Microsoft's Gates Signals Concern About Future

[george]

Microsoft's Gates signals concern about future

SEATTLE: -- Microsoft founder Bill Gates has signaled his concern that the company could be outmanoeuvred by web-based rivals like Google and Yahoo.

In an email to executives, he says that Microsoft needs to do act "quickly and decisively" if it is to lead the current wave of innovation.

Gates compared the message to his famous 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" memo, in which he outlined how the World Wide Web was set to change the technology landscape and focused the company on meeting that challenge.

Gates said that Microsoft had pioneered many aspects of the online world with products such as MSN Messenger and Hotmail.

"To lead we need to do far more. The broad and rich foundation of the Internet will unleash a 'services wave' of applications and experiences available instantly over the Internet to millions of users," he said.

"This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive. We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us - still, the opportunity for us to lead is very clear. More than any other company, we have the vision, assets, experience and aspirations to deliver experiences and solutions across the entire range of digital workstyle and digital lifestyle scenarios, and to do so at scale, reaching users, developers and businesses across all markets."

Gates exhorted senior managers to "act quickly and decisively" and pointed them to a memo from Microsoft's recently appointed chief technical officer Ray Ozzie, an industry visionary who is widely credited with inventing the Lotus Notes email programme.

In the memo, "The Internet Services Disruption", Ozzie named competitors including Google, Yahoo, Apple, Skype and Adobe as leading Microsoft in crucial areas and said that other start-ups could further erode Microsoft's position.

The memo appeared just a week after Microsoft announced online versions of its two cash-cow software packages Office and Windows, in what was seen as a bid to head off emerging competition to its most profitable products.

--DPA 2005-11-10

[stumonster]

Gates said that Microsoft had pioneered many aspects of the online world with products such as MSN Messenger and Hotmail.

History

Hotmail, founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world, originally as an impetus from getting by corporate firewalls blocking regular mail services. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in "-mail" and finally settled on Hotmail because it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing (camel case).

Hotmail was originally backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers [1]and was sold later that month to Microsoft, which rebranded it under its MSN umbrella.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail

yes - bill

[Crushdepth]

Microsoft has never been an innovator - just a cashed up predator of other people's ideas...

[The Coder]

Microsoft has never been an innovator - just a cashed up predator of other people's ideas...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Maybe a bit of both. Somehwherea around 1980 Bill Gates vision was every desk had a computer running Microsoft software. At the time, that seemed a mad dream from a Harvard dropout because people didn't use computers. The average worker might have seen a computer or heard of them but never used them. The desktop computer age arrived and with it Microsoft software. With some skill and some luck Microsoft had the right vision and the right software.

The big mistake is when Microsoft realized they missed the web browser boat and were being left behind. The gateway to the internet was bigger than what operating system you were running. But Microsoft was big enough to smash netscape with IE, albeit using questionable business practices.

Today it appears yet again Microsoft didn't see the most important technology in the world -- search. It's not whose web browser you are using, it's whose web page is in front of people. Google has been kicking MS's butt on that so far. Going to be interesting to see how Microsoft fights back.