Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Is it just me or does it seem like Microsoft is making all the right decisions when it comes to the takeover bids as of late? Yesterday the news that they finally gave up on Yahoo! came out, which in my humble opinion is a positive outcome for Microsoft and its users/customers. I know primary interest in the Yahoo! deal was the advertising potential, but when you’re trying to “hire” an unreasonable tamper tantrum its usually better to walk away. But this post is about a little more than that.

Last week Microsoft also laid down the reality to Xobni, and basically told them that they will be swallowed up by the Outlook team and relegated to the 1.5 useful features their product delivers. They didn’t seem to like that and instead walked away from the deal to release the beta today.

It’s not that Xobni is not cool, it’s just that its not 7Mb cool. It’s just that its premise and promise fail under load in much the same way that Microsoft Outlook, Google Desktop and all the others fail when dealing with massive amounts of data. Xobni features, in no particular order, are Inbox search, ripping out contact phone numbers from email signatures, attachment tracking between contacts and the supposed social networking aspect – it takes all the people you’ve ever CC’ed together and assumes they are a social network. No, not kidding. Aside from the visual interface tricks any third grader would enjoy, the most worthwhile component to me appeared to be the attachment tracking, however, the field was not wide enough to quickly see the entire filename. I frequently have to track contracts and documents in external email threads so this would have been useful had it been designed with some common WPF components that make up the actual user experience. So even though I’ve maintained this to be a rather cool but useless addon, with the public beta release I am uninstalling it. Why? Because the 2 features I need should be a part of Outlook, not yet another bloated addin that will fail to deliver when it loads up all my data.

The reality

The Web 2.0 vapor train is coming to an end it seems and Microsoft, with its gigantic weiner, seems to be pissing them all out of their VC-induced REM sleep state.

All the Web 2.0, like .com before it, is sustained and built not on profits but hopes of profits. Smart people cash out and don’t buy into the greater fool theory, but some people like the taste of their dreams so much that they may never wake up and face the reality – in Xobni’s case, thats the fact that $20 million for 2 Outlook features is a hell of a compliment. For Yahoo!, it’s the fact that sometimes you have to work with people you don’t like because you have a common agenda, especially when there is a 500lb gorilla in the room aiming to crush you.

But companies grow up, they wake up, they learn. Moral of the story being, dreaming of money is nice, having money in the bank is even nicer.

As for Ballmer, there is speculation that he may be asked to step down. If anything, he deserves a raise for being up front. Microsoft has a long reputation of being an evin, ruthless, throwing chairs behind the closed door, strongarming company. The recent press releases show a far more open, process-oriented CEO than the videos and keynotes portray.

Now… how about some of that $33/share being invested back into the company for rapid development of features tied to the actual products people pay for and run their companies with?

I never thought there would be a day where I would get a fan base inside of Microsoft but the last two posts on Microsoft Mesh seem to be flooding my mailbox. Most ask what I mean by leadership and a certain someone actually challenged me to lay down a plan I would implement if I worked there. So what exactly is there to leadership, is it just a personality defect of the loudest idiot in the room saying something out loud and people filing in behind them hoping not to be the next on the headcount chop block? No, allow me to explain.

Leadership is a personal skill that allows you to explain your vision, sell the people on the dream and the benefits that vision delivers, to make everyone involved fulfilled in their task of bringing that vision to life so they give it their all to make it happen.

That is not random pointy haired boss talk, it is a system by which a company is ran. Without leadership, motivation, fulfillment, agenda and vision of what everyone working together could possibly deliver you end up with a workforce that will only do its bare minimum to remain employed and in their spare time work on fun and cool projects that are only sustained until they are fun or until they can move to another area where they can actually be valuable to the company. In the perfect world, every employee would be in their perfect role, making an incredible salary, benefits, looking forward to coming to work each day, enjoying every customer interaction, considering it a personal triumph when each milestone is reached.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. We take jobs to get our foot in the door, we don’t always like the people we work with, we don’t really agree with our bosses or see the point in anything we do. Striking that nerve yet?

To Microsoft’s management:

Microsoft is currently in a position where it has to play catchup in a world saturated with halfassed solutions, finicky customers with no loyalty or ties, that demand an open, free, integrated platform and may from time to time click on an ad. Business calls for tough decisions, gambles and involves risks. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to have to give up on that Tween market.

