Microsoft is all about: Advertisers?
Microsoft has always had shareholders as it’s first priority. They make every decision based on how much revenue they can recognize and how soon. They are so eager to protect their bottom line (even at the expense of their users), that they have even disguised advertisements as news stories on msn.com. You click on a headline that looks interesting, but instead of a story there, it’s an ad. And the same get-the-money-now thing underlies their good-enough philosophy with respect to product design. Obviously, they can’t piss off their users too much, but it’s astonishing what people can get used to. After a while, you just get used to Office and IE and Windows. So if people will buy ugly things, why spend money making them beautiful?
So, Microsoft is all about shareholders. Isn’t every company? Okay, sure. But HOW do you create sharedholder value? At Apple, the belief seems to be that if you create well-designed, beautiful things, people will buy them and the shareholders will benefit. It’s a longer term vision, though. Sure, people will gradually get used to crappier products, but that downward spiral leads to bad places. Keep the vision and that spiral can go up. You have to think long-term, though.
Microsoft’s strategy is twofold: Job one has always been and remains protecting their monopoly. There’s a real limit to how user-focused they want to be — nothing that could potentially benefit another company is permitted. For example, when I worked on live.com, the execs made us pull a configurable-search feature entirely so as not to take traffic away from MSN search. I argued MSN search should have to earn that traffic, but they don’t care about such arguments. Protect the monopoly as much as possible is the rule. (I had been hired into the group with the promise that we were trying to do the right thing for the user as a way to save MSN, but when that didn’t pan out, I left.)
Things started to stagnate with just the one strategy, though, so several years back, they adopted another one: emphasizing developers. Everybody had fun with Ballmer’s little fit about that on stage. But developers are now yesterday’s beans and they’re on to the new thing: advertisers. See below. Yeah, that’s going to save them.
I genuinely worry about the Seattle economy. Microsoft is still expanding up here at a breathtaking pace. There are at least 10 new buildings under construction up here right now. When Microsoft finally runs out of things to try, it’s going to hurt. I’m sure there are a few years left, though. 