Mike McCue was a bit choked up Wednesday after announcing he will leave Microsoft next month, two years after the software giant acquired Tellme Networks, where McCue was a founder and chief executive.
"It's kind of an unusual feeling to leave a company you've started," McCue said in a telephone interview, following a meeting with his staff. "It is a big change. There is no question about it. It was an emotional all-hands meeting."
Mike McCue said the future of his 20th anniversary Mac (shown here) is up in the air, like his own future. But while the Mac may end up in a tech museum, McCue isn't looking to retire. Instead, he said he plans to advise start-ups and return to "his entrepreneurial roots."
(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET)McCue said that he wants to get back to "his entrepreneurial roots."
"I haven't really thought about what I want to do next other than that I am going to advise a couple of start-ups," McCue said. "It seems that's a good way to get back into start-up land."
He says he is still figuring lots of things out. For instance, he still isn't sure what to do with the rare 20th anniversary Mac that sits on his desk. He might donate it to a computer museum when he finally leaves in 45 days, or he might take it with him.
As for his own plans, McCue said he plans to take the summer off, but also added. "If I find an idea that's really, really big...maybe I will start another company."
Not surprisingly, McCue said it was the people he would miss the most. He laughed when asked what he would miss the least. Answering diplomatically, the often plain-spoken McCue said he's looking forward to being in a small company again.
"I just won't thrive as much in a big company setting as I would in a small company setting," McCue said.
As for his effort to infuse design deeper into Microsoft, that's still a work in progress. "I'd give it probably a 'C-plus' to a 'B' right now," McCue said, but he noted that there are others at the company that share that priority and said he has been impressed over the last six months. "I would say it's on an upward trajectory, a steep upward trajectory."
He said design is critical in the world of consumer electronics.
"It's what makes the iPod the iPod and a Creative Labs MP3 player a Creative Labs MP3 player," he said. "It's this secret sauce. We do it here and we love it. We're starting to export that. There's a lot of momentum on that front."
McCue said he doesn't expect a lot of staff to leave in the wake of his departure, and that of co-founder Angus Davis, just as there wasn't that much turnover after the Microsoft deal went through.
"It wasn't so much retention bonuses," he said. "It was the vision."
Mike McCue isn't the only Tellme veteran who is leaving Microsoft. Also departing is McCue's fellow Tellme co-founder Angus Davis.
Davis
(Credit: Microsoft)Davis told the troops of his departure at a recently concluded staff meeting.
"Just told my colleagues of 10 yrs I'm leaving company I founded," Davis said in a Twitter posting. "What a wonderful journey. Thank you, Tellme!"
The Tellme unit will become part of a "speech center of excellence" to be led by Zig Serafin, a 10-year Microsoft veteran. That unit will also include Microsoft's separate Speech Components Group. Serafin said in an interview that Davis and McCue are the only high-level departures and shrugged off the suggestion that Microsoft may have trouble hanging on to Tellme's rank and file.
"I'm not new to the group," said Serafin, who will lead a combined unit that includes Tellme's staff as well as others at the company who work on speech technology. The group spans teams in Mountain View, Calif., where Tellme has offices, as well as Redmond, Wash., and Beijing. Serafin noted that he was deeply involved in helping Tellme integrate with the company in the year following its acquisition by Microsoft in 2007.
"For the first year I worked with Mike to help him connect in with Microsoft and how to navigate the company," he said. Serafin was even there on Super Bowl Sunday in 2007 as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer , with Ballmer accidentally spilling a soda on McCue during one excited outburst.
"I've been there since the beginning and the leaders recognize that," Serafin said.
Serafin said that the Tellme unit, like other Microsoft divisions, was affected by recent layoffs. However, he said that Microsoft isn't abandoning any of the many areas in which Tellme was working, including Microsoft's mobile phone, automotive and mobile units. Tellme also has its own consumer service and application as well as an enterprise business that sells a voice-recognition-based phone service to large and mid-size businesses.
"Microsoft believes that speech is a natural user interface that will be used in a wide range of consumer and business applications," Serafin said. "We think there is an opportunity to further move the needle forward as far as what role speech plays as a natural user interface."
With 400 people on the team, Serafin said that Microsoft has the broadest speech effort in the industry.
"There's no group in the industry that has this combination of assets working across software and services for speech."
Among the projects Serafin will inherit: coming up with a Tellme app for the iPhone. Last year, a Tellme executive said an alpha version was already being tested and said a final product would be ready by June.
Microsoft now says it will miss that target. Although an iPhone version of Tellme's voice-powered search is still being developed, the company plans to release it only after the Windows Mobile 6.5 version of the Tellme app, which is due in the fall.
Mike McCue, the former Netscape executive who led TellMe, plans to leave Microsoft in June, two years after his company was acquired by the software maker.
Mike McCue shakes hands with Microsoft's Jeff Raikes in March 2007 when the software giant announced that it would acquire TellMe.
(Credit: Microsoft)The Tellme unit will become part of a "speech center of excellence" to be led by Zig Serafin, a 10-year Microsoft veteran. That unit will also include Microsoft's separate Speech Components Group.
The new unit has about 400 employees, with three-quarters coming from Tellme and 100 from the speech components unit.
"Mike has been instrumental in making Tellme a core part of (Microsoft's) long-term speech strategy," the company said in a statement. Microsoft "is on track to deliver this vision, so it's a natural time for Mike to move on to his next big thing."
