Microsoft
Strategies For Platforms And Applications
Microsoft’s First Annual International
Analysts’ Meeting
Microsoft invited more than 150 industry
analysts to Redmond to discuss its entire current and future product
strategy. This was a
full court press event, with many executives in evidence, including
both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and tantalizing glimpses into not
just near-future announcements like next month’s Windows 2003
Server, but much further out events.
Overall, I’d rate the vent a solid B+.
There was lots to hear (although the balance between strategy
and details was often off) and speakers were refreshingly candid.
Some speakers seemed to need more rehearsal – or perhaps a
new watch -- (nothing began or ended on schedule) and a few had
difficulty getting historical information right, but that was offset
by the opportunity to have so many one-on-one meetings, both formal
and more casual, and get details on future Microsoft plans.
Microsoft has already announced dates for next year’s
meeting and we’ve put it on our calendar.
Microsoft Strategies And Roadmaps
The big news from Redmond was what will
happen and when. Of course, we care a lot about some things and less (or
nearly not at all) about others.
We will stick to our knitting and tell you about the ones we
found compelling.
Much of the strategy is about how
Microsoft can help IT avoid complexity by designing its
infrastructure and applications for integration.
(The implication is that the previous notion of buying
“best of breed” applications from multiple vendors and then
integrating them is what leads to complexity.)
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Microsoft points again and again to the
notion that it isn’t good enough to provide integration;
architecture matters – infrastructure and applications have
to be designed to prevent or avoid complexity when they are
used together.
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Microsoft believes its System Management
Server (SMS), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and
Applications Center will together provide a unified management
solution for the Windows-centric enterprise, including the
option to manage non-Windows systems with third-party
extensions.
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Gates As The Architect
In his
role as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates’
comments to the industry analysts were also about the importance of
architecture, especially for enterprise customers.
Using the PC’s history as a background, and Microsoft’s
own IT needs as an example, Gates noted enterprise customers’
needs to simplify and rationalize, bridging the gap between business
and technology as well as the space between the IT function and its
vendors.
Hardware advances continue, Gates
believes, but the opportunity is in software and that, of course, is
where Microsoft is making its investments.
It sees XML everywhere as a key.
In a Q&A session, Gates reiterated that Microsoft
differentiates itself with its software, not with services.
Microsoft has a long-term focus on a
common architecture and has increased its R&D budget 20% to
address the issues of complexity and cost.
He sees the future in Microsoft product “waves.”
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The Longhorn Wave (2004-5) will start to
be presented to developers soon, in the fall of this year.
Longhorn is a desktop OS release.
It has profound implications for how interfaces look,
how information is presented, and how applications are
installed and updated.
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The Blackcomb Wave (2005-6), being
further off, gets less definition, but it is the next server
release after Windows 2003 Server.
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Windows 2003 Server
Microsoft will start shipping the newest
Windows Server next month.
The Windows 2003 Server comes in three
flavors: a Standard
Edition for small businesses and departmental users, an Enterprise
Edition, supporting up to eight processors, for applications, web
services, and infrastructure; a DataCenter Edition for business
critical and mission critical applications, supporting up to 32-way
SMP and 8-node clustering; and a Web Edition especially for web
serving and hosting.
In addition to traditional Server roles,
Windows 2003 server is especially designed for its new role in the
.NET web services architecture.
Decreasing Complexity And Cost
The most interesting thing Microsoft
said in its three-day meeting was in Bill Weghte’s remarks about
how it would solve “the Crisis in the data center” by lowering
the cost of IT operating, accelerating the use of business
requirements in IT, and managing key IT assets while taking the
strain out of people, processes, relationships, and information –
all this through simplicity, automation, and increased flexibility.
The key, Weghte claims, is to stop using
80% of our IT resources on maintenance and free up more of it for
innovation. To do that
we need smart software that will drive much more IT work in an
automated way, based on business policies.
Microsoft wants to be able to do this
across heterogeneous platforms.
They know enterprises aren’t just Windows shops.
We think there are two barriers here.
Microsoft isn’t yet a trusted enterprise partner. (Yes,
enterprises all buy Microsoft software, but they all buy everything
from janitorial supplies to car fleets, too; being a supplier
doesn’t make you a trusted, strategic partner.)
In order to become one, we think
they’d have to do two things
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prove that they have much higher quality
standards going into the future than they’ve had in the past
for both product and support (we think they know that and
they’ve been working to improve here)
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figure out how to finesse the services
card. So far,
Microsoft has agreed to provide services as a kind of getting
into new markets, liaison, if we have to, function.
That may not be enough skin in the game.
Big companies need a lot of resources and they like to
know their strategic partners can provide them.
