InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 30, 1999
Microsoft In Transition:Software Leader Braces For Change
icrosoft president Steve Ballmer oversaw a reorganization of Microsoft's product divisions in March. Ballmer recently spoke about those changes and other issues with InformationWeek.
Q: Can you talk about what's important at Microsoft these days and your priorities?
A: What we tried to do as part of our reorganization back in the spring, and I'd say probably the best way for me to characterize what I see to be the priorities for the company, falls into two dimensions. One is, who are our customers and what do they care about? We tried to organize in such a way that for every customer, it was clear that there was at least one person who cared intensely to make sure that we were doing the right job for that customer.
We decided to focus around four core constituents: developers, other IT professionals, knowledge workers, and consumers. They each have a set of issues, which I think can broadly affect our product line, but there's a division that is focused on and has at least a number of the core technologies to serve each of those customers. There's an enterprise focus that needs to apply universally across those constituencies, and we don't lose sight of that.
If you go to the group focusing on IT people, they have [several] critical goals. The first is reliability-reliability and availability are not exactly the same, but they're kissing cousins-and manageability. You could say they have to focus in on scalability, too, and that's true, but most of the scalability solutions come by improving the tools so the applications themselves are designed to be almost infinitely scalable.
From a technology standpoint, there are three or four major things going on. One is the shift in, you could say it's application hosting but it's really a shift in the paradigm of the kind of applications people want to write, and the way they want to distribute them, and the way people want to use them, and the role of the Internet in delivering those applications. That paradigm shift actually ties into what we need to do for scalability, rapid application development, the kind of services that you provide developers, what knowledge workers will get off the Internet-all of those things.
Q: You made customer centricity a big point when you announced the reorganization. Can give us a status report?
A: We've done some fairly extensive customer-satisfaction surveys. We're now not only rerunning those, we're also drilling into more detail. And we have, not only for our product development people but for our support and sales people, a reasonable list of issues to work on. So I consider that an achievement.
One of the first things you have to do is [come up] with the right kind of focus, the right kind of culture, the right kind of discipline, the right kind of diagnostic. I feel pretty good about the way each of our teams is learning to balance being a product champion with being a customer champion.
I'm not saying we're perfect. Our people tend to be naturally product-based because that's what you've built, that's what you ship, that's what the emotional crescendo is around. But we also need to look at the way the products interact with one another, and that's why we've assigned the ownership of these different customer constituencies to the different divisions, and I'm pleased that they're rising to the challenge. I can't point out 28 things that are instantaneously different, but I didn't really have that kind of expectation of a rapid-fire change.
Q: Where would you like to see improvement?
A: From a product perspective,
I think people think we do a pretty good job. Our products on a feature basis tend to be nicely responsive. There are two or three things that can get in our way and where we have to be careful. Cross-product issues [is one], where people want the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts. That's part of the reason for the new structure-to try to have people think holistically in the shoes of the customer.
The second area relates to periods of time when, for whatever reasons, we allow there to be long time gaps between releases. I know Windows 2000 is going to be a lot more reliable and a bunch of other things than NT 4. But it doesn't help to say it's in the cooker.
Another thing we absolutely learned relates to the ways in which we communicate. We're not as good at communicating broadly, and I'm not talking about account management here. Our communications with our customers can be more systematic and clear. It should be absolutely obvious how you get answers to the important questions, and [we must have] high enough quality and in-depth enough technical information to let people get their jobs done.
The other area I would highlight is that we did get feedback, particularly out of our large but not largest customers-enterprise customers-that we could be doing a more thorough job of account management.
Q: What are you doing to address that last problem?
A: We're adding hundreds of people around the world to help. That's actually one of the easier ones to solve. More people help. Those are easier to solve sometimes than things that require innovation and clever thought.
Q: What is Microsoft's role in helping businesses go through the transformation required to become E-businesses?
A: We have to provide the kind of platforms that people can use to build and implement E-commerce solutions and that includes reliability, scalability, rapid development-the tools that make it easy to develop commerce apps.
No. 2, there are important opportunities for us to standardize some key ways that applications work together that will help people do these E-commerce applications.Third is to provide standard services over time that third parties can use to eliminate the need to do things in their application [such as redundant authentication and passwords]. Fourth, we can actually help people promote their services on the Internet.
Q: How long will E-business be a high priority?
A: People will be doing E-business for the rest of time. But do I think it will endure as this top-level theme four or five years from now? Not a chance. What's the next big issue? I don't know. I'm better at predicting what's the next big technical issue than what's the next big convergence effect upon business. I have to get better at predicting the convergence of technology and business.
Q: Some people think the rise of Web computing will be a trouble spot for Microsoft because we're moving away from PCs.
A: We could become less important, a lot of things could make us less important, but I don't believe PCs go away. The thing we've been good at in the past is always being involved in what the world wants to do.
Now we're on another precipice. In terms of shifting focal points for what IT can contribute to the business, we have to continue to remake ourselves to be relevant, and if we don't remake ourselves, even the popularity of the PC won't keep us relevant.
Photos by Ellen Banner
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