How Ray Ozzie is Changing Microsoft

prostoalex writes "The October issue of Wired magazine takes a look at Ray Ozzie's work with Microsoft. To hear the article describe it, he's rebuilding the company from the ground up. A 70,000-employee company is quietly changing its ways by thinking of software as deliverable services that perhaps could be rented on a monthly subscription basis." From the article: "There are, of course, two major reasons for Ozzie's ascendancy at Microsoft: Gates and Ballmer. Ozzie is one of the few technologists anywhere whom they respect; they'd been trying for years to get him to join the company. Now he's carrying their hopes for the future, and it's a heavy load. Ozzie needs to move Microsoft from selling software in a box to selling lightning-fast, powerful online applications ranging from gaming to spreadsheets. The risks are enormous. The mission is to radically alter the way the company sells its most profitable software and to pursue the great unknown of so-called Web services - trading an old cash cow for an as-yet-to-be-determined cash cow. No, Microsoft doesn't think its customers will stop using PCs with hard drives and work entirely online, but the desktop era is drawing to a close, and that promises to force some painful trade-offs."

AAAHHHHH!!!

I'm going to puke if I see somebody mention that the desktop days are coming to an end!!!! Who says? What proof, besides companies greed, shows that people don't want desktop software? I sure as hell won't be running apps online rather than on my own machine for a lot reasons. Just to name a few:

1) Bandwidth

2) Keeping apps under MY control, not somebody elses

3) I don't like being required to have an internet connection to type an f'n paper.

And those are just to name a few.

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

Microsoft is one of the last company in the world to want desktop to end. They have a monopoly and control almost anything in Desktop world. They make tons of cash in desktop world.

When everything goes online, they will have to fight against google, and in online world, Google is the 500pounds gorilla, no Microsoft.

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

I'm going to puke if I see somebody mention that the desktop days are coming to an end!!!! Who says?

I don't know who said it, but Netcraft confirms it....:)

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

2) Keeping apps under MY control, not somebody elses

If you want apps under YOUR control, I hope you're not running anything from MS as it is....

Re:AAAHHHHH!!!

*YOU* won't because you aren't their target market. YOU are the exact opposite of their target market. They want users that are uninformed, not computer literate, and have no desire to maintain a computer.

These people are cash cows for businesses. They get them to buy/rent the software, they are able to convince them that they won't have to care for the applications, and they convince them that this is the best way.

These people don't know what bandwidth is, they are people that don't want to control anything, and they don't think about things like requiring an Internet connection to do their tasks. As long as everything works they're thrilled to fork the money over monthly, just like they do for electric, gas, water, telephone, and their cable TV.

"Perhaps"? "Quietly"?

A 70,000-employee company is quietly changing its ways by thinking of software as deliverable services that perhaps could be rented on a monthly subscription basis.

MS has been making it increasingly plain, at a very high volume and in no uncertain terms, that this model is precisely what they are aiming toward.

Re:"Perhaps"? "Quietly"?

In fairness, Microsoft has ALWAYS wanted to go to a subscription model. They want an ongoing revenue stream.

I remember Gates talking about subscription servicesvs one-time licensing long before the internet came along. The question has always been how to make this great leap, without orphaning or crippling their existing install base business. Ironically their greatest threat (the internet) will become their greatest enabler.

My company is using MS Project Web and MS Outlook Web to a large extent, and I am very impressed. How come we're all happy to use gmail, google maps, google calendar, etc but not a web version of MS word, MS outlook, or MS Project? There will always be a practical need to local installations and local software, but a centralised produtivity app model has tremendous advantages.

Service?

Software as a service? Perpetual payments? No thanks.

Who -- besides companies looking for more profits and a constant revenue stream -- actually wants this? The cons far, far outweight the pros for the typical customer.

What services, though?

Not only that, but given that your customers would also have to subscribe to MS's software services, what developer in their right mind would use such services as dependencies for their software? If MS moves the bulk of their software online, they will want developer tie-ins to such software. Or, will MS simply switch from selling IIS to providing hosting services with APIs and daemons that developers and end-users won't be able to run themselves, and that competitors won't provide? It seems far-fetched and not even beneficial for Microsoft.

