WinXP was the first OS with Watson. As such, a lot of low-lying fruit was there to be picked; many bugs (in Windows itself) got reported and fixed. But alas, the fixes were being held up, because Win management really really wanted to simul-ship the Windows XP Service Pack with Windows Server. Lots of good reasons for this, but there's a limit!
Watson has a feature where we can tag buckets with a link; if you hit Send on that bucket, we bring up the browser, typically saying "we fixed this, go <here> for the update". But since the SP hadn't shipped, the page (for a zillion buckets) was authored to say (in effect) "hey we've fixed this bug, really we have, and you'll get the fix really soon, but not just yet". Needless to say, this made not a lick of sense to our customers.
Win XP probably ran on 1000x as many machines as Server. No one was clamoring for the Server release, but all my XP peeps were being denied their fixes, and it just kept dragging on. So I wrote to whatever Windows Veep ran the thing, and told him to get off the pot, sever the connection, ditch the simship, deliver my SP. To his credit, they did so, and I was happy.
And then, twenty years later at a party, somehow the subject came up, and some guy I'd never met before said "that was you?", and was ready to punch me out over it. I guess he'd been square in the simship clan, and I'd shoved him aside.
It may be that when I asked, you yourself felt that customer obsession and competition were both important to the company. Still, I can't help but treat the paragraph that enumerates the long list of vanquished competitors as the driver of cultural "swagger" and market cap as Exhibit A of a faulty focus on competitors over customers. I found myself wishing for additional praise which would also have been truthful, for all the great products, as well as a description of the explosion of happy Microsoft customers, which I saw as an executive for a leading ISV during this same period.
This was the period where Autodesks's customers and employees thanked us (and my company rewarded me personally) for becoming Microsoft-centric rather than yelling at me for "submitting to the 'borg'", removing OS choice, etc. as they had complained in the 90s.
This focus on competitors over customers was the only weak area of Microsoft, to me. Every company has one. I always saw room for both and wished MSFT could have talked about customer love more than competitor bashing. I also often wondered if the optics of this lopsided emphasis weren't a driver for the legal problems, which I always saw as fabricated by weak competitors (and I have a few examples of competitive leadership behavior that prove it).
Separately, are you going to edit all this and kill some trees some day?
The Windows Scalability slide brings back a lot of memories. :-)
WinXP was the first OS with Watson. As such, a lot of low-lying fruit was there to be picked; many bugs (in Windows itself) got reported and fixed. But alas, the fixes were being held up, because Win management really really wanted to simul-ship the Windows XP Service Pack with Windows Server. Lots of good reasons for this, but there's a limit!
Watson has a feature where we can tag buckets with a link; if you hit Send on that bucket, we bring up the browser, typically saying "we fixed this, go <here> for the update". But since the SP hadn't shipped, the page (for a zillion buckets) was authored to say (in effect) "hey we've fixed this bug, really we have, and you'll get the fix really soon, but not just yet". Needless to say, this made not a lick of sense to our customers.
Win XP probably ran on 1000x as many machines as Server. No one was clamoring for the Server release, but all my XP peeps were being denied their fixes, and it just kept dragging on. So I wrote to whatever Windows Veep ran the thing, and told him to get off the pot, sever the connection, ditch the simship, deliver my SP. To his credit, they did so, and I was happy.
And then, twenty years later at a party, somehow the subject came up, and some guy I'd never met before said "that was you?", and was ready to punch me out over it. I guess he'd been square in the simship clan, and I'd shoved him aside.
It may be that when I asked, you yourself felt that customer obsession and competition were both important to the company. Still, I can't help but treat the paragraph that enumerates the long list of vanquished competitors as the driver of cultural "swagger" and market cap as Exhibit A of a faulty focus on competitors over customers. I found myself wishing for additional praise which would also have been truthful, for all the great products, as well as a description of the explosion of happy Microsoft customers, which I saw as an executive for a leading ISV during this same period.
This was the period where Autodesks's customers and employees thanked us (and my company rewarded me personally) for becoming Microsoft-centric rather than yelling at me for "submitting to the 'borg'", removing OS choice, etc. as they had complained in the 90s.
This focus on competitors over customers was the only weak area of Microsoft, to me. Every company has one. I always saw room for both and wished MSFT could have talked about customer love more than competitor bashing. I also often wondered if the optics of this lopsided emphasis weren't a driver for the legal problems, which I always saw as fabricated by weak competitors (and I have a few examples of competitive leadership behavior that prove it).
Separately, are you going to edit all this and kill some trees some day?