Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Thursday 29 October 2009, 7:53 PM
At what point should Microsoft get scared?
That comment has a certain force. I was reminded of it when I watched Eric Schmidt give a bravura performance at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
It started well, with some subtle but cutting digs at his Gartner interlocutor: when asked his prediction of non-advertising Google revenue three years time to compare with Gartner's projected nine percent, he said "We don't do that calculation. It's what finance people do, and it's not very interesting." Laughter.
But there wasn't much laughter during the next 45 minutes, as he elucidated a frighteningly coherent view of how the future was going to go Google's way - and not just bits of the future, the whole lot. From enterprise to consumer, from cloud to mobile, everything was included.
We might, if we're good, be left some vertical market stuff - Google only likes dealing with things that a few hundred million people can use - but that's because the big G can't be bothered. Everything was in the mix; Wave, ChromeOS, Chrome, Google Apps, HTML 5, GMail - oh, was GMail high on the list - Android, even YouTube. Cross-enterprise searching, anyone, where you find out what's going on inside your circle of trust? Employee monitoring? Seamless cloud apps on all platforms? Security that works without firewalls?
One of his predictions was that by next year, there will be netbooks running cloud services within the enterprise that will be good enough to replace the run-of-the-mill enterprise PC "but at a fifth the cost", because cheap hardware was that good. It all joined up. It all made sense.
I digested that prediction while reflecting on the fact that I was watching Schmidt in high resolution via YouTube within Chrome under Linux, on a machine that was simultaneously running all my social networking, chat and other clients, all my home entertainment requirements, all my editing and content creation faffery... and the only part of it that was Microsoft was the copy of XP I run under VirtualBox in order to get to my corporate email. That's only because Microsoft chose to cripple Outlook Web Access when it's not running under IE. Guess how that makes me feel.
(Ah yes, Outlook. Exchange. Schmidt talked on stage about the revelation he'd had about calendaring being at the heart of enterprise: when I use Exchange's calendaring, the revelation I get is that I hope to the highest powers in the cosmos that someone fixes it soon.)
I had a Google Doc open for a project I'm sharing with five pals. I had Google Maps open. I had an Android phone snoozing by the side of the keyboard. In short, I had too much Google in my life. And when ChromeOS comes along and makes my netbook work better (and it will), the amount of non-Googleage will shrink still further, because Google works and is nice to use and I am weak in the face of working code that's nice to use. The fact that everything Schmidt was saying was patently coming true in front of my eyes didn't help.
Now, imagine Ballmer trying to put on an equivalent 45 minute performance where he seamlessly merges the Microsoft vision for mobile (can you even tell me what that is?), cloud (ditto), netbooks (ditto), security (ditto). And how much? Those MS calculations that running free services and software cost more than proprietary solutions - well, they're hard to swallow when you're paying for everything yourself.
Just to put the seal on it, Schmidt mentioned how many Google salesmen were going into the enterprise pushing GMail - priced not for free, because they found that enterprise was happy to pay for service, when they got it. And when the sales pitch didn't work because things were missing, they went back to the Googleplex and fixed them, or worked around them, or found reasons why those missing things didn't need to be there at all. Then they went back, and tried again.
So when I read that Los Angeles City Council is moving from Groupwise to GMail and Google Apps - at a cost of $7.25 million, paid for partially by a legal settlement Microsoft had to make for overcharging - and think that this is the sort of deal Microsoft should be winning, I wonder what Ballmer makes of Schmidt's grand plan, and whether I will hear any cogent response this year, or next year when the ChromeOS netbooks are in the fray, or the year after that when the migration from Exchange becomes too big to ignore.
When, in short, will Microsoft get scared enough to do something that might make a difference? Because after 45 minutes of Schmidt's world domination plan, I was plenty scared myself.
And I like Google.
PreviousComments on this post
Well is it the case of better the devil you do know, or one you don't?
Jumping from one massive mogul to another wasn't quite might idea of a fairer open market. :s
Another good one, Rupert. Very interesting and thought-provoking.
How long has Outlook/Exchange been broken (or just been a royal pain in the rear to use, if you want to be charitable)? The answer is as long as they have existed, from the very first version up to and including the 2007 version. How long has Microsoft had to fix them, and failed to do so? Fifteen years? More?
The more interesting case, though, is likely to turn out to be ChromeOS. When there is an alternative to Windows available, from a huge, well-known and respected company rather than something that Microsoft and their minions can try to pooh-pooh away, I think that both home and corporate users are going to be ready to jump. Add pre-loaded and well known Google Apps, Gmail, Picasa, and the rest of the family, and the MS clique's ability to claim it doesn't have applications goes away as well (even though that is already an unjustified claim today).