A more far-fetched idea is that they might just do a total end-run around developers and provide complete solutions for businesses and even take on administration duties as well... but is that even realistic? Sounds like a nightmare for MS. Maybe developers on MS platforms will be reduced to middle-men in this situation?

Re:Service?

I take it you haven't actually looked at the costs of running a complex app, or at the manpower required to do so. I'll give you an example:
My company sells software packages where the license alone costs you a million or more. Installation can take from 2-3 hours to a day, and fully configuring it can take anywhere from a couple of hours to weeks. Properly administrating the app, as well as taking advantage of the data it spits out, can take anywhere from a lone admin to 20-30 people (administrators as well as a full fledged NOC). Finally, it's complex enough that learning the ins and outs of it can take upwards of a year. Needless to say, one of the biggest problems we have when people buy it is that they screw up the installation, screw up the configuration, or don't have the manpower or processes in place to properly take advantage of it. So what's the alternative?

Well, the same app is available as a hosted service. People buy a temporary license, tell us what they want the app to do, and it's all set up for them. They don't have to buy hardware for it, don't have to administrate it, don't have to configure it, don't have to maintain it, troubleshoot it, write scripts for it or do any of the other things that are difficult and expensive. All they need to do is log into the web interface, look at the pretty pictures, or look into their email for the pretty pictures that the app sends them. They can be complete users of the app, without ever having to go to the trouble of becoming admins. And that is worth a ton of money to them. Not only that, but it gives them time to learn the app without having to worry about screwing things up. Not only that, but they have someone to yell at when something goes wrong.

The end result is that our customers are much happier with the hosted version than with the stand-alone app. This happyness often translates into hosted services customers buying the stand-alone app, but now they're actually power users, and far less likely to shoot themselves in the foot.

There will be an explosion of hosted services in the near future. Actually, you can already see it now. Just beware of anyone who's trying to tell you that they'll completely replace stand-alone apps. There is a place for hosted services and there is a place for stand-alone apps. Don't confuse them, or you'll end up in a world of hurt.

It's not necessarily one or the other...

MS investing a lot of time and research/development into online-ready "mini-apps" does not necessitate a trade off in the quality or time spent developing their desktop OSes.

Look at the Xbox. Microsoft is a big enough of a company that it can afford to branch off into another market and create a whole new division dedicated to new services/products without the other aspects of their business suffering (not any more than usualy, anyway).

Although we may be talking about a change in company culture as well - which most definitely does change a company from the ground up - expandinding into new fields and with new products and service offerings doesn't mean that we should expect an entirely Microsoft that completely departs from it's desktop offerings.

Not to mention that I don't see too many businesses that currently use desktops in their office switching things over to cell phones in the near future.

Is it just me

Is it just me who finds this direction questionable? I write software for a pure online company, so I think online software services are wonderful for a whole bunch of stuff. But there's a lot of things I don't want to do online. Actually, I find the current division pretty good... the more communication oriented something is the more online it is. I think this falls out naturally from what consumers want and what makes sense technically. Do consumers really want an online spreadsheet yet, for example? Someone has to push the envelope I guess. I'm curious to see the reaction to this move.

Cheers.

Software subscriptions

I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work. Corporations and other large orgs already pay Microsoft yearly fees to be able to get guaranteed updates at a fixed price. My university paid $250,000 per year to get unlimited seats for Office and the OS. However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.

Desktop Era Closing? Again?

The desktop era is coming to a close? baawwaaahhhhhhaaaaaa!

please tell me how I am going to work on a report, a spreadsheet or a presentation at 40,000 feet? Unless I can "rent" my word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation program for offline use for a few days, I am sh*t out of luck. I guess I could play Tetris on my PDA - oops, can't do that since I have to rent the software for that too if I am running Windows CE or whatever it is called now.

Guess I'll just have to go back to reading a book and winging it at my destination.

Running to a close? For now, but for how long?

