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The early years
Gates, born on October 28, 1955, had a passion for computers right from his school days. He made money from software even while at school!

Bill Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen studied together in high school. In Lakeside Prep School, they had the first tryst with computers. Both of them had a great interest for computers and programming. They would spend hours in front of the computer.

The turning point in their lives was when they came across an article about the Altair 8000, a small computer. Gates and Allen approached the manufacturer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) to launch a programming language for the computer even when they did not have the program ready.

However, in a span of eight weeks before the demonstration, Gates and Allen developed the interpreter. The interpreter worked at the demonstration and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC. It was a great achievement for young Gates.

Passion for computers

In pursuit of his entrepreneurial dream, Gates moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS was located. Gates and Allen realized there was huge potential in software languages. They saw a great opportunity in it.

To give shape to their dream, they founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975 in Albuquerque. Gates was only 20 years old then. The name ‘Microsoft’ was derived from the words ‘microcomputer’ and ’software.’ The name was first used by Gates in a letter to Allen on November 29, 1974. It became a registered trademark in 1975. A few years down the line, Microsoft started gaining prominence with operating systems.

The first taste of success
Gates first tasted success with the MS-DOS operating system. In 1980, Microsoft joined hands with IBM. Under this pact, Microsoft’s operating system was bundled with IBM computers. This worked out well for Microsoft. Five years later, IBM wanted Microsoft to write a new operating system for their computers called the OS/2. Microsoft created the OS/2. However, Microsoft managed to get the rights, to market MS DOS separately besides the IBM deal. The Microsoft version emerged successful. The OS raked in fortunes for the company.

Image: Microsoft headquarters in Redmond. | Photograph: Photo Ron Wurzer/Getty Images

Why Microsoft is a hit

The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorporated business in Washington with a change of its name to ‘Microsoft, Inc’. Bill Gates became president of the company and chairman of the board, and Paul Allen became executive vice president. On February 16, 1986, Microsoft relocated to Redmond, Washington.

A month later, on March 13, the company went public with an IPO, raising $61 million at $21.00 per share. By the end of the trading day, the price had risen to $28.00. Soon Microsoft began introducing its office products. Microsoft Works, an office program which combined features in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, was the first to be released.

It then went on to launch more remarkable products. However, the world’s most used software programs did not have a smooth and speedy launch. It was challenging to develop advanced software, Microsoft faced several glitches and legal issues initially.

"The success of Microsoft is really due to our relationship with developers. From those early days of getting people to write applications in BASIC, to getting people to write applications for MS-DOS, to get people to write graphical applications for Windows, that’s where we had our success. With things like Windows, it didn’t happen overnight. There were many years of getbting the system better, taking advantage of performance, improving the tools before that became a mainstream thing," Gates told software developers at Microsoft’s TechEd conference about his transition on June 3.

The wonder of Windows
Microsoft introduced its successful office product, Microsoft Office on August 8, 1989. Microsoft Office had applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc. On May 22, 1990 Microsoft launched Windows 3.0.

Later it was followed successive versions — Windows 95, 98 and 2000. More than 1 million copies of Microsoft Windows 95 were sold within 4 days of its launch.With several versions of Microsoft Windows, the company captured over 90 per cent market share.

Innovations continued to rule at Microsoft. In 2001, Microsoft launched Office XP, followed by Windows XP. In 2002, Microsoft and partners launch Tablet PC. Microsoft launches Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System to consumers worldwide.

Today, the company manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. The most popular products are Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.

Innovation the buzzword

From just two co-founders who struggled to put things in place in a challenging environment, the Microsoft family has grown stronger by 78,000 employees spread across in 105 countries. Today, Microsoft has revenues of $51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007.

From July, Gates will hand over the entire responsibility of running the software giant with one of the world’s most aggressive CEOs, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer believes that innovation is the secret of Microsoft’s success story.

"Why is Microsoft a big company? Microsoft is not successful because we are big. We did something that people really like. People wanted it and they bought it," Ballmer says with confidence.

And how big is Microsoft? Well, quite big, actually. It makes profits of about $60 million every 24 hours!

But what will Microsoft be like after Bill Gates? Keep watching this space over the next few days as we bring to you a series of articles and opinions on Gates and Microsoft.

