Microsoft should fire their VP of Marketing immediately without severance. Then hire this guy as his/her replacement. He should be given a $1 million retention bonus for 365 days of employment.
Or better yet, Microsoft should create a new position called President of Simplification and Branding, then have all employees, including Steve Balmer, report to him.
The first thing he should do in his new role is fire Balmer.
The second thing he should do, which is alluded to in his presentation, is roll up all subsets of a given product into a single SKU. For example Windows 7 has the following versons: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. This does not include sub-editions, upgrade editions, and family pack editions. All of this should simply roll into a single version that includes all features. Let it be named Windows 7. Do the same thing for the upcoming Windows 8. Drop 32 bit support outright.
For windows set the price for this single version to $50.00.
After making this change alone, you could probably eliminate 500 FTE head count. Do this across all product lines and you could eliminate thousands of jobs, and numerous levels of management, a move that would reduce costs, but far more importantly interject some much needed nimbleness into the organization.
Next combine all like products that compete with each other. For example, consolidate Windows Media Player, Zune, and XBox Music product groups into a single product group.
Kill notepad. Acquire Light Table or Sublime Text editor and include it with every copy of the OS.
Fire 1 and 3 program managers. Fire 2 in 3 product managers.
Increase the base salary of every engineer by $30,000.00 or rebase their salary to $200,000, whichever is more.
I'm just getting started but you get the point ...
I'm confused if this is sarcasm or not. I'd like to believe sarcasm, but if it's not, then could you explain why they would ever drop 32 bit support outright? Perhaps on new versions, but are there not problems that come with 64 bit installs and 32 bit drivers? I would assume that much of the scientific/technical drivers, not to mention old printer drivers, would not get updated and therefore be unusable. However I could be completely wrong, so I'd like some more information on this. Thanks.
The Zune desktop software is stunning. The design and layout of the application is vastly superior to iTunes and Windows Media Player. The Zune pass, and artist bios are excellent people who love to discover new music. Each time I use Zune I think to myself, "I need to write software this beautiful and functional."
Zune integration with Windows Phone 7 was the candle that flickered my last hope for Microsoft to compete with iOS and Android. Microsoft's inability to work with carriers to push out WP7 updates, and now the death of the Zune brand, puts that candle out. What a tragedy.
We are seeing the beginning of the commoditization of the smart phone industry. Smart phones will become ubiquitous and intense competition among handset manufacturers will erode profit margins.
While I admire the passion that fueled this letter, their goal to "offer overwhelmingly superior experiences" seems foolishly optimistic. How will Nokia differentiate from the plethora of Android derivatives, iOS, WP7, Web OS, and Blackberry?
Isn't that what android is all about? Commoditizing the market, and acclimatizing users to sophisticated capabilities (Like handheld search!). I'm not a fan of microsoft, but I am a fan of competition.
I kind of like this battle that's warming up here.
Yeah, check the source for the static builders in Executors, like Executors.newCachingThreadPool, newFixedThreadPool, etc. They're all just different ways of wrapping ExecutorServices around a task Queue.
The DSL snippet is every bit as verbose as the PHP code sample, yet somebody had to write the DSL in the first place. Not sure mission was accomplished. I think a better solution is offered by Mustache logic-less templates.
Or better yet, Microsoft should create a new position called President of Simplification and Branding, then have all employees, including Steve Balmer, report to him.
The first thing he should do in his new role is fire Balmer.
The second thing he should do, which is alluded to in his presentation, is roll up all subsets of a given product into a single SKU. For example Windows 7 has the following versons: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. This does not include sub-editions, upgrade editions, and family pack editions. All of this should simply roll into a single version that includes all features. Let it be named Windows 7. Do the same thing for the upcoming Windows 8. Drop 32 bit support outright.
For windows set the price for this single version to $50.00.
After making this change alone, you could probably eliminate 500 FTE head count. Do this across all product lines and you could eliminate thousands of jobs, and numerous levels of management, a move that would reduce costs, but far more importantly interject some much needed nimbleness into the organization.
Next combine all like products that compete with each other. For example, consolidate Windows Media Player, Zune, and XBox Music product groups into a single product group.
Kill notepad. Acquire Light Table or Sublime Text editor and include it with every copy of the OS.
Fire 1 and 3 program managers. Fire 2 in 3 product managers.
Increase the base salary of every engineer by $30,000.00 or rebase their salary to $200,000, whichever is more.
I'm just getting started but you get the point ...