If ISP's have their way, plans like these could seriously backfire. Especially if the ISP's begin to be more strict on how much people are exceeding bandwidth quotas. Yes, I know that right now quotas are not that common; however, for the likes of the people on my network, we are only allowed 5GB of data, from a combined upload and download, per any given 7 consecutive days. Needless to say, if I turn on and off my computer daily (and we'll keep it simple at once a day,) and I have to download Word, Excel, and Outlook every day, that doesn't leave me with much more data remaining for activites such as watching internet video streams or listening to audio over the internet at a decent bitrate, both of which are applications that many analysts say are likely to boom in the coming years (however, I tend to view this to actually boom once DN:F comes out, but I actually do like to listen to some radio stations from across the world, such as Minnesota Public Radio's The Current.)

The only way we could have applications be truly web-based is if ISP's don't impose quotas, or those quotas are set at such a high level that they are meaningless.

Not about any one company in particular

Not about any one company in particular; but, I said this years ago that the software industry will move to a services model. The competition will no longer be who provides the best product; but, who provides the best services. Symantec discovered this maxim years ago when they moved from providing A/V protection with free virus definitions and moved to a A/V protection through virus definition-update subscription. Why? {cue speculation} Any john with a computer and their A/V software was getting free updates - meanwhile, symantec still had to pay their programmers and Virus analysts. Where was the money they needed to pay these guys? They had to change in order to stay afloat.

I must admit, it scares me greatly to think of an OS where I'd have to subscribe to use my Windows's software such as Word.

One word: Chiapaint

Chiapaint [bricklin.com]. A decade old, and more relevant than ever. The only thing out of date is the modem squawk.

Of course, if Chiapaint doesn't convince you, enjoy, you can go to any number of websites that will cause a cute little picture of a steaming coffee cup to appear in your browser window for about a minute and then crash, misbehave, post error messages, display a grey rectangle, or tell you to update your version of Java.

I agree

Many, many, many of Microsoft's largest customers want an easy to manage, easy to migrate, cost contolled solution that is an alternative to the "desktop". Additonally, many, many, many of the Microsoft's largest customers want someone else to Host Exchange for them. It has a HUGE number of features that bring value to IT but it is difficult to maintain for several reasons. Beyond those two reasons, there are many, many, many small to medium sized companies that can't afford IT...they are also good candidates. Come on, aren't you guys supposed to understand the Business of IT? Rather than just blindly bashing MSFT, take some time to learn how business works.

The OS works, why do you need to upgrade

What we are seeing is a maturing OS. In the past, you upgraded to get new features and get rid of the many, many bugs. But as it gets to the point where the OS does everything you need it to do, and does it somewhat on the stable side, you get to the point that upgrading is not as much of an issue.

Microsoft if doing the only thing they can do, make the OS obsolete for reasons other than a new "improved" OS to replace the old one that is working just fine anyway (for most people).

I other news, I heard today that MS is going to have pirated copies of Vista shut down. This move and the move to subscription, is going be great for Linux!

Transporter_ii

Tales of Desktop's Death Greatly Exaggerated

Okay, set aside for a moment that it's Microsoft here. Think for a second.

Web applications are not new. I've built my fair share of them. (Maybe even more than my fair share.) In some circumstances, they work very well:

• application can be accessed for anywhere with net access
• application can be updated instantly
• easy to share data between users
• customer relieved of burden of maintaining servers and data storage

They have downsides, too:

• application requires a functional web browser; browser bugs may impact web application
• application provider might go out of business, taking your data with them
• pay-as-you-go
• centralized data repository is an attractive target for hackers

And yet for many applications, particularly specialized applications dealing with customer account access, inventory management, project management, online publishing, or a whole slew of other things, we accept these limitations. We assess the costs of not using a web application and determine that, overall, the web application provides value for the money.

What's interesting here is that while existing web applications have enough benefits to outweigh the risks, it's not clear that replacing standard desktop apps will come out the same in the risk/benefit analysis. The kinds of things we're doing on the web, we're doing because they work better that way; we've had years of experience with the desktop, and we know some things work better with centralized server models, and others work better with all the work done on the client. Microsoft is betting the farm on everyone being happy to push to the server model, but it won't happen; there are too many compelling reasons to keep ordinary desktop apps right where they are, on your desktop.

