Cat5bird Seat

Revolution as a PR Maneuver

Microsoft's "leaked" memos appear to be mandates from on high made public on purpose to kick itself in gear.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 01/16/2006

Back in November, Microsoft “leaked” a couple of executive memos, one each from Bill Gates and CTO Ray Ozzie. I say “leaked,” even though the From line on Ozzie’s memo says “Executive staff and direct reports” makes it pretty clear from the tone and the speed with which full copies were handed out to the media that the press and Microsoft’s major customers were equally important audiences for this particular piece of work. In Ozzie’s memo, he outlines a vision of “The Internet Services Disruption” and talks about how Microsoft can start baking services into all of its software to start beating off challenges from Google and smaller, nimbler competitors. You can read the memos yourself over at http://www.hypercamp.org/2005/11/09 if you want.

Thematically, the memos are fairly simple: Gates leads off with a bit of revisionist history, congratulating the company on catching the Internet Tidal Wave ten years ago in a successful act of corporate reinvention (in fact, anyone who lived through it knows that Microsoft’s leap to the Internet, while ultimately successful, had a certain Keystone Kops feel to it at the time). Ozzie then wades in at length, pointing out that there are a batch of Microsoft competitors on the Internet, identifying some fundamental shifts in the computing landscape, tying those shifts to opportunities for Microsoft, and ending with a concrete call to action (which, in typical Microsoft fashion, includes a bit of management reorganization and a fresh intranet site).

I could dig in and critique some of the details of these memos (for instance, I am much less optimistic than Ozzie is about advertising-supported software being a fundamental shift — I think it’s a temporary aberration born of dollars in search of anything remotely plausible to be spent on), but I think it’s more useful to back up and ask some fundamental questions: Why write and leak these particular memos now? What’s the point? I think it’s fairly obvious that if these were really top-secret internal planning documents intended only for Microsoft’s executive staff, they wouldn’t have shown up simultaneously in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and a batch of loud-mouthed blogs all on the same day. That’s not a leak; it’s a carefully-orchestrated campaign to get the word out. It’s up to us to tease out what the word "is."

I think the most important word in the Ozzie memo is not “services” at all. After all, Microsoft has done software-as-a-service to death in recent years: Remember when Office was going to become a service offering you’d get over the Internet? Remember Hailstorm? (Actually, the company would probably rather you forget both of those things; neither one is mentioned in this set of documents, intent as they are on portraying Microsoft as a company that continuously Does The Smart Thing). Nope, the word of the day here is “agility.”

The key section of the Ozzie memo, in my opinion, is buried toward the end: It’s titled “What’s Different?” In this chunk, he talks about reorganizing the company and how “Microsoft’s execution effectiveness will be improved by eliminating obstacles to developing and shipping products.” He talks about shipping a wave of new products, about it being time for fresh missions, and about improved agility on the product teams. He states bluntly that “complexity kills” and makes blunt suggestions on how to simplify the development process at Microsoft moving forward.

Look again at when these memos were leaked: Just as Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were finally shipping, after years of work. SQL Server in particular was two years later than many developers originally expected it, and Visual Studio came out to an early backlash from developers who think its complexity has resulted in a low-quality release. BizTalk, which was supposed to be part of the same wave of releases, has slipped into 2006. And now the press is beginning to focus attention again on the question of just when Windows Vista, and the corresponding Longhorn Server release, will actually go out the door.

It’s pretty clear that Microsoft can’t afford to keep on with these half-decade-long development projects involving tight coupling between developers all over the company — not in an age when their major competitors ship updates in a matter of months. What I see in these memos is Ray Ozzie saying very clearly, from his new position as the outsider brought in as CTO, that the development style is going to change — and he’s stapled Bill Gates’ memo on to his to show that he has backing from on high. The press is being enlisted to write about how Microsoft is becoming more agile as part of an internal Microsoft political struggle. This serves two purposes. First, it assures customers that things are changing, and that we might as well wait for the next Microsoft release rather than shopping around. Second, it holds the developers’ feet to the fire, letting them know in a public way that they need to ship better code faster.

The interesting question is whether a corporation the size of Microsoft really can become more agile on a scale that makes any difference — or whether Ray Ozzie will be looking for a new job in another year or two when he discovers that there’s too much inertia in the current processes for him to bring about change by decree. On that, all I can say is: Stay tuned.

Are you in favor of a more agile Microsoft? Or do you think this particular dog is too old to learn new tricks? Let me know at [email protected].