Ed Brill on the Microsoft FUD campaign again
I don’t really like the endless Microsoft bashing that comes out of IBM, not because it’s not justified – it is – but because I want to hear about why IBM products are great, and I want to hear that from passionate users and to a large extent I don’t although it’s getting better each week. This week we have another post on the topic from Ed, this time picking apart a talk by Bill Gates. I have a few points I would like to make to Ed.
- Often Bill makes mistakes when he is talking about Microsoft products so it’s really no surprise that he makes them about IBM. Bill is a busy guy and he’s your competitor as well.
- Whenever I talk to people from MSFT I am amazed how badly they are informed about the competition, so Bill’s comments are no surprise to me.
- You seem to think people believe everything Bill Gates says – come on – I really don’t believe that your typical IT director is going to believe Bill will give a fair analysis
- Bill does get the “discontinuity” point badly wrong, especially as there is a Exchange Public folder to SharePoint discontinuity going on right now. However go back 6–9 months and everyone was talking about the risks associated with the unclear roadmap for Notes/Domino, so it’s not like he is totally wrong, he is just out of date. Of course maybe being out of date is useful for spreading FUD, but how up to date are your exec’s about Office 2007?
The one issue I take with your position is that one of the 5 people directly reporting to Bill is the guy who wrote Notes!!! When IBM has a transplant of that level in their organization, then you should expect an indepth knowledge. At the end of the day, Bill’s reputation is built upon him being a geek and having extremely strong technical skills. If that is no longer the case, then maybe it’s time for him to let someone else drive the boat.
Sean—
Having seen Bill perform on video and in person too often for my liking and read some of the transcripts of his recent talks I find myself agreeing with your conclusion, I now believe MSFT is too big for any one guy to be close to it technically, his reputation was one of a person who liked to get stuck into the details and he is clearly not achieving that now. I don’t rate his performance at all as a big thinker. From my perspective he does need to get out of the way and let a big thinker come in and lead Microsoft, and I think Ray Ozzie seems to be that big thinker.
As a side note I doubt very much that when Bill and Ray talk that Ray spends the time educating Bill about IBM’s current product portfolio and strategy, as I say at least historically Microsoft look inwards far too much.