What Microsoft should do, and already does, is represent the grownup version of the web properties. What I’m saying is, fuck the long tail. Forget about the mee-toos. Take the 90% desktop dominance and extend that dominance to the web by following, not buying, Yahoo, Google or whoever happens to be mismanaged bucket of eyeballs at the moment. Make Office collaboration easier without a server. Make remote desktop access easier without buying a server.

Want to be relevant on the Web 2.0, tomorrow? Microsoft Online thing you got?

“Microsoft is proud to be a supporter of small businesses, everywhere. Just getting started with your own business? Microsoft’s got your back, and we’ll give you the tools that the biggest companies in the world run their businesses on – free for the first 5 employees.”

You can’t make money giving things away, but you also can’t go from obscure to dominant overnight. The truth to the above pitch is rooted in the fact that 50-90% of the people that sign up for the above will be out of business within a year. On the oft chance that they grow and scale, they will do so on Microsoft solutions.

Use the Web 2.0 to enhance your desktop experience. You are in the mess you are in because you went the other way around, you flexed your desktop dominance to force to people to play by your rules. Time for another angle.

To Microsoft’s employees:

It is not your fault that your executives would rather float billions of dollars into an external, complex, mess of a transaction for something you could build on your own if you just got some real direction. “We will compete” is not direction, it’s a poor excuse of what to do with the inertia that is behind the Microsoft brand. Sooner or later Steve will have to figure out if he wants Microsoft to be a rising star or if he wants to ride the cash cow into the sunset of enterprise obscurity.

Until Microsoft executives themselves grab the table, get serious about the next wave of products and realize that they can’t be the same thing they have done for the past 10 years or a series of halfassed mee-toos, I recommend staying away from the mee-too divisions.

My advice? Beg, crawl and blow your way into the roles that will fulfill you, make you happy and productive so you don’t turn into a cynic over the direction of the company. If you can do that, you’ll be able to ride the wave of innovation that a lot of us, your partners, are very anxious to see you on.

It’s time for a change. People hate change, it’s the leaders job to sell it. Time to earn yo keep….

Is it fair to call Microsoft Mesh (pronounced “microsoft mess”) a failure, already? For a Web 2.0 startup, no. For the richest and arguably the best software company, yes. Nobody from Microsoft that emailed me about the last post had any argument with that opinion – Microsoft has no leadership up top. If they did, one of them should say:

We are the best. Lets act that way too, and then lets prove it.

Instead we got halfassed experiments even a Web 2.0 company would be ashamed of. And the techies are getting it too, outside of the Microsofts own cheerleading base, there is nothing out there. Remember when Gmail launched, as a pittiful minimalistic webmail?  People were bidding up to $20 for an invite on eBay. Microsoft Mesh?

Thats 0 interest.

Now, here is the big picture: The entire Web 2.0 world is built online with its only limitation to mass adoption being offline use. That world that Microsoft has a 90% or more domination over. So why is Microsoft being run like a disorganized bunch of government employees all jumping over one anothers projects with all dreams and no roadmaps… instead of stable useful software that just inches its dominant desktop solutions to some simple web collaboration? Because it would sell fewer Microsoft servers? Compete with Grove/Sharepoint teams agenda?

No. Microsoft wants to battle Web 2.0 on its own, spend $33 a share for Yahoo, ignore its loyal user base. That is either bad leadership or the leaders are idiots. Either way, they need to be fired.

And if there is any question on the above, why is this request coming to Microsoft from the outside? Why do your loyal users have to tell you what is needed and how long are you prepared to ignore us? You know what happens when you ignore the needs of people that pay you, right?

So please, will the real Steve Ballmer please stand up and throw a chair at this halfassed loop your company is stuck in?

Is what I would be saying if I worked for Microsoft PR. Check this quote from some blog Mark follows.

Here is the thing with software development, you pay for your incompetence. The only choice is whether you pay for it up front with bad PR, or over the course of the product lifecycle through support, angry customers, lost future sales, renewals and so on.

So Microsoft took their flagship product, bumped the public availability release one week to work out the kinks. Is anyone REALLY going to be all that inconvenienced with this delay? And what is Microsoft being beaten up over, the fact they found a problem and tried to address it before they endangered a ton of systems on what is the most widely deployed operating system… ever?

There are plenty of good reasons to smack Microsoft around, production delays for QA is not one of them. I know SPFs that can fix everything because they work by themselves in a moldy basement can’t grasp the concept of software development with worldwide teams comprised of thousands of engineers and personnel all being all on the same page… It’s different than Bob the SPF being able to fix the decaying thermal compound on his eMachines server thats 3 feet to the left, just slightly more complex.

