“Patience is a virtue!” So said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as he once again committed the software giant to the cause of Cloud Computing with the added warning to the rest of the market that timing is everything...
“In our business, there are big technology shifts that happen,” said Ballmer. “Every three years, we have to rebirth ourselves. Every product, every two years, three years, whatever it's going to be. So really picking the right area, whether it's to be in new product categories, new lines of business, taking a new approach, every good thing we did generally started with getting it right on the front end. Picking the right things to invest in. Every mistake is usually because we picked a business that just wasn't worth investing in, as opposed to simply mis-executing.”
Ballmer admits that in the past there have been timing and execution errors on the part of Microsoft. “The saga of our Windows product is probably one of the better chronicled,” he said. “I'm sure many people went through as sort of a cycle, either at home or at work, with our Vista product. Just not executed well, not the product itself, but we went a gap of about five, six years without a product. I think back now about thousands of man years, and it wasn't because we were wrong-minded in thinking bad thoughts and not pushing innovation. We tried too big a task, and in the process wound up losing essentially thousands of man years, of innovation capabilities. A discipline and an execution around the innovation process I think is essential."
It's not just a case of following the 'next big thing' because everyone else is, but of deciding when and how to pursue new trends in the market. “We apply another lens, which is not only are we in the right areas, and maximizing innovation, but are we being forward-looking enough, or are we being too forward looking?,” he explained. “What is the right window for innovation? Six months, ten years, three years? It turns out that having a perspective on the timeframe that you're trying to intersect is incredibly important."
He added: "We have bet on things that were too far in the future. There's kind of this gestalt now in the Internet business that everything happens in six months, which is patently nonsense. There's a lot of tough, hard engineering work that doesn't happen in six months, not in the Internet business, nor in any other. So, picking the right timeframes and windows to bet on is absolutely essential.”
In fact, he claims, Microsoft has been working on its Cloud strategy for a long time behind the scenes, but it's only now that the time is ripe to make a full-scale assault on the market. “We've been betting and investing in the Cloud for in some ways about ten years, and in a way that I think is market impactful, we've been investing for about six or seven years,” he said. “Yet it's only now that this uber bet, is going to start really impacting certainly our business customers.
On the consumer side we're already far more in midstream. In our own cases we look at the move to the Cloud and one of the things to ask is do we like the portfolio of areas in which we're investing? We invest in the PC, the phone, and the TV. Those are intelligent devices that are going to continue to morph.
"Of course, in the area of the phone, there's so much landscape and technology that we're passing on, and yet we have by far the broadest footprint of anybody out here. The question we ask in the Cloud environment is, is there something new that we have inspiration for, vision for, that we should take advantage of this unique transformation? Right now I'd say we've got our hands pretty full. Yet, everyday I'll have employees who will say, come on, there's this cool new area, or so and so company is doing really well, why don't we just kind of jump into that?”
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