Doug’s World

Head in the Clouds

As I’ve spent more time at Microsoft and hear more managers and employees talk about strategy, it has become clear that some people around here worry quite a bit about competing with Google. That’s a good thing, since Google has come on strong in recent years and is a serious contender in the software business. They’ve got a big stable revenue stream from search-related advertising, and they “get it” about managing software development. They’re like Lotus or Novell or Netscape in their prime, and that’s a bit scary to some folks at Microsoft.

But I think sometimes people around here are so eager to out-Google Google that they lose sight of Microsoft’s role in some of the long-term trends shaping the future of the software business. We weren’t the first Google, and I hope we’re not the next one, either.

The way I see it, Microsoft offers a suite of products that allow people to manage their own bits better than any other platform available today. Not by putting those bits up on the internet somewhere and then trying to get at them when you need them, but by putting those bits on your very own hard drive and having them with you wherever you go.

Sure, Microsoft technologies can be used to manage data in “the cloud,” but so can products from a zillion other companies. What those other companies can’t offer is a way to effectively manage offline data, except when they build products that run on the world’s most commonly used operating system. That is, our platform: Windows.

But it seems to me that a big portion of Microsoft’s current message is “we buy into Google’s view of the future, and we can do it better than them.” I’d rather see us toning down that message a bit and instead saying “we offer an alternative to Google’s put-your-data-in-the-cloud philosophy, a more balanced approach that lets you manage your data the way you want to manage it with all of your options open.” If marketing is the art of exaggeration, I think we should stop exaggerating our similarities with Google and have the confidence and vision to exaggerate our differences.

That’s a sweeping generality, of course, and there are plenty of initiatives within Microsoft that are about offering an alternative to storing everything in the cloud. Look at Office “12″ — we’re giving users a level of polish and sophistication in productivity software that the world has never seen before. Or the Sharepoint platform, where you can work with your data and workflow processes online or offline, smoothly switching back and forth between those paradigms as the needs of the day dictate.

Those are the sorts of technologies that only Microsoft can offer effectively on such a large scale. Sure, we need a better search offering (and we’re getting there rapidly), and we need to figure out how to pick up more online advertising revenue as that market grows, but that doesn’t mean we need to be more like Google.

Well, the Google policy of one day a week for pet projects would be nice. On the other hand, the best developers have always found time for their pet projects, and hiding those from management is just part of the fun. What kind of wimp needs management’s permission in order to develop something cool on the side? Ha!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 7:58 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.