What they're afraid of is losing the fight for the desktop. This is their long-term strategy to lock everyone into their system. First they tried to lock up the OS. Then they tried to lock up the file formats. While Linux and OpenOffice are not quite credible threats (if you consider market share only) MS can look ahead and see a day when they have enough market share to seriously threaten their dominance on the desktop, and it isn't 50%, or even 25%. Maybe it's 20%, that magic point where people feel like there is an alternative, and then it's the tipping point, people no longer feel locked in. So MS wants to keep people locked in, because it keeps the cash flowing. That means locking up the data itself. And that's what their online apps are all about.

No...

"...the desktop era is drawing to a close..."

Bullshit.

Just because Microsoft is trying something new doesn't mean it's going to change computing as we know it. They need to get off of themselves if they think otherwise. Not every system is set up to work through the internet, which by itself would render that approach impossible.

How many times is Microsoft going to announce this

I've read this same basic article for the last 5 years. Even right after Windows XP came out, Microsoft was making press releases and giving interviews all about "betting the company" and turning things on their head. .NET, C sharp, everything gets one of these articles.

Frankly, they shouldn't keep running their mouth about these big grand ideas if they're never gonna actually follow through. Sure, they released .NET and have done small parts of what they said they'd do, but so far nothing has come close to completely changing the company the way they keep claiming.

MOD PARENT UP

New York Times, June 23, 2000, John Markoff:

"The company said it would retool its product line to shift the very focus of computing away from hardware devices and toward a new generation of Internet-based software allowing people to interact with data and one another whether they are using computers, digital cell phones or interactive televisions. William H. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, portrayed the long-awaited move as 'more ambitious than anything we've done' adding, 'There is no Microsoft product that isn't touched by this activity....' ...The strategy will involve repackaging some of the company's core products, like its Office software, as subscription-based services obtained over the Internet."

"Microsoft's new view of computing calls for processing to be done everywhere, ... But while he and Mr. Gates insisted that those services would be based on an open Internet standard, enabling users with non-Windows-based platforms like the Palm computer and Apple Computer's Macintosh to take advantage of them, the executives acknowledged that such users would be second-class citizens. Mr. Gates said the "richest" interactions with the new .NET services would require the new Windows.NET operating system."

"Mr. Gates said that the bet on .NET was equivalent to the 100 percent bet the company placed on its shift to the Internet strategy in 1995. Mr. Ballmer said he was confident, but he realized that the strategy was still a gamble. 'It's a bet I feel very confident about,' he said. 'But it's a bet.'"

MS Notes

I continue to be underwhelmed by the genius that is Ray Ozzie. I keep reading how he is mr amazing. however, I have been personally forced to use Notes and even attempted developing on it.

so help me out here....is being the brain behind lotus notes a positive or a negative?

not trolling here on purpose, but come on, what has Ray Ozzie done in the past decade to make him headline worthy?

"The desktop era is drawing to a close"?

Really? So how does one do any of the following from a thin client or mobile phone?

*Edit digital video
*Edit digital audio
*Create 3d graphics and animations
*Editing large images
*Develop and compile software

As long as anyone has any interest in doing any of these, the "desktop era" will keep on keepin' on.

However, if Microsoft wants to turn towards a renting-software-over-the-network paradigm, it'll make it that much easier for me to ignore their offerings. Especially if they only run on Windows.

coming to a close?

yeah ... I really do think all users will want to pay for Word monthly... So linux finally wins.

Freedom to innovate

Yup, here's the big payoff... When arguing against the antitrust violations, Ballmer cried "back off and watch us innovate". Here we see the fruit of those efforts, rebuilding the company to enable a whole new way of milking revenue.

The microsoft ship is sinking.. slowly and agonizingly, but it's sinking.

There big innovations over the last few years have been around leveraging their monopoly position to keep increasing revenues, as the market demands. 'Windows Genuine Advantage' and the beefed up mechanisms in Vista.. Moving from a purchased software model to a recurring cost license.. Brilliant! Just what customers are clamoring for!

I, for one, hope they really crank up their efforts in these areas. Nothing will drive users to MacOS and Linux faster than this crap.

