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Category: innovation

MSFT-YHOO: People get ready, a change is gonna come…

Published February 9, 2008 by cgerrish

As someone trapped in the locked down world of enterprise software during the working day, I often think about the nature and rationale for the lock. Generally, people adapt to whatever environment they’re in, and I’ve adapted to the limited, crippled environment in which I have to get work done.

More and more, applications that used to be written in-house are being brought in from the outside, particularly around employee benefits, expense tracking and performance reviews. These are general business functions where outside shops always provide a better software solution than the in-house one. All of these vendor provided solutions are Web-based and are integrated into corporate network identity management systems. In many cases, employee data is stored with the outside vendor. This is a trend that will only accelerate.

One of the locks on the corporate desktop is Microsoft. MS Office rules the roost, it’s the conduit through which all work and communication occurs. A consequence of the lockdown is that change and innovation happens at a very slow rate. In part, this is due to the installed software model of most corporate desktops. Managing tens of thousands of geographically dispersed desktop computers is a highly complex task. Complexity is reduced by simplifying the systems, and eliminating outside influences.

Imagine how much cost and complexity could be reduced if all enterprise applications were delivered via the web. The economics dictate that installed corporate applications must migrate to the web. Or to quote Steve Gillmor from 2005, Office is dead. Some version of this story is at the bottom of the business case for Ray Ozzie’s Office Live. Many have made the case that this software delivery model only makes sense for the SOHO market. Actually it makes even more sense for very large corporations.

So how does this relate to Yahoo? Years of operating in the highly constrained enterprise environment has drawn the boundaries of Microsoft’s imagination. Microsoft needs Yahoo to teach it how to dance to that crazy new music all the kids dig. Once enterprise applications are delivered via the web, the speed of innovation will increase. The surrounding web-based consumer application space is already filled with more powerful tools than the enterprise, particularly in the area of collaboration and knowledge management. Flickr and Delicious are tremendous knowledge management tools. Ray Ozzie sees the change is gonna come, and makes the big move that will help them get ready.

Nicholas Carr’s Big Switch makes the case for the move from the hard drive to the cloud and Matt Ritchtel’s piece in today’s NY Times summarizes. Can Microsoft trade in its lead boots for a new set of led boots? Perhaps Curtis Mayfield and Sam Cooke said it best: People get ready, a change is gonna come.

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MS-Yahoo: Can Ray Ozzie Make Elephants Dance?

Published February 3, 2008 by cgerrish

My two cents on Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo: Microsoft, finding itself in the new world of the social graph, needs to buy some friends. People don’t like Microsoft, they fear and respect it. People don’t buy Microsoft products, they buy products that already contain the OS and Office. People choose Yahoo, they choose delicious and flickr. They like Yahoo Finance. And it’s all supported by advertising.

The question about whether Microsoft could successfully integrate Yahoo is a people question. Is there a strong enough personality within Microsoft to envision an entity that creates a new integrated whole. Clearly it’s not Steve Ballmer, and that means it’s got to be Ray Ozzie. Ozzie is trying to move the key Microsoft revenue streams on to the network with his “Live” initiatives. Yahoo is the advertising framework and user base that could contain and support the new web-based Microsoft Office live.

If Ray Ozzie can make elephants dance, many of are wondering who will call the tune. Microsoft is willing to pay $31 a share, but the cost to Microsoft will be much higher if they decide that Yahoo has to be rebuilt on a Microsoft technical stack. That was their approach with HotMail and it was very expensive. Is this the moment in time where Microsoft embraces a mixed technical operating environment? Yahoo is a big supporter of open standards and open source, the community is justifiably concerned about how Microsoft will affect this. When you integrate YahooMail and HotMail, do you make your decision based on technical stack or the quality of the product? Are the decision makers at Microsoft capable of making a decision based on product quality?

Can a shot-gun wedding result in a happy marriage? When we discuss $1 billion in efficiency as a result of the merger, we’re referring to the brutal process of merging groups, firing people, closing facilities and trying to keep the lights on during the process. The digerati of the Bay area and Redmond will be significantly affected by these changes, and it will ripple into the surrounding economies. There will be a lot of pain for both those who stay and those who leave.

It’s up to Ray Ozzie to provide a new vision of the combined entity that will convince those left standing that it was worth it. For the deal to ultimately be successful, Microsoft will have to be transformed as much or more than Yahoo.

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Design Thinking: Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor

Published January 16, 2008 by cgerrish

This thread of thought bounced from Zeldman to Buxton to Gillmor.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a post about how Apple should hire itself out to fix the awful state of user interface in a number of devices. My immediate reaction was that there’s no reason that good UI should be unique to Apple. Jobs and Ive just start at a different point than most manufacturers. The question really comes down to where the power lies with regard to design thinking in an organization, and at what level design decisions are made (or not made). At Apple the answer is very clear.

This lead me to a lecture by Bill Buxton at Stanford’s HCI program. I wasn’t able to attend in person, but a video of Buxton’s lecture is available through iTunes University. Buxton’s lecture provides the link between industrial design and software interface design– the interface is now part of the form factor. Buxton has been hired to change the design culture of Microsoft. That’s a tall order, but I give them credit for bringing Buxton on board. His ideas about understanding the transitions between states, and the journey from sketching to prototype are very important.

Steve Gillmor chronicles the transition of software applications from the hard drive to the cache / cloud. His latest prediction is that Silverlight will become the rich internet application runtime of choice for the new MacBook Air and the iPhone. Clearly it won’t be Flash or Java. The Ajax apps are already there, but more richness is always better. If Microsoft plays it right, they could find a path into their next incarnation. MS Office may be dead, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Office is yet to be born.

The reason that no phone or computer manufacturer can compete with Apple is they don’t understand what design thinking is or why it’s important to their organization. Phones are designed by a set of pipes, the telecommunications network makes the design decisions. Computer and software interface design is still dominated by the hardware, it’s designed back to front. Until the value of design is understood, and the hardware stops designing the software, Apple will have no competition. It’s all about the ratio of features to features used. Apple leads the field by a mile.

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Air: The Difference between Broadcast and Servers

Published January 15, 2008 by cgerrish

We can connect to servers wirelessly, and that’s a kind of air. But when we broadcast over the air, it’s entirely different. When broadcasting content over the air, you don’t care how many receivers are taking in the signal. When listening with a web server, the number of requests for content matter a lot.  A good example is what happened to Twitter or many of the blogs during Steve Jobs’s MacWorld keynote. Twitter went down, and many of the blogs covering the event were slow or unreachable. It’s the finite and the infinite, a fundamental difference in the way communications channels scale.

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