Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Got this email yesterday, and I feel it’s pretty telling of the Mesh that Microsoft is finding itself in (not printed in its entirety):

“We are Gold Certified with Microsoft with specializations in OEM, IW and Mobility. Our goal for 2008 was to shed the certification and convert the majority of revenues in consumer and SMB space from Windows to Mac OS X.

…

Microsoft is clearly no longer interested in being a desktop company. We have found the Apple solutions more profitable with its users both buying more peripherals and opting for the more expensive models.”

This is one of the largest independent OEMs around, I even bought my first computer with my own paycheck from this company. Over the years as both our companies grew I got to know the CEO and as far as Microsoft fanboys go, this dude makes Steve Clayton look like a Linux hippie convinced that Microsoft is the devil. For him to initiate a platform switch… man.

Microsoft has a problem, the evil problem. They seem to be looking to pick a fight with everyone while the bread and butter of its partners is allowed to fall apart under the now pirate treasure that the sunk Vista ship has become. People are starting to figure out that there is a company out there dedicated to their experience on the desktop and they are enjoying it enough (oh, just f’n shoot me for what I’m about to say) that even thought it is not designed for business they demand and push it be included. Apple is bridging the desktop PC, office PC divide.

Microsoft has turned its back on its partners, which bring in most of its revenues. Now the partners are starting to turn their back on Microsoft. Makes one wonder, if its worth sacrificing the existing multibillion dollar platform for the fight with Google over search advertising, just how big is the ad market? Or is it just the case of Microsoft lacking any direction and focus?

Poor Steve…. I imagine if any of the bigger clients ever sat him down and reenacted the Office Space scene: “What would you say you DO here?”

(P.S. Reason why is really written well in Brian Williams blog post that I can’t seem to find. If anyone reading this has the Vista branding problem post he wrote please post it in the comments).

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.