It’s over. Isn’t it? Microsoft/Yahoo, continued

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8 responses to “It’s over. Isn’t it? Microsoft/Yahoo, continued”

1. 

   jon

   May 27, 2008

   “So. What’re you in for?”

   Killer Klowns, by The Dickies

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2. 

   jon

   May 27, 2008

   Meanwhile, back in Vista-land, Ina Fried has an excellent interview with Steven Sinofsky in Windows chief talks ‘7’ on CNet, including

   So, were the problems with Vista support and Vista enthusiasm–it sounds like you’re saying they were mostly issues of disclosure as opposed to execution on the product. Is that right?
   Sinofsky: I don’t really want to dwell too much on the views of the past, and sort of just tell you again the lessons that we learned in working with partners. The team feels this tremendous responsibility to working with IHVs and ISVs and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), because they’re running businesses, they have their own business challenges, their own business goals, their own aspirations, and when we speak about what we might do, they will take it seriously. So, we appreciate that and we respect that, and it’s a great benefit.

   Putting aside how that does or doesn’t sit with the “Vista Capable” decisions, not wanting to talk about product or execution issues of the past (Vista) or present (SP1) doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they’ll be addressed in Windows 7. It doesn’t help with customers and analysts either. This is a long-standing tradition in Windows (executives didn’t allow the post-mortem analysis of “the Longhorn reset” to be distributed) but as a shareholder it’s very disappointing to see Sinofsky embrace it with such a vengeance.

   I can understand why it’s too early to talk about specific features in 7, but I’m a little surprised that it’s too early to talk about some of your philosophies about where Windows has an opportunity to grow, and how things are changing, and some of those things, some of the factors that are influencing your work.
   Sinofsky: Well, again I think what I would say is that we’re talking about different types of customers, and different types of customers have different needs for information and are able to absorb it in a way that I think is mutually responsible.

   and Sinofksy’s closing:

   Let me just end with this. Look, we’re working–the team is working super, super hard on this release of Windows, and you have to imagine we’d really be excited to start showing it to people. We want to show it, and we want people to get their hands on it, but we want to do that under the umbrella of being responsible members of the ecosystem, and being respectful of people’s time and energy and the work that they’ll put in to making Windows 7 great from the work that they can do.

   So, why don’t we say we’re on target for the three years after general availability (of Vista), we’re very excited about the release that we have, and we’re very focused on promising and delivering.

   Well, all right then. You won’t talk about the past or present, you won’t talk about the future because of your fear of making mistakes and an attitude that we don’t really need the information and couldn’t absorb it anyhow, everybody on your team wants to talk about it but you’re saying no, and you won’t commit to any details. But you’re working super, super hard. Good to know.

   Update, May 30: I had missed Chris Flores’ Communicating Windows 7 on the Windows Vista Blog, which points off to the Sinofsky interview and uses some very similar language. “This means sharing the right level of information at the right time depending on the needs of the audience.” And since we clearly don’t need to know anything right now, it ends with the same reassurance that we don’t need to worry our pretty little heads about it:

   We are well into the development process of Windows 7, and we’re happy to report that we’re still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista. As always, we will be releasing early builds of Windows 7 prior to its general availability as a means to gain feedback, but we’re not yet ready to discuss timing and specific plans for any Beta releases. In the meantime, customers can confidently continue with their Windows Vista deployment plans.

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3. 

   Webhost Tips

   May 28, 2008

   This love-and-hate drama between Microsoft and Yahoo will only hurt their stocks in the long run.

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4. 

   jon

   May 29, 2008

   I saw the link to the Sinofsky interview in a thread on Mini, where four of the five people who voiced an opinion liked his performance. In the rest of the world, all eight of the people I’ve asked so far (half Microsoft employees) agree with Anonymous@7:42 on Mini:

   Sinofsky comes off as a person obsessed with spin and with controlling the conversation. He often answers the question he would like to answer, not the one that was asked. His Jedi mind tricks are off putting and fall flat. I found his responses frustrating and obtuse.

   He seems obsessed about one aspect of the process–information disclosure–pinning many of Vista’s ills on sloppy information sharing practices. When asked about those ills specifically, he changes the subject.

   Well said. The Slashdot crowd also makes some excellent points and has some good “5: Funny” comments as well. The fact that most of the people on Mini don’t seem to see it that way is another great example of the reality distortion field hovering over Redmond — and so is the cloud-bashing by the surprising number of people who don’t still seem to get this whole “web” thing.

