Captain's Blog

The Value of Microsoft – Customer Value in “The Platform”

2005-03-04T23:31:00Z

Before I go into anymore detail about “The Platform” itself I thought I’d cut to the chase and look at an example of a customer following this philosophy in the real world.

I spend most of my time with enterprise customers and a lot of that time talking about “The Platform” with them. Most customers invariably chat with me about problems that they are trying to solve with technology that can integrate with whatever they have. By focusing on “The Platform” as a strategic architecture base with customers it's possible to introduce our technology in a new light and demonstrate long therm value that goes beyond a single solution.

Austereo is an Australian customer I have been working with for the last 12 months. After delivering a Platform focused workshop to their IT team, Austereo decided to embark on the platform approach to their IT. Check out this article in which Ross is interviewed on the subject of their new direction.

This shows a happy customer, but none of the detail behind outcome. Stay tuned for the details…

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The Value of Microsoft – The Microsoft Platform

2005-03-04T15:08:00Z

I think a platform discussion is a reasonable place to start looking at the overall value of Microsoft. I have to start by saying I really don’t like the term “platform”, it’s used to describe all manner of software systems and hence means different things to different people. Unfortunately I like the term “stack” even less which is the only alternative I can come up with. So I’m going to persevere with the former and define what I mean – when I say “The Microsoft Platform” (I’ll just call it “The Platform” for short).

Let’s reminisce for a moment. At least since the inception of Office and BackOffice, Redmonites have been thinking about software from an engineering standpoint beyond individual products, and therefore creating value beyond individual products. Things were relatively simple at this time, we wrote some software which appealed to a broad audience and made it simple and attractive for other companies to build functionality alongside and on-top of our products. This collection of software provided a common foundation (going beyond just an OS) and was an enabler for others to create more customised solutions using custom code while leveraging the generic pieces. (Hmm, this sounds like Linux :-)) This is pretty fundamental stuff for the techos , but value is about business – I think it’s time we shared.

No one can deny that this approach was spectacularly successful. The core of what Microsoft produced was a set of integrated software components, which spanned multiple products, and could be used and re-used by the solutions created using them. Collectively these components are what I (and many others) refer to as the “The Platform”. Somewhat confusing given Microsoft often refers to the “Windows Platform”, or the “Office Platform”, etc – I think of these as merely subsets of “The Platform”. (It would be useful step forward if, as a company, we recognised the importance of this holistic usage of the term “Platform” and stoped using it in to describe subsets of “The Platform”.)

As I’ve described it, the “The Platform” refers collectively to all of our software components in all of our products – that’s a fair chunk of what we do as an organisation. So I would argue that “The Platform” is a key part of the overall value of Microsoft and worthy of more discussion and examination…

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The Value of Microsoft – Intro

2005-03-03T22:11:00Z

In the 5 short years I’ve been here at Microsoft the company has evolved an enormous amount. Back in 1999, Windows NT 4 and BackOffice formed the bulk of our product offering for business customers. Today things are very different in terms of products but, our underlying philosophy driving us I don’t think is all that different. This philosophy and our demonstrated ability to execute against it over a long period is a rather unique and special quality of Microsoft. Somewhere in this philosophy lies the true value of Microsoft, over and above the products or technology of the moment which we spend most of our time peddling to customers. I thought I’d have a crack at trying to define our value beyond our products and technologies. Stay tuned…

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.