Credits:
Image1 : Pictures of Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates (L) and Paul Allen, from the early 1970’s, were on display at the Microsoft Visitor Centre in Redmond, Washington. | Photograph: Ron Wurzer/Getty Images
Image2: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen (L) watch the Western Conference Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers in Portland on 26 May 2000 | Photograph: George Frey/AFP/Getty Images
Image3: A customer checks software packages of US software giant Microsoft at a Tokyo computer shop. | Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images
Image4: A customer looks at a display of desktop computers running the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system . | Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Image5: Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates Pose in Seattle after Gates announced Ballmer as the company’s New Chief Executive Officer on January 13, 2000. | Photograph: Getty Images

News Source

At the end of the month, Bill Gates is stepping down as chief software architect of Microsoft, and retiring from his day-to-day role at Microsoft, the company he co-founded and led for most of the past 30 years. Michael J. Miller, former PC Magazine Editor-in-Chief, sat down with him to look back at how the computer industry has evolved over that time, and where it is headed.

Part I: Hits and Misses

Michael Miller: From a technology standpoint, what would you say is your biggest success? Was it making the PC popular or the graphical user interface?

Bill Gates: The most important thing is the creation of the software industry and the importance of having this platform that anybody can write to. That goes back to Microsoft Basic on the Altair, the Commodore PET, TRS-80, Atari 800, Apple II—building up a library of programs that people use to get something done.

There was no software industry before the PC came along. The whole magic was that computers became so cheap, and you need a lot of software, so people can sell software in volume and price it quite reasonably. That magic of high volume, low price just wasn’t possible in an era with a very modest number of very expensive computers. Most companies that did software did it as a sideline before we came along.

Basically we take that idea of a whole software industry, and we ourselves do some of the big things. We evolved the platform of the software industry from Basic to DOS; from DOS to Windows; from Windows to .Net Internet; to modeling, cloud computing, natural user interface…

The platform is changing because of the hardware improvements and the kind of scenarios that are possible. It’s just so different. We are about building a software platform and a software company.

M: Over the years, you have also talked about a number of technologies that you thought were going to be successful but haven’t reached mainstream appeal as much as I think you thought they would: SPOT, tablet PCs, speech recognition, stuff like that. What do you think it is: a software or hardware problem, or just society? Why did some things become incredibly popular and some things stay more or less as niches?

B: Look what was written down from when Paul and I started Microsoft. Half the things we dreamed of as scenarios for software to solve are still in front of us.

Natural interface including speech, and the kind of inking that comes out on the tablet. My prognosis, you can call it stubbornness, is simply that it is not ready for the mainstream yet. We have to keep improving the software and hardware. But I have no doubt that the current way we interact—which is overwhelmingly a keyboard and mouse way—in the next decade will be changed deeply. Not that it will go away, but it will be supplemented by speech, vision, ink-type things. And this is the kind of issue where Microsoft gets to put billions of dollars behind those beliefs.

The tablet: it’s taken off in some niches. There are millions sold a year, but not tens of millions. My belief is that we will get to hundreds of millions. So we are a factor of 100 away from what I wanted to happen and I believe will happen, where every student instead of having paper textbooks has this great device connected to the Internet that allows them to edit, create, record voice, browse, in this very deep way. —next: A Long, Sometimes Slow Journey ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part II: A Long, Sometimes Slow Journey

M: So why did it take so much longer than a lot of people thought it would?

B: Well, everything [took] longer. Why did graphics interface take so long? Why did connecting computers in a network take so long—seven or eight years? Then you get to the hockey stick point.

Take graphics interface: Steve Ballmer and I would fly around the country and do these seminars about graphics interfaces, people would say "No, it’s too slow, it’s too hard to write the software," and it was very weird that we were pushing it. Then in a period of about year, it became so obvious that nobody discussed it anymore. So it is one of those weird things where you battle for so long and then there is no period where people say, "Gosh, you were right." All that happened was that immediately they say "Why are you still talking about that, of course that was right. Now we want to discuss your next thing."

The early 128K Macintosh almost failed. The only reason that thing survived at all was because some craftsmen at Apple and Microsoft were able to squeeze a few programs into the thing and kept it going enough. Then the 512K Mac came along and finally they got that thing to reach its critical mass. In the meantime, 95 percent of the companies that showed up to write software for the Macintosh went bankrupt, just as happens with all these things.