/. market not home market

the folks that read /. aren't going to give up their desktop OSs and apps anytime soon, but many (most) home users would be fine with IM, email, photo, word processing and so on being run off some server in Borat's broom closet especially if this meant no updating/malware/backups or other maintanence, a lot of these folks would see $10 to $20 a month (added to the cable bill) for all of this a bargain

ITS TRUE, if Mircosoft says so....

... don't believe me. No Problem. The problem are all those mindless MS followers.

MS is going to convince them that they need the same hardware, cept more expensive, to acces their online software.

And they will somehow convince the mindles followers that the hardware is not able to run desktop applications.
(of course the mind full will know its DRM policing that keeps you from running FOSS on your online access device.)

If you are not using a desktop or even a laptop to access your online software, then what are you going to use? your cel phone?

Hey Mel, can you look over that massive spreadsheet and tell me where the problem is?

I suspect what the online software really is, is nothing more than having teh software installed on your desktop system and the licensing being checked ever 5 minutes to see if you paid the bill. And when your google search takes 5 minutes to do a simple search than you can blame MS for bandwidth problems... uh correction, you can blame the mindless followers of MS.....

The wrong premise, the wrong guy

After spending the GNP of numerous countries on Vista/Windows Server 2007, it's an illusion to think that Ray Ozzie is going shift it all to a dubious "web 2.0" model, and find revenues sufficient to continue to propel Microsoft's stock price. Microsoft would love to rent stuff, but there are companies that do browser based 'office' apps that are literally a decate ahead of Microsoft, and these still suck. The browser is a lousy lay when it comes to doing real user interfaces consistent with multiple OS environments.

Nothing Wired, or Ray Ozzie says is going to change that. The mere fact that Vista has been so delayed that it's become meaningless and nearly nihilistic (if it weren't a laughable clone of things other OSes do correctly) should give you an idea of Ozzie's effectiveness. Short Microsoft stock: that will get their attention where nothing else will.

if MS is going to rent, then Linux will domiante!

Once MS rents thier software, then Linux will take over the world, along with OS/X unless Apple follows suit.
Renting sofware isn't for the mainstream user and especially not for the technically savy.

Burn

Karma

Linux usability.

from the change-or-die dept.

I'm not trolling here, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
This is just a bit of constructive criticism. Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers! ;)

Re:Linux usability.

I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.

I agree with most of your comments. Usability is a big problem in linux, and open source in general. Most open source software is not created with the end user in mind. However, I don't think that using Windows is the solution. There are other things to consider to. For one thing, linux is free as in freedom (for me that's a big thing). Linux based software tends towards open standards (another big thing, I've been bitten by MS Word too many times). Also, While Linux is complicated, it tends to be fairly consistant, and the things that I learn are easier to remember. Integration is nice, but it has it's ugly parts too.

Lost credibility

>Cell phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs are now arguably the primary way we check email...

No, they're not. You're a chump, and quite out of touch with the other 90%.

The future of computing and subscription models.

Most of the people who already commented here made good points, and I almost feel like I should have just moderated some of them up, rather then add to what's here.

But here's my only thought I didn't see mentioned yet. Steam is a great example of the "right" way to sell software online. It's not a subscription model, yet the user is always alerted of expansions or new game releases they can buy for a reasonable price by simply clicking a button. Nonethless, this advertising doesn't really get in the way of using the games themselves either -- so it's usually looked at as a "good thing" vs. a "nuisance".

MMORPGs like WoW are, in my opinion, not really representative of the type of success a company like Microsoft could expect to see if they started offering software by subscription. For starters, MMORPGs are a highly addictive genre of games, by design. They do everything they can to get players "hooked" so they keep coming back for more. I don't think you can build this same level of "excitement" into typical business apps like Word or Excel. Furthremore, they're far from the "norm", so people can deal with paying a monthly fee for them. If *most* of your apps all started asking for monthly subscriptions, you'd quickly say "Enough!" and look for alternatives.

WTF? Why Ozzie?

IIRC Ozzie is a *technologist*.

Deciding to move the company to selling on-line services is a *marketing* decision.

Either MicroSoft is really screwed up, or the article is a bit off base.

or both.

Look at other markets for trends

There are a lot of other markets that are similar to this type of situation.

