A memo that reportedly leaked from Microsoft has been making the rounds of the tech media.
Just before midnight Tuesday night, the Wall St. Journal, NY Times, and other major, mainstream US media ran an exchange of memos between Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and chief technology officer Ray Ozzie.
The memos indicate that Gates and Ozzie see the need to turn Microsoft around, concentrating more energy towards on-demand services and less on massive software packages that do all things for all people.
Ozzie’s memo to Gates and other Microsoft executives says, among other things, that the company needs to basically be a lot more like Google in the provision of ad-driven consumer services such as Email (Gmail) or Blog support. He uses the word “grassroots” numerous times to describe newer technologies such as blogging, RSS feeds and tagging. He goes on to castigate the crew for not investing more time or energy in developing Ajax, a programming language that allows web-services to act as if they were on the user’s desktop.
Gates’ response speaks of disruptive days at Microsoft. “This coming ‘services wave’ will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us – still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience, and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle & digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets.”
Gates is challenging Microsoft employees to work harder, and to “act quickly and decisively” in seizing opportunities outlined in Ozzie’s vision.
His last paragraph tells us where he thinks his company is heading and what it needs to do to get there. “The next sea change is upon us. We must recognize this change as an opportunity to take our offerings to the next level, compete in a manner commensurate with our industry responsibilities, and utilize our assets and our broad reach to reshape our business for the benefit of the users of our products, our customers, our partners and ourselves.” Gates is obviously not comfortable with how his ship is navigating this “next sea of change”.
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