RSSReading the Microsoft tea leaves: Is the company turtling?
Today’s round of Microsoft layoffs, widely reported elsewhere, included a somewhat surprising addition: Don Dodge, the Director of Business Development for the Emerging Business Team, who blogs about it here. The Emerging Business Team is Microsoft startup-facing evangelist squad, and Dodge has been at their forefront as they have gone out to make the hard sell for Microsoft products in a community where a shoestring approach using free, open-source alternatives has become so de rigeur that a distinctly anti-Microsoft attitude has emerged.
When Microsoft decided to go full-press at selling their technology to this important sector, I was entirely on board with the effort, even to the extent of pointing a couple of clients who qualified toward the BizSpark program which would allow them very low-cost access to Microsoft products and assistance building out their technology infrastructure. It had been a long time, even at that time, since any breakout startup of any significance had emerged running primarily on Microsoft products. That’s not simply bad for the company’s core sales business; it is a bad sign for future sales, as decision makers at startups and enterprises alike look at new and exciting developments and start asking “How did they make that happen, anyway?” There is a reason that auto manufacturers scramble over one another to sponsor stock car teams… at some level, other buyers look at what feats are being accomplished with those products and think, “Hey, if it works for that, it’s gotta be good enough for me.”
Not to mention the fact that market penetration breeds deeper market penetration, even when it comes to servers. If everyone a company is looking to interface with is running a particular flavor of technology, and speaking that language, it makes life easier to go down that same road. The more big hit startups are on the Linux highway, the more tag-alongs are going to be heading for the on-ramps there, and skipping Microsoft Lane.
So when the company lets go an individual that even its critics believe was doing a good job, it’s hard not to conclude that it is diminishing the role of the unit that person spearheaded. And if that’s the case, you have to wonder, is Microsoft ceding the startup market?
There has been a certain school of thought suggesting that the company should cut away all extraneous business units and simply focus on the core of Windows, Office, and server applications, sold primarily to established businesses. This, and other recent cuts, seem to be oriented in that direction. But it’s a shortsighted cut, even if that’s the objective, since tomorrow’s established businesses are today’s startups.
It’s easy to read too much into individual actions or events, and sometimes it’s even easier to buy in to an emerging media narrative compiling a host of events. That may be what has been happening in the past months as perceptions of failure, or even worse, of inadequate success, have been laid at Redmond’s feet from a variety of sources. It’s easy to read this as another point in the trend, and I am tempted to do so, although it may well be wrong. These aren’t the actions of a company looking forward and being aggressive. They are the “safe” moves of people looking to avoid blame and focus on what they know. But despite the perception, they aren’t safe moves for Microsoft at all, but instead a slow path toward irrelevance.
