[dredmorbius]

Observations:

⚫ This spot's proving very difficult to fill. Both in terms of finding the right person, and in getting them to accept. It's been 160 days from the initial announcement of Ballmer's retirement.

⚫ Given Ballmer's long-standing deficiencies and publicly-voiced dissatisfaction with his performance, this also speaks to very poor succession planning on the part of the Board. This would be they: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/bod.aspx

⚫ Enterprise + cloud is probably a safe pick for now. It suggests a de-emphasis of consumer and mobile, and a retrenchment to core strengths, if not enduring ones.

⚫ I'm not sold that bringing in external talent solves problems that insiders can't tackle. The insiders will be well aware of strengths and weaknesses, the challenge is in acting on them given existing internal relationships and politics.

[rbanffy]

Enterprise is the high-inertia segment in Microsoft's product portfolio and the one most at risk of disruption by SaaS players. Emphasizing it makes a lot of sense.

The problem of insiders is that they may embrace the culture that brought the company to where it is now. It's not always a good thing.

[mastermojo]

I'm pretty sure Microsoft is a pretty big player in Enterprise SaaS already.

[rbanffy]

They are, but that's also the market where their lock-in has least effect.

[r00fus]

That sounds like an opportunity to me. Get real cloud-based software solutions that compete with Google SaaS officeware, but tie it into desktop office in a way that synergizes without forcing people to subscribe or upgrade.

Apple is good at the monetization angle of this. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same (except with software, not hardware).

Example: 90% of the time I'm on a webex/gotomeeting, I'm looking at one of three things: 1) Powerpoint, 2) Excel/Word or 3) a Browser.

Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier? My guess is that they were too arrogant to make things work for the folks not on the latest versions, or on different OS's.

It's 2014, that's not good enough. People expect your product to be sociable and flexible. And that's why it's Cisco/Citrix software that's showing the MS docs.

[Maarten88]

> Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier?

What makes you think they haven't done so already? Ever heard of Office 365, OneNote, Lync?

> My guess is that they were too arrogant to make things work for the folks not on the latest versions, or on different OS's.

My guess is that you haven't really looked into Microsoft's products for the past 5 years. I can tell you that they are doing quite well in the product development of their cloud and SaaS offerings lately.

[jzwinck]

Lync doesn't even have an option to pop up notifications when new chats come in. How well do you think that works on a workstation with four screens and no sound?

[rbanffy]

> Why can't Microsoft make that kind of sharing easier?

Remember you are not their client. Your CTO/CIO/CEO are. It's not you they need to make happy and they won't even try.

[r00fus]

> Remember you are not their client. Your CTO/CIO/CEO are. It's not you they need to make happy and they won't even try.

That kind of attitude doesn't work anymore. The Enterprise Architect does get listened to these days, because software is key to the health of the company's operations.

We're not in the days where downtime means you get an extra cup of coffee or the day off. Downtime could mean you go out of business.

[dredmorbius]

Quite.

The biggest lock-ins are from Office formats, and Active Directory integration with network and communications services. Crack either of those and the bulwark starts to crumble rapidly.

[gtirloni]

I will agree with Office but I've a hard time seeing AD disrupted by anything else. The alternatives aren't better and/or are a support nightmare.

And with Office, it seems the Office 365 offering with the web clients has a very good shot at technically beating Google Apps... if they can sell it efficiently is another matter.

[dredmorbius]

I'm not saying that AD is easy to disrupt (the primary challenge is that there's no one clearly superior replacement), but that if you crack it, a massive benefit / bonus of Microsoft's product line is voided.

[7952]

Microsoft have a lot of lock in with security that makes cloud deployment harder. You may be able to easily edit a document in the cloud; but can you authenticate access to it using Active Directory? If an employee leaves can I remove access to all the SaaS apps they use instantly? Large players like Google can make solutions to these kind of problems, but how many start-up SaaS companies can afford to integrate with something like AD? Microsoft does still act as a gatekeeper.

[arethuza]

Integrating with AD for authentication of users to an external service in the cloud isn't that difficult - I've seen a number of approaches work although I must admit I've never actually seen the "official" approach of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) in action:

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