AlexHopmann.com

A brief mention of me in Mini-Microsoft today.
Its always nice to get recognition for cool projects you worked on. I still
really enjoy reading mini, although as many people have observed his
comments section has really gone to hell. My other observation is that while
I agree with a ton of the stuff that he writes, in many ways I think his
central premise- that the key thing to fix Microsoft is to just reduce its
size a bunch, is just incredibly unrealistic. There are two key issues here-
1) Just who does the scaling back anyway? The problem is that once you have
an organization with entrenched power structures, fiefdoms, etc. as you
scale back those tend to get maintained or even enhanced. Unless the senior
management types are super-human, the fiefdoms protect themselves and the
cuts probably in exactly the wrong places. 2) Microsoft has lots of
legacy. Sometimes you can try to ignore it, but the reality is that just
about every computer user in the world today relies on Microsoft’s products
and they can’t just quit maintaining them. And this means that every time
they fix something they need to fix it across ~33 languages across 6+
different OS revs, etc. They can’t afford to just abandon their existing
customers and architectures and the reality is that much of their bulk is
because of situations like that. If people blindly took mini’s advice you
would likely have another situation like the run up to the great “security
push” and temporary abandonment of IE where people (myself included) got too
focused on the new great innovative stuff and ignored supporting the
existing stuff.

On another topic I really really need to upgrade this site- I’m going to make it my top
project to crank out some RSS feeds, etc. I’m still going to stubbornly stick to
using my own custom tools to build the site. Also if people have been connecting to
this page on alex.hopmann.org, I’ve also registered
www.alexhopmann.com since the more
normal URL structure seems to be easier for people.

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We went down to Fry’s Electronics the other day and were thrilled to see
that Network Magic boxes were there on the software aisle. They were
beautiful so we couldn’t help ourselves and picked up a few copies. You can
click here to get one yourself from Amazon. Feel free to buy 5 or 6.

Also- Tom’s Networking just posted a review of Network Magic.
Sweet. I was a bit nervous about this one- I read Tom’s daily and they can be
pretty hard-core. “Network Magic has more going for it” is a pretty great thing
for them to say and I’m hoping we can be all over improving some of the issues
they point out.

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When Microsoft acquired Groove and made Ray Ozzie CTO #3 (talk about having
lots of “chiefs”) I’ll have to admit that I was a skeptic. I’ve seen lots of
smart people come into Microsoft and have a really hard time figuring out
how to fit in and be effective. To be honest, with some of the recent trends
(more on that later) I was expecting it to be even harder to do anything
that would make sense.

They recently published a memo that he sent to the whole company (initially
two weeks ago). This is being positioned as the latest “Internet Tidal Wave”
memo and I’ve got to say that my reaction is actually “wow”. First of all I’m
really touched that he talks about OWA and XMLHTTP (twice!) as being some of the
key pioneering projects leading to the Internet services wave. I didn’t
necessarily expect those things to catch on quickly or be recognized for what
they are initially, but its interesting that it wasn’t really until the guy
comes in from outside that they finally get some internal recognition. I seem to
recall the Hotmail guys even analyzing how gmail was doing its stuff when OWA
was right there under their noses for 7+ years!

But beyond that, I’ve got to say that it really feels like the rest of the
memo is pretty much dead-on in a way I haven’t seen for awhile. I’m sure there
are some details you could pick on, but it looks like a great wake-up call, it
looks like something that people should be able to get their teeth into, and it
feels like some good validation for a which of the thinking we have been doing
at Pure lately.

Back to the “recent trend” thing. I was just reading Rich Tong and John Zagula’s book The Marketing Playbook. Despite the title, the book doesn’t really
seem to be directly about marketing much, but there are a few really interesting
insights. One was that Microsoft was constantly re-orging in a way that people
were constantly working on new things. Some of the strongest things Microsoft
ever did were the result of mixing up a bunch of people who weren’t entrenched
in the history of a specific area. At least back when I left in March it was
pretty common to have many of the main players in each area have been in the
same role for 10+ years. The guys running Office had been doing it forever. Many
of the people running keys parts of Windows had been doing it forever. Microsoft
still does tons of re-orgs, but they rarely involve much substantial change that
I’ve seen. I’d love to see them just swap a bunch of the dev-managers and GPMs
(ok, and GMs and VPs) between Windows and Office and shake things up a bit.

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