets others figure out what consumers actually want, confident in its nearly unique ability to react quickly. So -- consumers start buying iPods and $.99 music downloads? MS would never come up with that kind of idea on its own. But you can bet it's going to take several large and well funded swipes at it.

Ajax

[grazzy]

Sure, it's great and all, but it'll never change the way the web works. Improve it, yes. Change it? No. You can build as large js-applications as you wish (and yes, spend exponentially as much time debugging them) - you will never escape the fact that you're just building hacks around a stateless technology from pre 90's.

Leaked?

[n0dalus]

I find it very hard to believe that anything like this coming from Microsoft is not entirely intentional.
Microsoft is nothing more than a gargantuan marketing machine. This action is no exception.

Programming Philosophies

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix: Do one thing, and do it well
Mac: Do a few things, but be simple, and secure about it
Windows: Do lots of things, some well, most not, but get them into production fast

Article summary

[Dekortage]

In a nutshell: "We missed the boat again. Smaller companies are beating us. Let's crush them. Go Microsoft!"

This stinks of C#, dotnet, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

This really is ominous news, as it means that MS is going to release - YET ANOTHER - development platform which will surely have a slick interface that n00bz can pick up and drag'n'drop together some basic apps (but experienced programmers will scoff at) which - of course - will only build apps for MS' proprietary platform ... and of course, the only client which will be able to access this new platform is MSIE7 on Vistahorn...

Nothing to see here people, its just another tactic to lock us in but this time they want to tax us -while- they rape us, rather than just beforehand.

I know its wishful thinking, but I really hope this goes the way of passport and bob...

-GenTimJS

I dunno about that

[brunes69]

This article was written before GMail.

It was written before Google Maps, and more importantly, before Google Maps and Google Local combined.

It was written before Google Movies, and Google Video.

Frankly, I think Microsoft has at least a year of catching up to do, and that is *because* they are Microsoft. Any other company, I would give them at least double that.

That is just to match the technology. Then, they have to get marketshare. Sure, they have a huge channel to shove their stuff down (Windows), but Google is in a far better position than Netscape was in it's day. Netscape was still an app that had to be run. Google is a verb. You never saw the Jennifer Lopez talking about how she "Netscaped It" in Maid in Manhattan.

It is the same reason that Amazon auctions and Yahoo! auctions flounder in obscurity, even though they are cheaper to list on and have basically the exact same feature set as eBay. Ebay has the mindshare. It is featured in Movies and TV constantly. It is a verb. It is so commonplace it will be really a tough nut to crack.

Not to mention Google also has billions in the bank and is raking in revenue, while Netscape was giving away it's key product for free. They are also in a fa rbetter finiancial position to fight than Netscape ever was.

Re:One Guys Take on How MS Kicks Ass

[mspohr]

One important factor here that you have omitted.

Microsoft has never been successful in an area where they couldn't leverage their desktop monopoly. Since they don't have a monopoly on the net, they'll have difficulty here.

Symptom of a worse disease

[Philodoxx]

In the past, Microsoft has been very good at playing catch-up. They have been able to identify an area that the company lacks, and then through a variety of methods such as standardization, guaranteeing interoperability, undercutting, and flat out buying competitors they unify a market and they make a lot of money in the process.

Microsoft in the past, rightly or not, was seen as a great innovator. I can remember in high school listening to a Microsoft employee talk about his job and being amazed about how fun it sounded to work there. Even though they were playing catch up in a lot of what they were doing, they were able to come off to a lot of people as improving whatever they were copying and pushing it in bold new directions.

The problem now is that the perception of Microsoft has shifted to a more accurate one: a company that does not innovate, and "borrows" all of its good ideas rather than pushing the limits. This memo just furthers this idea. Online advertising has been done before, it has failed miserably before (anybody remember the dot com burst?) but now that Google has made a successful business model from it, Microsoft suddenly stands at attention and decides to get into the market.

Right now Microsoft can't even compete with Google in the areas which Google is strong. Even though Microsoft released its "new" search engine, it still only occupies something like 5-10% of users with Google having something like 50%. I realize that Bill Gates desperately wants to kill Google off, because he (rightly) sees the company as a huge threat. The problem is that Google is much better at doing what Google does than Microsoft is.

If Bill Gates wants to kill Google, he's going to have to find a way to leverage what Microsoft is dominant in (oh say... desktop operating systems) against Google. An even better idea would be to start innovating again, bring back the public perception that Microsoft is a leading edge company and start bringing back really smart people back to the company, and start doing something new.