Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by kebernet on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 08:55

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Software

Cooper: Microsoft needs better products. Everyone's least favorite news source reports on the dancing machine's new plans for Microsoft, and the hits just keep on coming.

"We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security," Ballmer wrote in a wide-ranging memo to employees, a missive that has become something of an annual tradition as Microsoft starts its new fiscal year.

AAah, I see. The problem is the PERCEPTION that their products aren't secure, not that, oooooh.... their products AREN'T SECURE. Its a really convicing arguement when new IE critical security flaws are found as fast as they can duct tape the old ones. Seriously, though. Microsoft is running into the wall now. They have never innovated anything as a company, they simply appropriate and at best standardize. However, without a healthy software market of people actually innovating out there for them to steal from, they are at a loss as to what to do. Hence Office 5 series is pretty much the last version of Office people were all on about upgrading to, because it was the last one before all the other office suites were dead. After Netscape died at the hands of Microsoft, nothing happened with IE. Of course now that the Gecko/KHTML series of browsers have stablized their cores they are innovating in great news ways, and so Microsoft revs up the IE team to steal their ideas. Perhaps in a few more years, OpenOffice will have crossed that liminal point and be the application forcing MS Office to advance, but they are still working on those cores. Microsoft, left to it's own devices, has no ideas but still wants your upgrade dollars for Windows NT 5.2.

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RE: Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by Shmooze (not verified) on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 10:38.

I like to bash MS as much as the next guy but come on, let's be a little less biased. The quote you attributed to Balmer addressed focus on security, it was not a claim that they are secure. I've been following quite a few blogs from MS guys and they all seem aware how awful these security holes are. They are trying to do a balancing act between ease of use, security, and keeping features (that in hindsight) they should have never included in products to begin with (and bet they would not now if they knew how big a mess they would cause). And really, I use Office 2003 and like it, but it's an Office suite - there is not that much more that needs to be done to it. If you were a MS employee (hehe) you would be all about trying to convice your customer base to upgrade.

RE: Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by cooper (not verified) on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 11:05.

You know, though. To talk about battling perceptions of security in light of a solid month of critical flaws and huge virus problems over and over, you have to admit, is just funny. People will have the perception that Windows 2000 isn't "Good enough" when Windows ** offers some signifigantly improved value. People will have the perception that Microsoft product are secure when the IT department gets a month or two out of scramble-ass mode. Frankly, the "keeping features" thing is just bunk at this point, IMHO. It's time for Microsoft to just start over, especially with their Email, Browser and Server products. Those handful of features that get mentioned are almost never used anyway, and I think if an IT department honestly thought that that next upgrade would really bring that value, they would be beating down Balmer's door. Also, to say that Office has "not that much more that needs to be done to it" goes to the very point of innovation. Looking at Mozilla and the simple things like tabs and intelligent search add SO much value. For my money, the last thing that got added to Office that added value was as-you-type spelling and syntax checking. To say that there is nothing that could be done to make Office better is like making the arguement that all the books have been written, all the songs have been sung. Even if you look at the only thing that has the MS-orbital world excited, it's .NET, which basically goes to a VM-managed Java clone. It's not like anyone is going to get fired for buying Microsoft any time soon, but I think they are definitely in an overall decline. Assuming Longhorn ships in my lifetime, it will have to be the end-all-be-all to change the downward trajectory of Microsoft as a company right now.

RE: Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by Shmooze (not verified) on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 12:46.

I have read a few articles recently speaking to the point of MS decline. It used to be you could always just begin using the next MS product on top of the current one, they would go to extrodinary means to ensure compatiblity. Raymond Chen's blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/) describes some interesting cases. With VS.Net they broke that, no recompile from VS 6, build everything all over. It seems that Longhorn will do the same thing in a few years. I still know quite a few companies that are not making the switch to .Net and when the do decide to migrate they will likely look at other options since if they have to rewrite everything anyway why not make sure you have the best tool? That really could be the downfall for MS, when a customer considers a new upgrade not just an incremental but a brand new item then they will evaluate other products at that time instead of just blindly upgrading (Word Perfect's move to Windows is an example - when the same Function Keys no longer do the same things and the user has to relearn everything all over why not look at other stuff) I think the next 4 years will be interesting for MS. I was being a little tongue in cheek about Office before, I actually have some pretty sweet Excel spreadsheets that are running managed code hitting web services to populate production data.

RE: Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by cooper (not verified) on Wed, 07/07/2004 - 13:42.

I read the Raymond Chen thing a while back. Honestly, the Sim City hack made me laugh, but so much of the rest of it goes, really, to poor API implementation. Honestly, I think with Win2k, or at LEAST XP, they should have just scrapped the whole Active* *COM line. I think Apple did a great thing with their "Yellow Box" compatibility layer for OSX, and really became a model to show that radical change can be managed properly. The migration to .Net is an issue, and whichever way you go, it is a good thing. Frankly the advantage to the JVM has never been the J so much as the VM. If you (effectively) eliminate memory leaks and buffer overflows from even being possible in your software, you eliminate 60% of all the problems. If you eliminate the nill-security COM registry and scope-imply all scripting, you eliminate another 35% of all the problems. I mean, it has literally been 2 years since WebSphere had a critical security flaw, and that one was only critical if you were stupid (view JSP source bug). It's not because of innate superiority of the code, it has to do with the entire development model. Microsoft can certainly change that moving forward and still keep an isolated instance of VBRUN.dll on the filesystem. Hell, I can run Windows apps in complete isolation from each other with Win4Lin under Linux. Implementing a similar isolation layer in WinXP can't be THAT big of a deal.

RE: Balmer: Microsoft needs a better sales pitch

Submitted by atrox (not verified) on Thu, 07/08/2004 - 11:56.

"I like to bash MS as much as the next guy . . ." Give it a shot, that post wasnt very becoming of a basher. It sounded pretty reasonable and levelheaded to me, work on your venom and bias a bit more.