microsoft | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

A monument to a modern pharaoh: Links of the week

Some of this week’s highlights included the auto industry’s changing business model, inside Microsoft’s Vista mistake and Apple’s memorial to a modern pharaoh.

Starting a new job makes keeping the website up to date difficult but it is possible to get some reading done. Some of this week’s highlights included the auto industry’s changing business model, inside Microsoft’s Vista mistake and Apple’s memorial to a modern pharaoh.

A monument to a modern pharaoh

Apple Park is an anachronism wrapped in glass, tucked into a neighborhood says Wired’s Adam Rodgers. However his main point is Apple’s new five billion dollar new headquarters is really just a memorial to Steve Jobs and his ego.

Dissecting a dying business model

The car industry is one sector in a perfect storm of disruption and Australia’s General Motors Holden is slashing its dealer network to deal with declining demand and technological change.

Notably in the story is what happens to the dealers when their contract with GMH is cut with the franchisees having to hand over tools, signage and manuals. It shows just how the corporation controlled its franchisees.

Where Vista went wrong

This blog has long maintained that Microsoft’s release of the Vista operating system was not only the biggest mistake the company ever made but also gave an opening for Apple, Google and Amazon to seize the computer market.

So a post from developer Terry Crowley a former Microsoft developer is an insight into how the process went wrong. His view on internal cultures for companies facing market disruption is telling.

“In fact, the more power you hold, the more accountable you need to be to open yourself to honest challenge on either facts or logic. This is even more critical in times of rapid change because the facts and consequential logic might change. Accountability and transparency means you are able to reassess your conclusions and react quickly.”

The Life and times of Jerry Brown

An excellent interview between US political commentator David Axelrod and California governor Jerry Brown ranges over topics from Ronald Reagan’s rise, today’s hostility to government and his Asian travels while in the political wilderness. It’s worth a listen.

Microsoft sees off the Google threat

With their Office365 success, Microsoft have shown they are far from a spent force in the software industry.

Earlier this decade it looked like Microsoft’s most profitable business line was doomed as Google Docs threatened to disrupt the Office franchise.

Yesterday Microsoft showed how they had seen off that threat when reporting their second-quarter results that beat Wall Street analysts’ estimates and saw the company’s stock market capitalisation topped $500bn, the first time since the year 2000.

Microsoft’s results were mainly due to its cloud computing products with Azure growing at 93% year on year, Office 365 commercial at 47% and Office Consumer Products and Cloud Services at 22%.

Earlier in the week, cloud security company Okta released its Business at Work study that looked at trends in the commercial use of online services which showed how Microsoft’s products are dominating the market.

Microsoft’s advantage was underscored in a Gartner paper late last year. The Current State of Cloud Office and What to Do About It report found 10.7 percent of public listed companies surveyed were using Office 365 as opposed to 5.2% using Google. The rest had deployed hybrid or on-premise productivity suites.

So Microsoft seemed to have seen off the biggest threat to one of their most important products which for Alphabet/Google should be a worrying development as G-Suite (as it’s now called) has failed to become a meaningful revenue centre – advertising profits still made up 22 billion of the company’s $25 billion revenues in their last results.

Google’s failure to diversify should worry Alphabet investors, particularly given the headstart the company had over Microsoft Office in the early days of G-suite as then Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer struggled to shift the company’s key product lines onto the cloud.

How much the initiatives of G-Suite’s new leader Diane Green can go in making Google’s product more attractive is a big question as Microsoft have shown they can match or beat their competitors’ offerings in areas like collaboration and artificial intelligence.

Despite Microsoft’s success in seeing off Google in the office productivity market the company still lags Alphabet market capitalisation of $570 billion but Microsoft have show they are far from a spent force in the software industry.

Google’s grab for the smartphone market

Google’s Pixel smartphone is part of the company’s bid to exert greater control over the smartphone market.

This week Google released its latest smartphone, the Pixel, to mixed reviews. Controlling the most popular mobile operating system, Android, isn’t enough for the company.

As Microsoft found, just supplying the operating systems for smartphones isn’t enough to influence the market. Apple, along with Nokia and Blackberry before them, showed that the path to both controlling the segment and being profitable relies on having devices designed for their software.

Given the Pixel’s price point, it’s unclear how well it will do against the iPhone, Samsung’s models or the plethora of Chinese devices but for all the Android ecosystem’s players, having its controlling owner running in opposition to them can’t be comforting.

Again though Microsoft’s experience is instructive, and encouraging, for the broader Android community as Microsoft’s attempts to push out Windows CE devices failed dismally. For Google to be successful where Microsoft failed would require a degree of corporate discipline the search engine giant is not renown for.

In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft strength was licensing and controlling access to the operating system. Android’s strength in the smartphone world is that Google doesn’t have the same veto power. To be able to exercise control over the market, Google needs a big device share.

