Microsoft- Ray Ozzie memo
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
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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