Newsmaker: Gates scopes out the business landscape

Microsoft's message to business customers this week boils down to this: No delays here.

Although Microsoft announced last week that Vista and Office 2007 would not land on new PCs for the holidays, the company on Sunday said it is largely on track to deliver new business software.

After a long week, and very little weekend, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates arrived in the Lone Star state for the Convergence 2006 trade show to offer an update on the software maker's least well-known unit, Microsoft Business Solutions.

Cobbled together from a series of acquisitions that began with Great Plains Software five years ago, Microsoft has quietly grown a unit that sells the same kinds of software as SAP and Oracle, but sells it mostly to midsize companies.

In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates discussed Vista challenges, where Microsoft is headed with MBS, and the company's broader move to offer hosted software. He was joined by Doug Burgum, the former Great Plains chief who is stepping away from running MBS day to day, but remains the unit's chairman.

Q: Windows has grown over time, and one of its strengths is that it works with all the hundreds of millions of Windows PCs out there. How do you take something that complex and make it so that it can be grown in an orderly fashion and shipped on a regular schedule? That's been a problem with Vista.

You've got end users and developers, and if you make things too complex for either of those audiences, then you're not doing your job.

Gates: Architecture layering is a key part of that, and that's something we've put a huge investment into (for) Windows this time around. You know, even in the last year, as you've seen a lot of releases of Windows Media Player or Media Center or Tablet PC, we've been doing a lot of releases. The biggest one we did, of course, was the security release, XP SP 2, and if there's anything where the amount of work you see at the top versus the amount of work that's gone underneath, you have the highest ratio of security work. In XP SP 2 we tried to make sure there were no user-interface changes. There were a few things in the browser where you just had to think about add-ons that you didn't have to before, but other than that we were able to make it mostly invisible. You know, we have great technology to test for compatibility and how we change things to avoid breaking compatibility.

When does it get to a point where it's just too hard to add new features, such as a new file system like WinFS, into Windows?
Gates: We do a lot of architectural work in Windows every release, and probably more this release than any other. It all comes back to (this): You've got end users and developers, and if you make things too complex for either of those audiences, then you're not doing your job. And the idea that if you say, OK, to make our engineering easier let's have the file system here and this fancy file system here, but the user has to think, OK, I have these concepts up here, I can do rich query, standing query, notification query up here, down here I can't, I have limited properties and things; if you force them to learn both paradigms, it's bad. And so what we've been able to do in Vista is take the search enhanced file system and get a lot out of that. It's not the database-driven file system (WinFS) that we had in mind initially, but you get extremely high percentages of the things we had in mind by using the search-based file system.

Microsoft did a lot of work to combine the consumer and business versions of Windows into one code base with Windows XP, and most people find it a lot more stable. Some folks, after last week's decision to delay Vista, were saying maybe Microsoft should go back to having more releases for consumers and fewer for businesses. Do you have a sense of what it is that people want in the next version of Windows? Is it different for consumers than for businesses?
Gates: Businesses often move in waves where they'll upgrade many things at the same time: their own applications, Office, Windows. They like to roll things out in groups so that the business processes or user training, the support gets aligned around a whole stack of software. And so you have businesses that are very quick to get everything out and you'll have businesses that tend to lag in getting things out, and then you'll have other businesses, just because of the rhythm, they'll hit our cycles when they want to make changes or they'll be off our cycle. So sometimes they'll be very state-of-the-art and sometimes they'll be a few years behind.

More Newsmakers

[theoscnet]

Everything is just SUPER in Redmond!

"We're super happy with the growth"

"I mean, we perform super, super, super well."

(Our) software can scale up to cover a super, super high percentage of all businesses in the world

"how they take the updates in and when they pass them along to their systems--we've done super well on that,"

Reminds me of the days of Super Nintendo
Everything was just Super!

I'm just suprised a "super-duper" didn't get stuck in there somewhere, too...

Sorry, I thought that article was quite funny, just pokin fun...

[Earl Benser]

Gates is mightily impressed.....

...... Let's hope that there is actually something to impress the rest
of us.

But, from the Redmond blogs, maybe not this time.....

[Stomfi]

CEO Speak

These comments by Gates are obviously for the intellectually challenged, who need clever sounding words in a childish language they can understand and pass on to fellow CEOs and users of a similar ilk.
Unfortunately today, this seems to be the majority of the population, although Gates has always believed his supporters come from the ranks of those who can only understand what he does.
Sadly for Microsoft's customers, his "vision" is limited. (He rewrites things when he is proven wrong, like how he had to invent the world wide web when that didn't eventuate as a fad.)
New technologies are happening thick and fast in the latter part of this decade no matter how hard MS tries to put on the breaks, a strategy that has worked well for them so far. But advances in computing hardware coupled with open source software that can't be marginalised by the Gates money pot, look like numbering the days for a stand alone networked desktop system even in the home.
A huge problem for the Windows solution is that it is not cross platform and its application software does not run as well on other operating systems. Gates is trying to solve this problem with a web based solution, but instead of using a standard development platform like say Java, their "must be invented or owned here" strategy, has forced them to use something that anecdotal evidence suggests is inferior and insecure.
But like the old IBM before them, business leaders and the masses seem to think that big is best, so he knows he has their ear until the switch to more modern technologies and strategies by the end of this decade, marginalises his business model instead.