Nevertheless, Microsoft has a plan.
It intends to provide a Systems Definition Model that is a
live XML blueprint which can capture and unify operational
requirements of applications with data center policies.
They have already shipped a first release candidate to more
than 150 customers.
Microsoft has a four year plan, going
out into the 2007 time frame, for provisioning, virtualizing,
allocating resources, and essentially running the IT system, both
the Microsoft pieces and (ultimately) the rest.
The first pieces, in Windows 2003 Server
include a Resource Manager for enhanced CPU control and memory
utilization and Virtual Disk Service for SAN’s.
An Automated Deployment Service (ADS) will offer provisioning
of Windows servers. The
virtual machine software (acquired by Microsoft from Connectix) that
permits multiple servers to share a single, larger machine will also
be part of this offering.
(NOTE TO
READERS: We’re
working on a Magnum Opus, a chart for each of the four major players
in this game, IBM, Sun, HP, and Microsoft, showing each of their
roadmaps against time, and then comparing them to each other.
We’ll be back to you with a version of that in about 6-8
weeks. Suggestions
appreciated.)
The Integrated Platform
It includes all kinds of upgrades, but
to us the most important part is Microsoft’s decision to continue
to incorporate additional functionality into the server itself (they
refer to it as “baseline functionality”), making it possible to
access some important multi-user tasks without any additional
software.
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Microsoft likes to refer to this as
architectural simplification.
What they mean is that they move functionality into the
operating system or combine pieces of middleware together or
place them inside of a portmanteau application like Office
(which has itself become a kind of platform).
We’d note that this kind of
simplification is radically different than what we were
expecting in the web services round.
Somehow we thought that it was intended to be all about
increased modularity, even granularity, and the ability to
combine functions from a variety of sources into an easily
integrated and pleasing whole.
Perhaps that was unrealistic, but this (like Sun’s
Orion strategy) sounds like a big step in the opposite
direction – we’ll give you simplicity, but the price is
you’ll need to be satisfied with our definition of function.
Of course, all of these applications (Microsoft’s or
others) are highly customizable, so there’s always the
opportunity to fine-tune them.
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For example, many of the functions that
previously required a SharePoint Server plus consulting (or a
competitive product like Lotus) will now be supported directly
out of the Windows 2003 Server box.
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Or, as Microsoft’s Eric Rudder
suggested the Jupiter initiative (2003-4) will combine HTML
and Office into a single software object, code-named Avalon.
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Office As A Platform
With a more than 90% market share,
Microsoft’s main incentive for continuing to upgrade its Office
suite is to keep its massive corporate installed base happy and to
try to insure that substantial percentages of them will agree to
take each offered upgrade, an increasingly difficult task.
If we were writing an information
worker’s tool today (rather than the 40+ years ago that word
processors began or the 25 years for spreadsheets), we’d probably
be a lot more concerned with email, information filtering,
collaboration, and connecting to business processes than to
old-style productivity tools. Microsoft’s
Kurt DelBene, its corporate vice president for authoring and
collaboration services, talks about a “system for information
work,” something that would help users access, absorb,
collaborate, author, decide, and communicate.
To help move in that direction,
Microsoft likes to think of its Office software as a set of products
for an array of users (Corporate, Small Businesses, Home Office,
Education, etc.) plus a set of related Microsoft products like the
new SharePoint Services embedded in Windows 2003 Server, Windows.NET
and the SharePoint Portal Server.
That’s right, of course.
We do need new and additional services.
We probably need more of them and less of the traditional
personal productivity applications.
That’s why we’re not sure whether Microsoft can continue
to convince their customers that everyone needs a full-sized product
like Office for every information worker or whether some of those
workers would be better served with something lighter weight,
cheaper, and easier to use and support.
We don’t know the answer.
We do know that it’s a question – and one that lots of
competitors are going to offer new answers for. Whether it’s
actually useful to have employees using different products – or
whether it’s time to change –
remains to be seen. It’s
way too soon to tell. (The
last time we changed our loyalty from one office platform to another
was in about 1991/2 when Microsoft Word took over the market share
leadership from WordPerfect.)
In the meantime, Microsoft keeps coming
up with great new ideas. For
example, the OneNote note-taking software they created for the Table
PC will also be supported in desktop versions of Office 11 (although
it’s not clear yet whether the product will be bundled in the
Office package or sold separately). This ingenious software lets you takes notes in handwriting,
voice, or keyboarding (anywhere on the page), complete with
sketches, and will store them as ink or recognize them to enhance
storage and searching. Maybe
that’s the new word processor for some of us.
It’s certainly one of the reasons that Tablet PC’s are
flying off the shelves.
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