If you look at the the various players vs. the iTunes store model you perhaps can get a glimpse of the reaction to these competing market and 'solution' delivery styles. Whereas I think people are fine with renting items and services they must live with or don't want to invest in (like power, telephone services, etc.) they hold things that they find 'closer' to them as property and they want to 'own' it.

You probably do have a good amount of people out there who see computers as something they would just want to 'rent' but you also have a wide amount of people, like the slashdot crowd, that hold technology and issues such as these closer and of higher importance. Music is another example of this and the results are visible in the digital music marketshare breakdown (iTunes owning the market currently while others are in the rental/subscription business).

Why Network Based Applications?

I know one really big reasons for network based applications (they may or may not be "web based"). network based applications are a heck of a lot easier to manage when you're dealing with several hundred or several thousands desktop systems.

Right now, each and every desktop needs to be loaded. When a new version of an application comes out, and users want the newer version, you've got to manually upgrade each system. If someone wants access to an application that isn't on their system, it has to be installed. If a user gets a new PC, you've got to reinstall everything all over again.

Network based applications don't. Users can log onto any desktop system and see the same files, applications, etc. they're use to. Installing a new application simply means changing permissions and maybe some table in a central database. You also don't have to worry about users copying applications around, or loading applications that may contain viruses, malware, or other problems.

It might not be what YOU want for your home machine, but it is what most corporate IT departments want.

Don't worry. Home PCs will continue to use locally installed applications. Home users have administrative rights on their local PCs, more inconsistant network access, and no one who can centrally manage their systems. It wouldn't make sense (like it would in a corporate network) to use network based applications.

More choice is always better!

I don't think that desktop will die anytime soon. But to have other choices will be good as it will lead others to develop application to compete against MS. Google is already going that way with a mini excel and world online. So one day, it will be irrelevent where you will have to do your work. It will be a good thing, a lot of people can figure out how to click on install.exe when their autorun doesn't start their CDRom.

Microsoft's Problem

If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge [hutter1.net] to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) [technicalpursuit.com] does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights [geocities.com]. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize [mprize.org]:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

This is an old idea

Bill Gates was thinking about this in 1992 [fourmilab.ch].

Linux usability.

from the change-or-die dept.

I'm not trolling here - this is just a bit of constructive criticism, I've had SuSE installed as my only OS for 8 months at one time. I've had Ubuntu installed in a dual boot (and it had a lot less pain than SuSE when it came time to install software). But now I'm back to just Win XP as my only OS. The reason is usability. I'm talking about consistency and integration with other Microsoft products. Download Visual Studio Express. Install it (no pain unlike SuSE). Now try out the code completion including automatically looking inside your own classes for documentation tool tips. Look how easy it is to programmatically leverage other Microsoft products (Yes Microsoft is opening their API's). Use the debugger (hover over a variable in your source code to see it's value, etc.). Wizards. Compared to the PythonWin IDE I was using it's heaven.
Gnome has the right idea, usability should be a major focus of software. It does no good to be technically superior if your users can't make it go. I'm not bashing GNU/Linux here, I think it's great but as good as it is Linux still needs to be heavily polished before it's ready for mass consumption. I've drank Microsoft's kool-aid and you should too.
Microsoft's strength is the people on a project that they assign exclusively to polish their products. Shiny. And unlike the past current Microsoft products just go.
I believe in Open Source and I also believe that it is a better process on longer timescales. I also believe that Microsoft will switch to open document formats to keep most users on Windows. But in the mean-time Microsoft (especially with Visual Studio) has the advantage with getting people up to speed and generating useful code sooner than someone trying to master the intricacies of EMACS from scratch. This leads into productivity which is Microsoft's major redeeming strength. I think that in twenty years we'll all be using some-unix inspired operating system with amazing software made by a variety of vendors some free, some not, and with-all-their-money definately including Microsoft. Getting to that point however means producing code and that's where Microsoft is putting their development money.
I could go on about a million other things too, like XNA (Microsoft's new environment to standardize game development and yes it's integrated with Visual Studio). But that would be better left to another comment.
Developers! Developers! Developers! ;)