Society and business in the 21st Century
After last week’s long memo from CEO Satya Nadilla, it was inevitable Microsoft would have to restructure around the company’s new direction.
Bloomberg now reports Microsoft will be laying off thousands of employees – possibly more than the 5,800 laid off in the recessionary depths of 2009.
With 127, 000 employees Microsoft could almost certainly do with a cull, to make the company as nimble as it needs to be may take more than 5,000 jobs.
From a PC on every desktop to a services and devices company and now “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s long missive lays out where he’s taking the company.
It’s a radical shift from the company of the Gates and Ballmer years.
In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market.
This describes a very different company from five years ago; it implies an end to bureaucracy and management conveniences like stack ranking; if Microsoft is really going to be more nimble, then it means a smaller, more focused management.
In 1995, Bill Gates turned Microsoft around in a few months when he realised the strategic mistake he’d made in underestimating the impact of the Internet, so the company has adapted quickly to dramatically changed times in the past.
Whether Microsoft can adapt and maintain its position in a computing world very different to the one it once dominated will be among the great business studies of our time.
At the time Microsoft launched the second version of its Surface tablet, I suggested the company was hobbled by its reputation for taking three attempts to get things right.
Yesterday, Microsoft launched its third version of the Surface.
We’ll now see how well they do.
An major Internet of Things story this week was Microsoft’s partnership with home automation vendor Insteon.
This is a fascinating development for Microsoft, particularly given the lukewarm market adoption of Windows tablets and phones.
While Microsoft have some substantial advantages with their internet of things offering for the industrial and commercial markets, home automation is a crowded field where the company is playing catch up.
For Insteon, a partnership with Microsoft doesn’t matter while they have open standards along with support for both iOS and Android, for Microsoft though they have a lot way to go to make a dent in a market that a decade ago many thought they would have dominated.
Microsoft has come late to the Internet of Things party, but it is has a good angle with it’s ‘Internet of Your Things’ tagline.
General Manager of Microsoft’s embedded systems division, Barb Edson, spoke with Decoding The New Economy about the company’s strategy with the Internet of Things.
For Microsoft, the emphasis is on the enterprise side of the business with Edson describing their strategy of “B2B2C” where the value in the IoT lies in managing the data for the businesses providing consumer services.
Most notable is the company’s IoT tagline, as Edson says; “from Microsoft’s perspective we view the Internet of Things as ‘the internet of your things.”
“Lots of companies out there talking about the Internet of Everything that there’s 212 billion devices, why do you care as business executive. You care about your things.”
Microsoft’s strategy is based on leveraging their own assets such as Azure cloud services, SQL Server and Dynamics along their customers’ existing infrastructure.
This retrofitting the internet of things to existing infrastructure is illustrated by Microsoft’s using the London Underground as its main reference site.
Connecting all 270 stations of London’s 150 year old Tube network to the IoT is a massive undertaking and one that can only be done by retrofitting existing monitoring and SCADA systems.
Interestingly the case study only look at Phase One of what appears to be pilot project in selected locations, the Microsoft spokespeople were a little unclear on this when asked.
The London Underground is only one example of millions of organisations that will grapple with adding existing equipment to the internet of things in coming years; it’s an opportunity that Microsoft has been smart to identify.
Edson however is clear on how Microsoft intends to help companies deal with the information overload facing managers, “I think the most exciting thing is we’re seeing real business problems being solved.”
“Not like everybody else” proclaims Microsoft’s first ad for its newly acquired Nokia phone division.
In what way the Microsoft-Nokia product isn’t like its Apple and Android competitors isn’t clear from the ad, but hopefully they’ll tell us.
The real concern with the Microsoft ad is that it again appears the business is being left behind in a marketplace shift as Google, Samsung, Apple and all the other smartphone leaders move to integrate their phones with smarthomes, fridges and even football stadiums.
Sadly it might turn out that, once again, Microsoft isn’t like everybody else.
The Heartbleed security certificate bug is an illustration of how tough life is going to become for Windows XP users in the near future.
It’s notable that the long flagged end of Microsoft’s support for Windows XP happened the day before the Heartbleed bug, one of the most worrying security flaws we’ve seen was publicly revealed.
One of the questions that has bugged many of us in the industry – pardon the pun – is whether Microsoft would back down on its insistence they would not issue security patches for Windows XP when a major exploit became public.
With between 15 and 30% of the world’s desktop computers still running XP and 6,000 websites reportedly running on the superseded system, it’s hard not to see how Microsoft could justify not sending out an update should an exploit the size of the Heartbleed bug become apparent.
As it is, there may be some argument for updating some of the security certificates in the Windows XP and the older versions of Internet Explorer in the light of the Heartbleed bug, we’ll wait to see on that.
While Heartbleed doesn’t directly affect Windows XP computers, it’s still a reminder that life is going to get tough for those running an unpatchable operating system.