So the things that did happen: the move to PC computing as the mainstream office device; the move to graphics user interface; the move to PC-based servers taking over the data center. I remember there was a Fortune magazine article saying that some workstations had a higher growth rate than PCs did, of course off of some tiny little volume. What happened is we in our high-volume/low-price way created PC-based systems that did everything those workstations did. Not only did we take over the specialized functions, but we became the standard device for many of the jobs in the economy.

All these amazing things happened for the information economy, based on this software platform. And those things took time. There is nothing that was overnight.

The ones that are still in progress but are partly there are Tablet PCs, Internet TV, natural user interface. Those are three of the things you can say that they have failed to date. If you take my optimistic projection of how quick those would take off, we are well behind.

But the nice thing about Microsoft and the situation that we are in is that we can afford to be early. We can have our work sitting there ready to just keep being improved and improved.

Take Internet TV: until someone like AT&T comes along and says "OK, we want to do a video platform that is better than cable, that is personalized, targeted," it will only be another two or three years before it will be a common sense that when you watch a new show you can skip over the things that aren’t interesting and see more about the stuff you care about. When that finally happens, will anybody say "Oh, what a brilliant idea"? No, they will say "Of course! Why was it any other way?" Because it is insane that it’s any other way. Broadcast was this weird hack that was created to deal with very finite ability to get bits into households. And now the rules, at least for urban households in rich countries, are in the process of changing.

Things take a long, long time, but a lot of those things actually will happen. Many of them in terms of shopping patterns and behaviors, you almost take a generation in terms of how people are used to doing things before you get the full impact. No matter how good the technology gets. Mobile phone interface and natural interface will accelerate it, but all these things have the technical issues of the hardware and software, the price, and the behavioral thing around them. —next: Riding the Internet Revolution ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part III: Riding the Internet Revolution

M: When you go back and look at the whole Internet revolution, what did Microsoft do right and wrong?

B: The key thing we did right is we got more than 100 million PCs out there ready to be connected.

Then it was set that at some point the cost of the connectivity would get to the right point and some protocol would be picked. The fact that it was the ARPA protocols that came out of the university environment, could you have known that? I used those protocols a lot before I started Microsoft. In one place, one niche became where those protocols exploded, and they were particularly good protocols, but any of them would have worked. So getting all the machines out there and creating a volume environment meant the connectivity was guaranteed to happen.

Knowing what period it would hit the hockey stick, we didn’t know. For many years, "the year of the network" was declared by many people, and we were supportive. It was when we were going up and college interviewing that we saw within a particular environment—universities like Cornell—that a threshold was crossed in terms of expecting to put course outlines online, ordering pizzas online.

Now if you take the population as a whole, you have different groups with different adoption patterns.

M: As this was happening, you guys spent a lot of time developing sites, Internet tools. What did you do right and what did you do wrong with that?

B: So many things have to be learned as you go along. We bought some things that you have to look back now… As I say, in that party room, we were the sober guys over in the corner who had half a punch. You had valuations of $2 billion for software companies that had 10 guys. There was an ad-rotation company that had a valuation of $500 million, and I had guys working on ad rotation, who were saying "Can’t we have a fourth head?" If you had a certain kind of story, infinite capital went to you. That was very strange because we had been the people with the capital to back cool software, internally within Microsoft.

This whole concept that if you can get a piece of software so popular that it creates an ecosystem around it—that was our insight back in 1975. As that became recognized, people took it too far and didn’t think there could be many people going for that all at the same time.

We were caught in some of that craziness in the late ’90s. We bought a few things. I still believe in the Sidewalk vision: the sites for a city where you could see all of the events and merchants and plan things. It’s really going to happen more on the mobile phone. That concept was good. We created this company that we spun out for over $1 billion that became Expedia. It became about booking airlines, not about software. We created Expedia, Slate, Sidewalk, MSN. We bought Hotmail, we bought Link Exchange. I bet I can’t remember all of those crazy things we bought.

The thing we did well was helping businesses think about Internet and what they should do. That we did really well. Some of the more consumer-ish things and what would or would not catch on, we didn’t have the magic answer.

The search thing is the one that jumps out where you ask "Why didn’t Microsoft do a better job in search earlier?" Well, hey, we can’t do everything—we don’t expect to do everything. We do a lot and we have a longer time horizon than anyone else.