Since becoming a part of Microsoft, Tellme's work has become integral to a number of parts of the company, including the automotive unit that works on Ford Sync, Microsoft's Live Search, and its Windows Mobile teams.
McCue is known for his focus on design and had talked about wanting to make sure his products were on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft devices.
"We want to be on every phone possible," McCue said in an interview last year.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Microsoft is, indeed, working on an iPhone application.
One of the big challenges in bringing the Tellme search application to the iPhone: the lack of physical buttons on the device.
(Credit: Microsoft)As I predicted, it is the company's Tellme unit that is actively developing a program for Apple's iPhone. Tellme offers voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including the BlackBerry.
Although the company created an early alpha program in a matter of weeks, senior director Dariusz Paczuski said it will probably be a couple of months before a public version is ready. He said it will definitely happen within the current fiscal year, which runs through June.
"I'm not sure we can squeeze it out this year, given everything we've got going on," Paczuski told me at last night's Churchill Club event.
With that time frame, it is possible some other Microsoft division could beat Tellme out of the gate, although I haven't heard any other firm plans. (Microsoft did license its ActiveSync technology to Apple, which allows the iPhone to connect to an Exchange server.)
The iPhone does present some interesting challenges. One of its big features is the fact that everything is done via a touch screen. But Tellme relies on a physical button to determine when to start listening to a query.
"You want a button," Paczuski said. Even on Sprint's touch-screen Instinct, Tellme is able to use the call button to determine when a user is speaking. He said that when the iPhone application launches, there will probably be a big virtual button in the middle of the screen.
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In the latest example of its voice-to-screen search service, Tellme users will be able to get sports scores displayed by saying "sports" and their favorite team.
(Credit: Microsoft)Microsoft's Tellme unit is announcing an expansion of its "voice-to-screen" search service. By saying "sports" and the name of one's favorite team, users of the Tellme app can now get a screen with details on a team's current or upcoming game.
Among the sports covered are professional baseball, football, hockey, men's and women's basketball, and soccer. College sports include men's and women's hoops, soccer, and, perhaps my favorite, hockey.
The speak-for-sports-scores-feature, like the other voice-to-screen services only work on the BlackBerry, for now. Microsoft announced the service back in April and said it hoped to bring it to other phones at some point.
I checked back in Monday to get an update. A company representative said there is "active development" for Windows Mobile and said the company is also exploring whether to do a version for the iPhone.
Microsoft hasn't committed to any iPhone apps. However, if I was a betting woman, I would put my money on something coming from Microsoft's Tellme unit.
Tellme is the speech recognition company that Microsoft bought last year. Among its many products is one that lets you speak a search term into a phone and get back a screen with information--say the location of the nearest gas station or pizza parlor.
Tellme CEO-turned-Microsoft executive Mike McCue has been spending a lot of time these days integrating his voice search technology with Windows Mobile. However, Tellme has also continued to work with Microsoft's rivals in the cell phone business. In fact, Tellme's latest software was released first for the BlackBerry.
McCue, who sports a 20th anniversary Mac on his desk and praises Apple for its design, has made it clear he wants to be wherever the mobile customers are.
"We want to be on every phone possible," he said in an interview earlier this year.
He also noted that while the iPhone is seen as the be-all and end-all of mobile gadgets, it is actually fairly cumbersome and a two-handed job to search for local listings. No matter how great a touch screen is, he says, saying what you are looking for, if done right, can be much faster.
To switch a song on the iPhone, he noted, takes six clicks on the iPhone.
"Changing tunes on your iPhone is a dangerous experience," he said.
As elegant as the iPhone is--and McCue gives it lots of credit--what's really needed, McCue said, is a new interface. Not surprisingly, he sees voice as a big part of the solution.
It's not surprising, as Microsoft works to catch up to Apple, that McCue's team has been spending a lot more time lately on mobile applications, working closely with the group developing Windows Mobile 7--the next version of Microsoft's cell phone operating system.
"We want to make Windows Mobile better," McCue said, but added quickly, "Tellme will be available on all mobile operating systems."
Although computerized telephone systems have gotten much better at recognizing what we say, they still have to ask way too many questions.
You know the drill: endless menus, enter every piece of personal information. Contrast that with the Internet, where entering an account number or frequent-flier number brings up a ton of personalized information. Well, phone systems are on the brink of adding the same capabilities.
American Airlines is going live with a service that lets customers opt in to a "remember me" feature. When they call the airline, the system recognizes who they are, brings up their flight information, and offers options tailored to their travel plans. (Hear a sample of how the service works.)
Sample personalized call
Hear what American Airlines' new custom service sounds like.
Download mp3 (166 KB)
"That's what people want to do," said Jamie Bertasi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Tellme Networks subsidiary, whose system powers American Airlines' new service. "They just want to call in, accomplish their task, and move on with their day."
American is the first business to use Tellme's system in that way, though Tellme has been trying out some personalization in its directory assistance service. There, it recognize callers who have dialed in within the last 20 minutes and asks them if they want to hear the same phone number they called in for the last time--a huge time-saver.
"A lot of times, that's exactly why they are calling," Bertasi said. "People love that feature."
Bertasi said she expects many of Tellme's business customers to opt for personalization similar to what American is offering.
Indeed, the main downside to such services is that they threaten to put some people out of work. But, heck, if a computer can remember who I am and give me the information I want, that's a lot more appealing to me than talking to a live operator that can't.
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