When should Microsoft get scared? They should be already, and I think to some small degree they are, but not nearly enough. I think they will continue to blunder along, like a huge, myopic giant who believes that they can control everything around them, and crush everything that gets in their way. Until one day they will finally trip, and fall, and be gone. Thankfully.
Will Google become the next hated monopolist? Perhaps. It has been argued that assimilating that much power and control inevitably leads to the type of negative monopolistic behavior that has been seen over and over again in different ages and different industries. I think there is hope, though, in looking at the difference in how the two companies got to their dominant positions. Google has been incredibly good at determining what people want, and providing it. They have been equally good at remaining open to feedback from their customers, and the market in general, as you mentioned. Microsoft, however, has been doing nothing but exploiting their monopoly position - they provide something that people absolutely have to have, basically Windows and Office, and they are shameless and ruthless in devising ways to make their customers pay for those same things over and over again. At the same time, rather than true innovation and reaction to market feedback, they have put enormous effort into trying to expand that monopoly wherever they can, whether it be mobile, cloud, home entertainment, or whatever else.
That still leaves us with the original question, though - even if Microsoft should be scared already, when should we the consumers start getting scared? I'm afraid we won't know that, until it's too late.
jw
Excellent posts.
Perhaps soon we'll see Clippy the Office Assistant popping up with "I see you're not using Microsoft software much any more - would you like help with migrating to something else?"
Excellent Article Rupert. But, as Mr. Watson stated, Google listens to the people and gives them what they want. MS likes to tell you what they think you need and then try to force it on you. Well, their time is coming to an end, simply because they can't compete with companies like Google.
The question is, why? There should be panic in the halls of Redmond, or maybe it will be over the day before they realize they are no longer king of the hill. Arrogance can only carry you so far.
I feel like the odd woman out, because I like Outlook (and Word and OneNote) and I don't understand why I seem to be the only person Outlook works well for - unless it's that when I went freelance and came home and told Simon I wanted Outlook to work the way Microsoft said it was supposed to, he said 'I'll install Exchange then'. But there must be plenty of Exchange admins who know more about making Exchange work than we do; why does it make so many people unhappy? I run my life from Outlook: I love the way Outlook 2010 shows me the bits of my calendar around invitations so I can tell if I'm really available or going to have to run impossibly fast to get to the meeting, I love the new conversation view, I use the search all the time. I find Gmail primitive compared to Outlook Web Access (and doesn't Exchange 2010 make OWA work with a wide range of browsers?). And I like cloud, but the AIR enterprise apps at MAX this year were the first Web apps ever that didn't make me long for a rich client; I quite like taking advantage of the native power of the processor I've paid for rather than going down to the lowest common denominator in Ajax. I've no wish to be a Microsoft apologist - but I like rich software.
-M
Yes there's nothing like raw processing power. I remember saying something last year alomg the lines of 'a period as being the underdogs would do Microsoft some good' At the time I couldn't see a way for that to happen, but here we are and there it may be.
As I remember you mentioning Rupert, MS can be amazingly inovative when they are in the mood for it. If google become the no 1 for a while, then great, because MS won't be able to brush them under the carpet and will have to be very creative. Maybe mind bendingly so.
And then Apple will also step up their game. I can't see any death knell for Microsoft, just a......oh cliche......new era of competative innovation.
Microsoft are at least trying to be nicer at the moment. Google should watch out, because they too may grow the contempt towards customers that being a huge customer facing company can cause. So far they have mostly been shielded by dishing out adds amongst the search functionality.
Hmmm. I wonder if this comes down to the men v women multi-tasking issue.
Personally I hate having to do that. I very much prefer to do (and hopefully complete) one task at a time. So I guess it makes sense that I prefer all my software to do just one thing, and do it well. For me, anything that has all the 'extras' is a hindrance.
P.S.
I also want a phone that is just a phone, a camera that just takes pictures, etc.
I think, Mary, there's a world of difference between you using the latest Outlook/Exchange combo on your own home-managed system with the equivalent IT experience in your household of a small Microsoft-oriented planet, and the experience the rest of us working stiffs get out here in the corporates, where constraints are far harsher.
The amount of time I spend managing my constantly full inbox (by which I mean throwing away stuff - PSTs are no good to me, because they're not accessible away from my desk), trying to find stuff using a search that most of the time just flakes out, having to keep a copy of IE around so I can get to my folders (!), trying to keep my folder rules up to date... this may all be fixed in 2010, but what good is that to me? Microsoft's revenue model depends on the all-or-nothing big gun upgrade, which is not a good fit for corporates at the moment (and may never be again).