   They are however acute observers. A detailed price comparisons between Live Search cashback and Google showed much higher prices on Live. Oh dear. It’s astonishing to me that a company that prides itself on “execution” could get this wrong going out of the gate. For this strategy to work, Live needs to be known as the place to save money; at least initially, they would have been much better off with items where they had exclusive prices. Starting out with a bad reputation on this front will be a difficult handicap to overcome. Even brilliant strategies can be screwed up by execution mistakes. Sigh.

   Update, June 1: another anonymous poster did some more digging and found that on three of the four items, the Live Search prices actually are lower than Google. Hmm. Giving the impression of higher prices despite having lower prices in reality is also an execution screwup; hopefully it’s easier to fix.

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5. 

   jon

   May 29, 2008

   My morning blogcheck today started with a couple of very interesting posts. First of all, MiniMSFT’s What’s up with Microsoft India? extracts a long-running thread from the comments about Microsoft India which contains allegations of corporate nepotism by ex-HP’ers, hints of some kind of financial scandal, a GM who either is or isn’t leaving, and signed appearances by senior Microsoft employees Sudeep Bharati and David D’Souza. It’s a very interesting situation, and an example of how the presence of a blog like Mini really changes the dynamic … and of the value of anonymous speech. Unfortunately, the last discussion of MS India on Mini degenerated into anti-Indian racism, and with comment #3 here saying “Let the wogs start their own blog. Do we have to do everything for them?” we seem to be in for more of the same.

   And in a multi-dimensional “when worlds collide” moment, Autumn Sandeen’s Interview Of Microsoft’s Megan Wallent For The Radical Guy Show at Pam’s House Blend links to Ethan St. Pierre’s podcast as well as an earlier ABC Nightline interview. The headline for the ABC transcript, credited to Neil Karlinsky and Alyssa Litoff, summarizes: Transgender Executive: ‘Just a Different Person Now Than I Was Then’. I’ve recently been following a completely different topic at Pam’s (minority blogger representation at the DNCC), and so it was a shock to see a Microsoft-related post there. It also triggered a lot of memories for me: while it’s nothing compared to what Megan has had to deal with, especially as my job got more political I was the target of a lot of attacks and insults, including getting anonymously trashed for my attire both on the company blog InsideMS and … on MiniMSFT!

   Told you it was multi-dimensional.*

   Tying back to the Sinofsky interview I talked about in my previous comment: during her transition, Megan also moved from the Windows organization to Ray Ozzie’s group, which does Live Mesh and other cloud-focused work. Windows as an organization is extremely male; many guys there were visibly uncomfortable if I showed up in a meeting in pink jeans and tennis shoes. [Would Megan have been able to transition so successfully in that environment?] One way of looking at the angry and irrational reactions so many long-term Redmond-based Windows guys have to web 2.0 and cloud computing — and for that matter Sinofsky’s attitude of “we don’t have to tell you what’s going on, we know what’s best for you, we’re smarter than you” — is as typical reactions of males (and male-dominated organizations) under threat.

   And similarly, one way of looking at the anti-Indian attitudes is as symptoms of “American privilege under threat”, since it relates to Microsoft’s stances both on doing more development overseas and in favor of expanding H1B visas (a topic touched on briefly in David Sirota’s recent The Uprising). Microsoft has been incredibly Redmond-centric, and hence US-centric; its relations with “the subs” have had elements of classic corporate colonialism. [The “we know better than you” attitude applies here as well; one time, after two months of planning to goals set by corporate, all the subs flew to Redmond and were told to ignore their numbers because new ones had been picked. Sigh.] Ozzie and others are pushing a much more decentralized model, and with good reason: products developed in-region (and customized in-country and in-culture) are far more likely to be good fits for what people want than products developed in Redmond. Sinofsky, by contrast, has been a proponent of moving very slowly on expanding overseas development — except of course for sustaining engineering, generally regarded as “easier” and “less creative”, which already is done in India.

   The Yahoo! acquisition would have decentered power from Redmond; and it would have helped move forward the web-focused vision. I can certainly see why Redmond-based Windows developers opposed it and celebrated when it didn’t happen. However, I think the underlying dynamics are pretty clear. For those who wish it were still the 90s, it’s only a temporary respite.

   jon

   * And as a special added non-Microsoft-related bonus, this is the same Ethan St. Pierre who interviewed Deborah on The Radical Guy as part of the “Stop Real ID Now!” activism campaign last year. See, it really all is connected.

