Microsoft Town Hall Meeting
I just got back to my desk from a “town hall meeting” across the street, where Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer discussed Microsoft’s plans for this year and answered questions from audience. Questions were also submitted via email, and of course it was being webcast on the Microsoft intranet. It was a standing room only crowd in the cafeteria where the meeting took place, as you can see in the photo.
Steve wasn’t as high-energy as he often is, although he got a excited momentarily on a few topics, especially related to flexibility and pace of change. I enjoyed hearing Bill mention Office 12 and Sharepoint early and often, although it made me feel like I should be back at my desk working! (Since Office 12 and Sharepoint evangelism is my main focus these days.)
The questions weren’t softballs. I won’t share it all (hey, it was a Microsoft employees-only meeting, come work here if you want to know all the details!), but suffice to say that people were directly asking questions on the topics of the day, including things like the recent furor over MSN’s agreement to cooperate with the DOJ in requests for search records. Ballmer fielded that one, and although I certainly don’t 100% agree with his reasoning, I appreciated his straightforwardness in explaining it clearly.
My favorite moment was when Steve answered a question about losing the AOL search deal to Google with a long explanation of how Google put so much cash on the table that it wouldn’t have been a wise business decision to compete on those terms, and Bill quietly added “well, we cost Google at least $500 million.” After the laughter died down, Steve added the prediction that Microsoft’s market share in web searching will go up this year, “with or without AOL!”
This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 10:31 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on January 20, 2006 at 11:16 am Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Sitting in Chicago wrote:
[…] Douglas Mahugh has a report on Microsoft’s employee town meeting. I will watch it over the weekend. It’s really great that our execs are meeting with employees again. […]
on January 21, 2006 at 5:27 am J. Random Poster wrote:
What’s to evangelize? MS Office is a monopoly. People will get Office 12 crammed down their throats by their employers, just like every previous iteration of that steaming pile.
on January 21, 2006 at 5:22 pm Doug wrote:
Hmm, sounds like you may need a change of employer. Mine lets me use whatever version of Office I’d like — most of my colleagues are using Office 2003, but I’ve got Office 12 Beta 1, and next week I’m going to upgrade to a newer build (in between Beta 1 and the public Beta 2 coming up soon).
But then I’m a professional evangelist. Don’t try this at home.
on February 17, 2006 at 8:03 pm Doug’s World » First Hit vs. Most Hits wrote:
[…] Google Blog Search also had few hits — 14 total — but a different one showed up at the top of the list: my report on a Microsoft town hall meeting. I’m guessing that Google’s algorithm is probably based on a similar philosophy to their PageRank algorithm, which ranks the “importance” of a page by how many others link to it, and by the “importance” of those inbound linkers as well. Both Scoble and Mini-Microsoft linked to that post on the town hall meeting, and they both have thousands of in-bound links, so that makes sense. […]
on September 18, 2006 at 1:19 am Tom wrote:
Hi everybody!
Can the open source software movement defeat (or severely cripple) Microsoft in the marketplace?