Ultimately though the success of the Google Pixel smartphone will depend on how many users will adopt it. It may be time for another round of smartphone subsidy wars.

The cost of the cloud: How the disrupters are being disrupted

Cisco, Autodesk and Microsoft’s cutbacks and pivots show technology companies are not immune from disruption

A common factor when talking to tech companies is their talk of disrupting industries, they themselves are not immune from change though.

This week networking giant Cisco announced they would cut seven percent of their workforce, nearly 5,500 employees, as the company deals with the shift to software defined networking equipment continues.

Industry commentators are warning Cisco are not alone as software and cloud based services change the tech industry with Global Equities Research’s Trip Chowdhry estimating the sector may shed up to 370,000 positions this year.

Today I had the opportunity to ask Autodesk’s Pat Williams, the company’s Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific, about the challenges facing companies transitioning to the cloud. At the beginning of the year Autodesk announced they would be cutting ten percent, over 900 jobs, as part of a structuring plan.

“I think there was a model that we had that as we moved to a subscription business that said we would see a bit of a drop in revenue and we realised our gross margins would be pressed,” he said.

“What we were trying to do was right-size the business,” Williams continued. “Sometimes you need to do that. It was a very intentional forward looking move we made.”

Autodesk and Cisco are far from the first tech companies to suffer from the software industry’s shift to the cloud. Microsoft have been probably been the business most affected by the change.

Cisco themselves have been dealing with this shift for a decade as well, with a major restructure in 2011 that saw 6,500 jobs cut.

What is clear in a transitioning industry is that Microsoft, Cisco and Autodesk are far from alone in making cuts. As Autodesk’s Williams points out, it’s probably best for managements to be doing this proactively rather than waiting for the changes to force their hands.

The stories of Cisco, Autodesk and Microsoft show all industries are facing changes. Assuming you’re safe in any sector is brave thinking.

Microsoft imagines its future markets

Microsoft’s Imagine Cup tells us as much about the company’s plans as it does about its student contestants.

Currently Microsoft are running their Imagine Cup, the company’s annual student developer competition at their Seattle head office.

A regular fixture for the last 14 years, the Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s opportunity to show how emerging applications can be based upon their technologies. It tells us as much about the company’s successes as it’s missed opportunities.

With Artificial Intelligence and machine learning being the upcoming battlegrounds for the software giants, it’s not surprising many of this year’s competitors are focused on applying those technologies.

A good example of this is the Ani platform of Australia’s entrant, Black.ai, which analyses spatial movement and biometric information. In many ways this adds intelligence to smarthomes and has immediate applications in fields like aged patient care.

Black.ai’s timing is very good as patient monitoring has become an issue in their home country and veteran tech investor Mark Suster predicts tracking the flow of people is going to be a huge market.

The patient care angle of Black.ai’s is particularly pertinent to the Imagine Cup competition as health services have been a focus in the past. Two years ago the winners were another Australian medical services platform, Eyenaemia that used a smartphone app to detect anemia.

While the Imagine Cup is a good showcase for Microsoft, the competition also shows how the market has evolved around the company. Most of the contests have a smartphone component and the cloud features heavily in all the applications, both are fields where Microsoft has either struggled or is playing catch up.

The focus on cognitive computing and artificial intelligence in this year’s event shows the company is keen to show off its prowess in the emerging battle with Amazon, Google, Apple and no doubt other companies. Microsoft will be hoping they won’t be left behind in the next wave of computing.

The smell of social media defeat

While Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn is a triumph for the Silicon Valley greater fool model, it shows social media is largely an investor’s graveyard.

“There’s a shared sense of alignment,” says LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner during his video with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to announce Microsoft’s $26 billion dollar acquisition of LinkedIn.

Weiner has been trying to reinvent LinkedIn’s business model for three years and Microsoft’s acquisition is an admission of defeat with the company’s market capitalisation half of what it was a year ago and profits proving hard to find.

The fact revenues were slowing in the face of anemic returns is probably the reason why LinkedIn’s board was happy to accept Microsoft’s deal that’s 46% more than the social media site’s $17.5bn market capitalisation on Friday.

LinkedIn’s capitulation shows what a graveyard social media sites have been for investors. With the exception of Facebook, almost all have failed to deliver the profits or promise hoped for by those making big bets on the platforms.

Both LinkedIn’s and Twitter’s managements have been distracted by the search for revenue streams to justify their huge stockmarket valuations which in turn has alienated core users. LinkedIn’s surrender means Twitter’s acquisition is only a matter of time.

Microsoft now has to show how it is going to derive twenty-six billion dollars worth of value out of LinkedIn. The company’s track record of acquisitions is execrable as we’ve seen with Nokia, Yammer and Skype and there’s little to indicate this deal will fare any better.

Commentary that LinkedIn as a ‘cloud company’ will help Microsoft Azure against an already rampant AWS is downright silly, Nadella himself in a Bloomberg interview with LinkedIn’s Weiner was at pains to point out the networking service’s fit with the Dynamics product.