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6. 

   jon

   May 30, 2008

   Matt Stoller linked to the post on Mini on his OpenLeft Opening the day roundup yesterday with an interesting comment:

   If you stop thinking of the international labor movement as a set of organizations, and think of it as a story, the comments from this blog post, where Microsoft employees from America and India complain about management, is remarkable.

   I see it more as a set of interacting stories, but the underlying point is spot-on: narrative as a strategic force.

   Mini occasionally moves comments to the alternate “cutting room floor” blog, and there was a good example of this yesterday from an anonymous commenter describing the Redmond campus as “little India” pointing out underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos at Microsoft, and ending with “Is america really lacking talent or is something much more sinister going on?” Mini’s comment:

   (This would just explode. And not in a good way that an anonymous crowd can handle.)

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7. 

   jon

   June 5, 2008

   The What’s up with Microsoft India? thread’s up to 120 posts; I’m not sure if there are others that have been deleted. It’s amazing reading, although not pretty. There are repeated calls to Kevin Turner, Steve Ballmer, Lisa Brummell, Jean-Philippe Courtois to pay attention and do something. Hopefully one or more of them is reading the thread and getting things in raw form, rather than filtered.

   More positively, Microsoft cut a deal with HP, the US’s largest (I think) PC manufacturer, to place a Silverlight-based toolbar that defaults to IE on their machines. My first reaction is that It’s quite likely that Microsoft is taking a loss on this, at least initially; a couple of years ago, we looked hard at the Dell toolbar deal [part of the prep for that competitive simulation] and it’s hard to believe that their search and keyword advertising position has changed that much for the better since then. Aha, but it’s Silverlight, which has great graphics, and so it’s possible that this will be a new category of keyword-targeted display advertising; thanks to the purchase of aQuantive, that could work out very well for Microsoft.

   And in any case, even if it’s a loss initially, it’s probably a good investment for Microsoft: it puts more pressure on Yahoo!, and even more importantly it proliferates Silverlight. Microsoft closed a great deal with Tencent in China to base their QQ instant messenger/social computing apps on Siliverlight. 300 million seats here, 5 miillion there, pretty soon you’re talking some real market share.

   [For those on the Microsoft network, analyses of the Google Dell toolbar deal — and the other prep materials for the simulation — used to be on the Ad Astra sharepoint site, and might still be there.]

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8. 

   jon

   June 22, 2008

   Eric J. Savitz’ Carl Blogs, Jerry Bumbles, Steve Balks, Yahoo! Bleeds on Barrons updates on the latest twists and turns, with Yahoo!’s stock at $23 after rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy the search business. It’s a good old-fashioned proxy fight looming for the August 1 meeting:

   Giving more urgency to the “Oust Jerry” forces is the deterioration of Yahoo!’s executive team. In the past week or two, Yahoo! has lost Qi Lu, EVP of search and advertising; Brad Garlinghouse, SVP for communications and communities; Vish Makhijani, SVP for search; Jeff Weiner, EVP of the network division; Usama Fayyad, EVP and chief data officer; Jeremy Zawodny, who started Yahoo!’s developer network, and Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. Reports Friday indicate that a big reorganization of the corporate brass is planned.

   Heidi N. Moore’s Microsoft to Internet: Drop Dead is a great companion piece, excerpting and commenting on Steve Ballmer’s interview with the Financial Times

   So there you have it: The view from Redmond is that Google is a fad or one-hit wonder.

   Here you can see a microcosm of what has made Microsoft’s path just that much rockier and harder than it could have been, and why Silicon Valley considers the company to be the bull-in-a-china-shop of the technology world. The definition of death, in corporate America, is believing you don’t have any competition. The definition of being in a coma may be underestimating that competition.

   Microsoft is in no position to underestimate Google, the company that arguably proved Microsoft’s size and incumbency shouldn’t be a deterrent for a hungry competitor. Google embraced Yahoo; Google grabbed DoubleClick. Google may depend heavily on one product, but–what a product. As Ballmer himself noted, strength in search is a portal into dominance in many other areas.

   And Microsoft’s central businesses aren’t exactly on safe ground.

   Indeed. Still, right about now, I’d much rather be Microsoft than Yahoo!

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