September 13, 2005

Forbes

Forbes today published an article called "Microsoft's Midlife Crisis" which includes a quote from me. It is always an interesting experience talking to the press. In general everyone from the press that I have worked with appears to have great intentions and professionalism, but when you are being quoted you always need to contend with two factors- 1) you get just a little snip in the article, and 2) the reporter is usually trying to make a point and its not necessarily the one you intended to make.

Thanks to the Internet I get to respond to myself and clarify a bit, although for an audience about 0.00000001% the size of the one that will read the Forbes thing. Still, its better than nothing.

So the interesting thing to me is the context that my statement was put in. It comes right after the statement that Ballmer views integration as Microsoft's big advantage. In the Forbes thing it seems like I'm refuting that, yet in reality I couldn't agree more with the spirit of what Ballmer is saying. I just feel like Microsoft has over the years developed some really dysfunctional approaches to accomplishing that integration. What has happened is that the whole process has become victim to furious politics rather than solid technical and strategic decision making. Mostly this isn't the fault of the people involved, but an effect of the top level management culture, the way resources are allocated and the way decisions are made about funding projects.

What happens is that if you are developing some technology, you don't get to develop it out and scope it out fully. Your project will be cut unless you sign-up customers for it. Sometimes customers come on the own, but all too often I've seen teams basically force another team to use their technology via exec mandate. The situation mentioned in Forbes is one where this happened. The result is usually bad for both teams. The team that is being forced to use a currently unwanted technology often winds up undermining the project (both intentionally and unintentionally). The team that is building the technology often doesn't pay enough attention to what the real customer needs are as opposed to the needs of the political situation. Both groups end up unhappy, and unfortunately in many of the instances where I have seen people pursue these kind of things, the project winds up failing. The situation I mentioned between Outlook and Exchange was a great example and was ancient history such that I felt there was plenty of time to reflect on what went wrong and how it all turned out. The Outlook team wound up delivering something with most of the key benefits (I could go into what was missing, but its a long story) in Outlook 2003 and most of the folks involved have moved on. The sad thing is that there are many other more recent examples of similar situations that would not be appropriate to discuss yet and I haven't seen much progress on Microsoft's part in identifying the underlying dysfunction. Sometimes people try to suggest the solution is just to avoid integration but that misses out on one of Microsoft's greatest strengths.

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