Say there is an ocean out there and some big wave starts up, there is going to be somebody who is right where that wave is and they are going to be surfing before you know it. [The Google founders] are bright guys and were there when it started. They weren’t even the first, but they executed very well and they took the Adwords stuff and they created a good market with it. Boy, did they execute well. They’ve stayed ahead and did a good execution on that.

One thing that never comes out is that the software business is bigger selling to businesses than it is to consumers. Microsoft is really in touch with what are the practicalities, how do you make workers more productive, what are the pains in an IT department, what does corporate site development involve. We have built up over the decades the real ability to have great ongoing dialog with businesses about how they do their software and what they do. We have a very strong position.

When you think about why information workers will be far more productive 10 years from now than they are today, I would say the ideas in Microsoft Research Labs. There is more there about interactive whiteboard and the Surface-type desk and the way communications will work and how modeling will let you express things. There are more of the key ideas about why workers are going to be more productive there than anywhere else. In fact, it’s hard to think about what is the other place you’d name, because most people don’t have that broad view of software in common for that information worker. The economic value in that is very high.

This is a strength that Microsoft intentionally developed and it took a long time. We were first about bottoms-up guys who ignored IT, then we had to have the balance. Now we have that tension to meet that constructive needs from both top and bottom more often, even from the beginning of the product. What we did with SharePoint, what we did with the .NET development platform—that took a long time.

This is the whole time that the Windows platform really scaled up in terms of performance and security. Take Windows Server; it is unbelievable what has happened. Today the things that are still on mainframe have nothing to do with performance. It has to do with the code we wrote. We don’t want to rewrite it. In terms of absolute price/performance, nobody does anything on mainframe, but there is still a lot because the code is still up there. The Windows-based server and the Unix-based servers using the same hardware, they totally have taken over everything except the code museum stuff. —next: The Power and Problems of the Cloud ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part IV: The Power and Problems of the Cloud

M: Everybody now is talking about software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, and those sorts of things. How does the move towards those kinds of models impact desktop computing, which is clearly Microsoft’s legacy, the thing Microsoft is best known for?

B: There’s always been this question of "Where is computing being done, right next to you or far away?" And the more bandwidth and lower latency you have, the more flexibility you have about how you split that computer task. Time sharing had terminals where almost nothing was happening locally. Whether it was a character-based display, a 3270 or X protocol, everything but presentation was happening centrally. Then the PC swung it, before the Internet shows up, to where you’re doing everything on that local device and only the file store and in some cases, the database store, are done remotely, but you have most of the business logic as well as presentation, editing, and interactions done on that device. The beauty of that is you can work offline, you get great responsiveness, you don’t have to worry about the latency. Those of us who grew up with time sharing understand going back to timesharing, even with great capacity, is not that great.

Now you have more of a balance. HTML is back to the terminal model. When you browse a Web site, although HTML is way more complicated than most presentation protocols, it is a presentation protocol. Now you mix that in when you put active controls in or local script. All that AJAX stuff lets you now do some code execution. So it’s ironic that the good websites are the ones that aren’t using HTML, they are using local execution.

Now we are in a world where you can get the best of both worlds, when you call a subroutine, that subroutine can exist on another computer across the Internet. We now have tools for developers so they can call a service right across the Internet and they think they are calling a local subroutine.

Everything in computer science is to just write less code. What is the technique for writing less code, and its called subroutines. Everything that has ever been done—object-oriented programs, software as a service—it’s about taking this idea of subroutines and being able to use them broadly. When you want to draw a map, you say "That’s hard, a lot of data; I just want to call a subroutine." Well now you can call Virtual Earth or Google Earth</ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1"> and get back the presentation in this great form. You don’t have to think about the data, the format. So we are taking subroutines to this next level and making that simple. Actually debugging the stuff, performance, making it work offline—there is still work being done on this.

In the extreme case, we can take somebody’s data center and run it for them on the cloud. All the issues about administrative, capacity, who owns the data, what happens when things go wrong, when people are getting error messages, that’s cloud computing and there is a lot of deep invention and work. I would say we are investing more in letting businesses use cloud computers than anyone is, and we have some brilliant projects that Ray Ozzie will be talking about more over the next year.

None of this means you don’t want local intelligence that is very responsive to you. You don’t want everything to just be a terminal-type approach.

