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Reading The Tea Leaves On Microsoft's Next Move
Posted on Oct 25, 2005 at 12:46 PM by Aaron Ricadela
Bill Gates and Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie are paying a courtesy call to the San Francisco tech press next week, according to an E-mailed invitation I received yesterday. In between breakfast and lunch at a downtown hotel Nov. 1, the minds at Microsoft plans to "discuss Microsoft's vision and future direction and preview upcoming technologies," according to the invitation. The company's PR agency is staying mum about the details, but it wouldn't surprise me if software as an online service is somewhere high on the agenda.
Microsoft's taken some flak lately for parceling out its software in periodic cycles while Google, Yahoo, and other Web companies push new features out to their users more or less weekly. Those darts got lobbed repeatedly at the Web 2.0 conference here this month. Now, some of that criticism rests on oversimplified logic--it's a lot harder to develop the next version of Office than to flip the switch on a new feature on Flickr, say. But the Webheads have a point: People are getting used to trying out new functionality as it becomes available, and users' requirements sometimes change faster than release cycles. Even Steve Ballmer says so. "We can't make customers wait three to four years for things they need every few months," Microsoft's CEO said last week at a conference in Orlando, Fla.
With that kind of mandate from the top, it's not surprising the company brass have software as a service on their minds. I asked Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's new business software division, last week what his top priorities are after a month in charge of an expanded group that includes Office and Microsoft's Dynamics ERP apps. Right up there with expanding Office into new markets like data analysis, and bridging PC and phone networks, was delivering software as a service to make Microsoft's desktop apps more useful. "We'll build services capabilities into the client, and client capabilities into the services" delivered online, says Raikes. Look for fewer hard-and-fast distinctions between what's on your hard drive and what's on the Web.
Ray Ozzie takes the stance that it isn't so much designing the technology as identifying the market's needs that's kept Microsoft from being more aggressive rolling out Web features in between releases of its products. When I broached the subject with him a couple of weeks ago, Ozzie said, "We can do anything we want--it's just software and processes … I'm less focused on the absolute speed as I am on accomplishing meaningful scenarios." Among his ideas: Word processors that can publish to blogs as well as paper, PowerPoint software that can broadcast a presentation to a room and on the 'net at the same time, and spreadsheets capable of publishing charts to the Web.
Microsoft's massive Windows development group also throws off enough innovation to slip some of it out between versions, Gates told Wall Street analysts this summer. The directive from management seems clear: Ship technology faster when it can create new scenarios that benefit PC users and give them new reasons to upgrade their software. And try to wipe some of the luster off Google, which seems to orchestrate a public-relations campaign every time one of its engineers polishes off some beta code. Microsoft doesn't have Google's luxury of throwing software over the transom to see what sticks. But if it wants to defend its desktop turf, a little dose of excitement between releases couldn't hurt, either.
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