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Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

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Being the Forest, Forgetting the Trees

By Nick Hodge | August 22, 2006

Microsoft is on the cusp of ship­ping a whole forest of new products. Vista, .Net 3.0, Office 2007 and *.live.com stuff than you can poke a branch/stick at. All of which presents Microsoft with some tall chal­lenges. How does a single tree get noticed? How does the world find the sap­lings that are going to be the next Sequoi­aden­dron giganteum? Does the forest work together as a cohes­ive eco-system?

Today, thanks to Microsoft Australia’s, Frank Arrigo, I atten­ded the Blogger’s Brunch. Great of Microsoft to reach out to a sec­tion of the local tech­no­logy blog­ging com­munity. None of the attendees (except Angus Kid­man and Nic) are fam­ous in the blo­go­sphere, but on the inter­nets — noone knows you are an Australian.

Whilst hav­ing been a Microsoft cus­tomer since 1984 (Microsoft Basic 1.0 on a Macin­tosh 128K — and the box is in stor­age some­where), I am a rel­at­ive noob to “mar­ketec­tural” Microsoft. The speak is strangely famil­iar to my ears.

The fol­low­ing are some ran­dom thoughts and un-expressed ques­tions from this morning’s session:

• To the Microsoft PR people. Sorry it par­alleled Microsoft-Groove/Ray Ozzie his­tory with Apple-NeXT/Steve Jobs. To Frank Arrigo. Sorry I stated that the *.live.com people are hav­ing fun being com­pat­ible with all the ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer rather than imple­ment Fire­fox sup­port. Both of these were inten­ded as jokes, not memes.
• Today’s Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review’s IT sec­tion has quotes from vari­ous large Aus­tralian fin­an­cial organ­isa­tions stat­ing that they are tak­ing a wait-and-see approach to Win­dows Vista. Some are only now installing Win­dows XP. These organ­isa­tions state they will install Vista in 2–3 years. I find this quite inter­est­ing as it has taken them 4–5 years to install Win­dows XP. Per­son­ally, I am con­cerned if a large fin­an­cial organ­isa­tion is not run­ning a recent, up to date, tested and secure OS on all their desktop com­puters. I’d love to know what fea­tures in upcom­ing products are dir­ect feed­back from Aus­tralian cus­tom­ers. This would show that the soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­cess is a two-way street.
• Share­point should evolve into *.live.com server for the Enter­prise. If Vista has all the hooks, and the connected/disconnected world and new applic­a­tions are going to be mashed (lashed?) together with live stuff, this seems like a logical move. How­ever, large organ­iz­a­tions will be reluct­ant to put all their data into the world’s cloud for all to stumble upon. I am no expert on Share­point and all the pos­i­tion­ing stuff, but it seems there might be a little “ten­sion” (not a bad thing, mind you) between these two environments.*.live.com is gar­ner­ing the mind­share as it is new-ish; many of the APIs and licens­ing mod­els are to be determ­ined. Come to think about it, these are prob­ably the two reas­ons why they are still sep­ar­ate. Rev­enue and developer penetration.
• After hear­ing about the IT pro­fes­sion­als fawned over the cool­ness of Vista infra­struc­ture deploy­ment … I left the ses­sion (both men­tally and phys­ic­ally) ask­ing “what are Microsoft’s cus­tom­ers going to do with all these fine trees?“Customers doing mean­ing­ful stuff with Microsoft’s soft­ware so that they can impress their cus­tom­ers is where it is at. Mar­ket­ing people might call it Unlock­ing the value of the plat­form.
• Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion on the desktop has been one of my “things” for a while, so it’s inter­est­ing to hear that Vir­tu­alPC is to be included in the Enter­prise ver­sion of Vista. Whilst listen­ing to the intric­a­cies of Vista vs XP deploy­ment, my mind was racing think­ing about the future of oper­at­ing systems.So here goes: why is the Enter­prise desktop so fat? Why not have a Singularity-based OS with .Net 3.0 Frame­work as the API. Win32 + other leg­acy apps could be vir­tu­al­ized to the desktop. As the world and work becomes more con­nec­ted, the smart cli­ent at the edge of the net­work will have a dif­fer­ent face.

In sum­mary, I groked that Microsoft groks (sorry, Hein­lein) the world as it exists today. Ensur­ing that no trees are felled in the rush to mar­ket is going to be an inter­est­ing challenge.

Topics: australia, blogging, microsoft, strategy, virtualization, windows, windowsxp | 3 Comments »