I won't go into the pain I have with calendaring, but it's a rare day when the way I work and the way Outlook/Exchange works don't come into bloody conflict. Perhaps if I were more malleable I could learn to jump through the right hoops, but it seems unlikely. (And has anyone else enjoyed the clocks changing across international time zones?)
it is broken, and I'm not sure it'll be fixed.
I know we have the freedom to do things faster and more flexibly than most enterprises; I just figure if we can work out how to do it right, why can't a business with far more resources? And I know real-world business users are never on the latest tools, but at that point we're not criticizing Microsoft for what they're doing wrong now, we're criticizing them for doing things badly 3, 5 or 8 years ago. Yes, Google has the advantage of being able to improve things on the fly without businesses having to do upgrades (as does Exchange as a cloud service), but that means feature and interface changes - and I'm often told that it's the user training issue as much as the cost and deployment issue that holds back business upgrades.
And what really puzzles me is why so many enterprises do counter-intuitive things. Email is a huge source of business value, but rather than adding storage to the mail server or paying for an email archive service like Mimecast, they just say 'throw it away to save disk space' (or 'throw it away to reduce our exposure to risk because the value to the business isn't as important as that', which is slightly more understandable if still frustrating). No client upgrade can fix a corporate policy that says the cost of a hard drive isn't worth the user productivity it buys. I feel your pain on XP too; I've had to go back to it on every netbook I've reviewed and it's one of the reasons I'm still a Vista fan (I'm only rude about it in comparison to 7).
As you're on Outlook 2007, I can help you on timezones. Click the Timezone button to get dropdowns to set the timezone for both the start and end of the meeting - so you can finally put in flights. Sadly you will have to wait for 2010 to solve the timeslip issue (you know you put in an all-day appointment, change timezone and it jumps to a 24-hour appointment and then migrates to take up more and more time as you keep changing timezones so you no longer know when it actually starts and finishes?). Getting the US to have the same daylight savings as us? No chance, but when I got the timezone button I stopped finding it painful...
-M
Ah, you know that the bigger the business, the harder it is to do anything. This is generally true, and (I think) one of the things that Google is getting right with its slipstream model. I did think that this was a bad idea -- after all, we know how hard it is to get enterprise to upgrade at all, let alone regularly and automatically. I'm coming to the conclusion that it's a change that needs to happen, precisely because the current big bang update model is so badly broken.
At which point no, we're not criticising Microsoft for getting things wrong years ago which it's subsequently fixed. We're criticising Microsoft for not having a business model which allows those fixes to get out where and when they're needed - and to the end user, who always gets the poo-laden section of the stick, that's exactly the same as not fixing them at all. It's no good having great products if they're not compatible with enterprise realities. Google is trying to change those realities, which is at least interesting...
Users are happy with continuous updates. All of the big consumer sites have a policy of continual improvements, some of which do require the punter to (horror) Learn Something New. The rule seems to be to do the best you can not to break the core functionality, but that's not a real limitation nor does it have to be an unbreakable rule. When most of your users aren't using most of your functionality anyway, you can change quite a lot quite often without it breaking the world.
And we know, if we know anything, that consumerisation is pushing into the enterprise. That hasn't got to the point yet where enterprise does anything as daringly innovative as asking its users as customers what they want - a very odd lacuna, given how much employees cost -- but with the consumer-driven online service model drifting into the corporates, it's only a matter of time.
This comment has been deleted at the users request
Rupert talk to Jon Skeet at google about timezones he's been working on their ActiveSync stuff. according to jons recent blog post Argentina apprently decided not to do summertime as their dams were full.
His latest blog post has more:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2009/11/02/omg-ponies-aka-humanity-epic-fail.aspx (it's the text of a talk he recently gave)
Personally I vote for his "coffee time" clock.
I suppose it's the help desk who's least happy with continuous updates; as you say, it's that odd inversion of treating the most valuable asset* as an irritating problem who can just put up with things.
-M
*wait - as I recall, that's photocopiers...
Ah, I twittered that Pony post this morning - it was very fine, and I think everyone should read it.
As for Argentina - how weird. I shall have a look at that. Personally, I think everyone should use UTC (which is really GMT, but let's throw the French a bone here), and have done. After all, it doesn't really matter if what you call 17:30 is teatime or breakfast, but it does matter if your 8pm is my 7pm but I think it's my 9pm.
Perhaps to avert the "bloody Brits running the world" claim, we should actually rename all the times to something that's new for everyone. Hence 1am - Pootle, 2am, ZOMG, 3am, Grunchie, 4am, Tststs... so when you say "Can you conference call me at half past Pootle", there is no ambiguity or annoying imperial hangover.