Ok, so it’s not the last day to register for the WWPC but it is the last day to save about $400 and hit Houston for $1395. If you can manage a coach class flight and less than a 5 star hotel, you can make the whole thing happen for less than $2K.

If you’ve been to WWPC years ago and didn’t quite get it, it has changed, a lot. You need to go. I beg you.

Community conferences are great. Partner mindshare is great. But if you want to be great, you need to hang out with the best. Not the best down the street, not the best guy that just figured out one or two things, not the fastest sweepstakes entry guy on the block, not the unemployed guy who is always by the phone for a trade magazine quote, not the person that is barely an inch above you but markets himself as the next coming of Christ… I’m talking about the best in the world.

And if you want to be seen in the same light, and some day be a peer to the best in the world, you need to look a little bit higher than the crowd you stand in right now.

If you run, manage, operate, administer or in any way are interested in the world of IT business, you just might want to drop $2K to hang out at WWPC. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, this event is not about Microsoft, and I really can’t spell that out any clearer.

Comments are open for the angry riffraff with no ambition, paid competitive conference speakers, bloggers that would like you to look down and around and not up and really anyone who would like to explain why it’s a bad idea to go look around how successful businesses are built around someone that controls over 90% of our market. Go on, I dare you. Everyone else, consider this your Monday morning kick in the ass to do something great for yourself.

I really do not want to be hard on Microsoft regarding the only bit of relevant innovation in the past six years, but Microsoft Mesh outlines why Microsoft as a company is essentially, and for the lack of a better word, fucked. I am not sure if there is any other visual way to emphasize that so here is what I mean in the very cordial, proper English:

Microsoft Mesh is an online reporting, sync, management and access Web 2.0 framework and application from Microsoft. This amazing company, with billions of dollars invested in software creations supported and utilized by tens of thousands of partners worldwide has decided to scap all that and provide yet another incomplete synchronization framework to live in complete void of all its desktop applications existing sync features. I suppose the sync, presence, and access in Grove, SharePoint, Outlook, DFS, ActiveSync, Exchange ActiveSync, Live.com Office Live, FolderShare, Spaces, Live Messenger and Office Communicator was just too perfect that it needed no improvement, but a better way of unintegrated document-based sync was neccessary.

This from a company whose new slogan is “Better Together”?

Dear Steve, this is why your partners are abandoning your platform.

At the most senior levels of your company, Ray Ozzie & Co, you have no vision. You have what I can best describe as Schizophrenia, a confused company with no control over its creations and a new direction with each passing day. It demonstrates a core Microsoft frustration that partners, developers and now even customers are avoiding Microsoft for:

Series of incomplete and incoherent solutions for general information technology use.

Be it product development, where one product team does not interact with another product team even if they are on the same product group, or in licensing where we have half a dozen licensing options for the desktop OS alone, Microsoft is making a loud and clear message that it has lost cohesion of its solutions and even it does not know anymore who and what it is competing against.

Hint: It is Google. It’s Apple. I sell your software and solutions, Apple and Google are the solutions your potential customers are comparing you against. But for both Apple and Google, even though products are clearly in Beta stages at best, they at least play well together and have an integrated purpose in the platform. Microsoft does not.

Over the past two years Microsoft has become a mee-too company, imploding on its size and ambition, focused on “competing” with it’s partners and not on what the customers actually need and ask. While I appreciate the 300 brand logos you can put on a “FY Shipping Schedule” PowerPoints, as they indicate a variety growth and opportunity, to me and to my customers they paint a portrait of a company that has no vision but a collection of overambitious middle managers and a fear based direction influenced by the competition that is clearly outinnovating Microsoft.

I wish for your sake, and the sake of people that still have any hope for Microsoft, you remember that its really about pleasing the customer and providing open and integrated solutions, not about trying to dominate the world one competitive response at a time. Your customers already bought the software, how about focusing on improving those products instead of throwing 5 hippies and 95 B2 Indians in a bucket and cranking out logos and solutions that are clearly against even your own best interests.

Irony here is that DOJ wanted to split Microsoft into Applications and OS businesses. Who knew that Microsoft would crumble on its own due to the lack of leadership and direction. Dear Steve, “we will compete” is not a vision, it appears to be your doom.