re: Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right…And What It Teaches

northerngeek — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:19:21 GMT

Really great read, thank you for the link. I agree with your point of "number 6" too. I know a lot of people think Microsoft is this large somewhat evil company but your rarely see those willing to acknowledge that they were a tiny company in a sea of big fish when they arrived.

Someday they'll be a childrens book made about BG and MS.. ok maybe not.

re: Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right…And What It Teaches

Don Marti — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:06:19 GMT

Two that MSFT mostly get right and the Anything-but-MSFT crowd in the Valley mostly gets wrong:

7. Ship it! Software is never "done," so deal with it. Customers prefer mostly-working to nothing.

8. N00bs, n00bs, n00bs! In every software market category that's growing fast enough to matter, non-users, not the competitor's customers, are the majority.

re: Five Strategies Microsoft Got Right…And What It Teaches

Vlad Mazek — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:52:24 GMT

I agree with the list, but I disagree with the title.

"Five things Microsoft used to get right..."

#2 Outsource Your Sales Force - this was one of the amazing Microsoft moves and one I've modeled for my company. However, in the past 24 months Microsoft made a LOT of mistakes, alienated a lot of it's partner base and will suffer as a result of it. First, Microsoft started directly competing with it's partners on services - particularly those in the Microsoft Dynamics segment. The number of people who have stopped offering CRM because Microsoft went direct to the lead and undercut them is amazing. Then they tried to marginalize their developers through the "App Store" like model for CRM online. Earlier this summer Microsoft angered it's infrastructure partner force by deciding to become a hosting company, something that has very small VARs weary of Microsoft and much larger infrastructure companies like mine seeking, marketing and deploying competitive products to Microsoft's established platforms.

I guess the lesson to learn here is don't piss off your sales force that has an established marketing and customer relationship.

#4 Microsoft did this right on a number of fronts. First on the free tools, then on the free forums and portals like asp.net, channel 9, now codeplex, etc. It's easy to start writing software for the Microsoft platform. But, Microsoft failed to stay a software company and became far ambitious, going after every company that had a reasonably large market share and defacto control (think Adobe, think Oracle, think standards like PDF) so the willingness of programmers to develop on a Microsoft platform takes a huge hit. Why should I focus on developing for the platform with overzealous company that is known to play dirty?

This opened up the arena for AWS, Java, Linux, Flex and even you've noticed that everywhere you go people develop against Microsoft, not for Microsoft. Now you know why. And guess what the universities are teaching on ;)

I guess the lesson to learn on this one is that you have to play nice if you want to have friends.

I like your list as well though, right on.

-Vlad