Plugging LinkedIn’s ‘social graph’ with Microsoft Dynamics might give the Nadella’s team better tools to compete with Salesforce in the CRM market, it seems a high price to pay and almost justifies Salesforce’s Marc Benioff rejecting Microsoft’s overtures last year.

LinkedIn’s capitulation marks the end of social media’s growth phase. Now, as Facebook becomes the platform that rules all, the others have to find their niches in a market dominated by one services. For Twitter the race is now on to find a buyer.

Getting academics onto the cloud

Discount and free software programs are good for educational programs but they do risk industry wide vendor lock in.

Offering free products to students and academics has long been a tactic used by software companies to build their market presence. The current fight for dominance in the cloud is seeing the same tactics being used.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Amazon Web Services’ Glenn Gore about his company’s academic support program.

Part of that conversation ended up in a story for The Australian about how researchers are now using cloud computing services and it’s worthwhile looking at how AWS are using this program to cement their products’ market positions.

“We work with the majority of universities across Australia,” Gore said. “It’s part of an international focus around how we support the education sector in general.”

In some respects AWS’s behaviour isn’t new, for years Microsoft, Autodesk and Adobe have had programs offering free or deeply discounted products for academic or student use. The success of those schemes in becoming defacto industry standards is no small reason why these companies have dominated many sectors.

Microsoft themselves have the similar Bizspark program for tech startups and it’s easy to see how that initiative is helping push Azure’s adoption into a field that has been dominated by AWS.

One of the drawbacks though with cloud computing services is the risk of ‘sticker shock’ where customers end up with big bills. One of the universities I spoke to in researching the story recounted how 0ne of their faculties was presented with a huge AWS invoice because their engineers didn’t provision the services correctly.

This is where AWS’s team steps in with advice for researchers, “in the case of Koala Genome Project use the on-demand model, the standing pricing model for the cloud,” recounts Gore in pointing out the nature of their work could use spot-pricing to take advantage of cheaper prices in off-peak times. “As a result of making that one change they were able to do eighty percent more research.”

Getting more research time is always attractive for researchers and Dr Rebecca Johnson who leads the Australian Museum’s part of the koala consortium was particularly effusive about the support from AWS staff,

“What we have been able to access via this partnership with AWS is compute time and compute capacity that we just would not have had access too,” Dr Johnson said in a media release. “It would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars to create and we just would not build such a computer system these days. You would not create your own computer infrastructure as we would only use a fraction of it anyway. So, it is great for us to piggy back off these already built systems.”

Being a relatively small institution, the Australian Museum is a good example of how cloud computing can work for those without the resources of big universities or corporations in the same way small businesses and startups can access resources formerly only available to enterprises.

Amazon’s programs though show the Microsoft model of getting students and startups onto their systems early pays dividends. It’s good for academic institutions but one wonders whether it’s also another form of vendor lock in.

Microsoft and the AI future

Microsoft’s continued push into artificial intelligence is part of an economy wide shift

Despite the embarrassment of their foul mouthed racist bot, Microsoft are pressing on with a move into artificial intelligence.

Ahead of this week’s Launch event in San Francisco, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella laid out his vision for the company’s Artificial Intelligence efforts in describing a range of ‘bots’ that carry out small tasks.

Bloomberg tagged Nadella’s vision as ‘the spawn of clippy’, referring to the incredibly irritating help assistant Microsoft included with Office 97.

Tech site The Register parodied Clippy mercilessly in their short lived IT comedy program Salmon Days, as shown in this not safe for work trailer. While The Reg staff were brutal in their language and treatment of Clippy, most Microsoft Office users at the time shared their feelings.

While Clippy may be making a comeback at Microsoft, albeit in a less irritating form, other companies are moving ahead with AI in the workplace.

Robot manufacturer Fanuc showed off their self learning machine a few weeks ago which shows just how deeply AI is embedding itself in industry. Already there are many AI apps in software like Facebook’s algorithm and Google’s search functions with the search engine’s engineers acknowledging they aren’t quite sure what the robots are up to.

For organisations dealing with massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence based programs are going to be essential in dealing with unexpected or fast moving events. Those programs will also affect a lot of occupations we currently think are immune from workplace automation.

Exploring the downsides of artificial intelligence

Microsoft’s racist bot shows the limits and dangers of artificial intelligence

Microsoft Research ran an experiment last week on their artificial intelligence engine where they set a naive robot to learn from it was told on Twitter.

Within two days Tay, as they named the bot, had become an obnoxious racist as Twitter user directed obnoxious comments at the account.

Realising the monster they had created, Microsoft shut the experiment down. The result is less than encouraging for the artificial intelligence community.

Self learning robots may have a lot of power and potential, but if they’re learning from humans they may pick up bad habits. We need to tread carefully with this.