Mint
You have in the past talked about two stages in the deployment of new platforms – diffusion and exploitation. Has Vista (released in XXX 2007) reached the second stage?
It’s a yes and no in that Vista is actually a continuation of the exploitation stage of the original Windows platform. Windows went through its diffusion cycle back in the 80s and then it matured and went into what I call the exploitation cycle where millions of people started writing applications for it. The platform is not reborn with each new instance (or version) of the operating system. Each of those is essentially a continuation of the next phase of that platform.
The world can only tolerate wholly new platforms about once every 15 to 20 years. For example, when I talk about this upcoming change in the maybe 2013 to 2015 time period, that is the arrival of another new platform: one that has a natural user interface, one that has a new parallel architecture in the underlying machines. That is when programmers will have to learn a new trick. There is going tio be new applications to exploit this capability. I think that will be roughly the time period we may see the emergence of a new platform. Vista has been very successful but only as an extension of the Windows platform as we know it.
You are an India sponsor in the top management at Microsoft. Where do you see India in Microsoft’s larger scheme of things?
We started here in 1990 just as a commercial sales activity. When I started coming here about six or seven years ago I was a proponent of thinking of India in a bigger way. Not just in a sales subsidiary and a place where we can have development done in Hyderabad but to basically think of India as a rapidly growing economy and one that could house more components of Microsoft’s business than would have otherwise been the case. And, today India has the second largest population of employees of any country in the world. Onluy the US has more people working for Microsoft.
Its become a much more diverse capability. We still see it as a expanding commercial opportunity. Still the bulk of our revenue today comes from our traditional product lines. We don’t have that much revenue yet in our entertainment and devices category. The online services business is still quite fledgling here.
Does the slowing of the environment for Microsoft and the laying off generally affect your research turf in any way?
There is really no part of the company that we won’t make adjustment to. And the reason is Microsoft’s top management view of the current global economic situation is that we are moving to a permanent reset of the economic level on a global basis. We don’t view this as a bounce where its just going to descend and then come back quickly to where it was.
The reason we did this first round of layoffs and said we would do more restructuring is that we want to be plan-ful about it. But we do intend to alter fundamentally the company’s cost basis to reflect what will be a stable bottom in terms where we think the economy will stop globally and then start a slow reconstruction after that.
What would constitute those step down measures?
We basically laid off about 1,400 people worldwide last month and at that time we also announced that over the next 18 months we expected that we would remove as many as a total of 5,000 – so another 3,600. Each business group is now making their own plans, discussing their own situation and deciding how they will bring the company gracefully down this new structural level and that will be an ongoing process.
0 comments:
Post a Comment