People get confused. There is storage in the cloud, which is clear that your file should be up there and geo-distributed and backed up, and there is computation in the cloud. Those are both great, appropriate things, but the one that is without any tradeoff is to have the logical storage master up in the cloud. The one that you have to be careful of is what about computation, because computation is not free. And you have big problems with latency, offline, and scheduling that resource, which is a finite resource. But we are actually taking some pilot customers and moving huge parts of their data centers into our cloud where we manage it for them. Over the next couple of years, a portion of the data centers will start to move. Some people say data centers will move to the cloud very quickly, but I tend to think it will vary a lot

So you have two things moving to the cloud to be clear. You have stuff that could be done on the client, like storage where the master moves up and you just do caching. Then you also have server-based computing that could move into the cloud. Well that’s just a different data center, but it may be one that has the scale and pooling. With some of the early efforts, like the Amazon S3 stuff, it still forces you to write the program that understands there are different computers and how things work on that.

The thing we’re doing that Ray Ozzie will talk about later this year at the PDC is how you make it easy to write those programs that are high-scale running in cloud data centers in a way that you really understand what is going on. —next: Windows Work Yet to Be Done ></ZIFFARTICLE itxtvisited="1">

Part V: Windows Work Yet to Be Done

M: When you look at operating systems, like Windows, what has gone right and wrong? What do you see that you need to add over the next decade or so?

B: Well, there is a famous quest of mine called integrated storage, where you have not just a file system but more of a very flexible object-type database: things like your contacts, calendars, favorites, your photos, your music—how you rate those things are stored in a much more structured environment. And so they can be navigated easily and move between applications very easily. And that hasn’t happened. It will happen as part of the move to cloud storage. We will get this extra storage structure. Say you want to move data between multiple phones, multiple PCs, TV, car. You don’t just want to move files, you want to move things that have more structure. So there’s integrated storage or unified storage that hasn’t happened yet, and that’s too bad. You see a little bit of it where Apple and Microsoft are doing string indexes in the background, but it’s only a partial step. It doesn’t give you the full structure.

Now operating systems have a huge role to play in natural user interface. Now we have taken Windows and put it into our Surface device, but how do you add the programming model, how do you interact with those types of things? There’s a lot that still has to be done there.

There’s a lot of work to be done in security. Right now the tradeoff is between the user having to see a lot of things that they don’t really understand versus choosing how promiscuous things want to be and what they want to run. We haven’t made the breakthrough that makes it easy for people to understand what type of risk they are taking for which actions, so they are just getting a lot of stuff that they don’t know how to answer. Even with all these great mechanisms, they can do things that are quite dangerous. It is not an easy problem to solve, but there is a lot to be done with that.

You know the whole thing with the operating system existing across devices, where I updated the operating system on this machine, I update it on this machine…. If you have a houseful of machines or multiple machines, you should just say, "Hey, I want this Adobe application on all them, I want this file on all of them." That way you can just look at your machines and do things holistically. We are in the process of solving that, but that’s really a mess today.

With some of these things that aren’t done, the cloud stuff gives you a slightly better way of doing them. We can store your music rights, all of your preferences, software rights, we can store them in the cloud. Then when you buy a new device, if you’ve got connectivity you can pre-configure the thing. When you get a phone, it’s a lot of trouble today. Why should it be? You should say "Hey, I am Michael Miller. Make this thing like that other phone I have." Even if it’s from a different manufacturer or has different software—for things like contacts and schedules, there is a mapping. You shouldn’t start like some newborn.

News Source

Lest we forget the turgid history of some other horrifically bad promotional videos from Microsoft that will forever be burned into our brains. Here are some of my top picks:

8. Steve Ballmer Sells Windows 1.0
Do plaid suits make you think of Crockett and Tubbs? Didn’t think so, but apparently now-CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer thought it would be an accurate attempt at making Windows Write look more useful than Word, which at the time was not yet working very well with Windows. In his pre-"monkey boy" days Ballmer could still get things cooking though. Who else would get this excited about Reversi?

7. Windows 98: It’s a Series of Tubes
What makes this one great is that this is probably what Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens saw before making his famous "series of tubes" speech. An e-mail is sent out and makes a perilous journey through the neon tunnels of the Internets. When actually delivered, the e-mail comes into the woman’s laptop as a glowing sphere of light, as well as to everyone else including a young boy who is clearly far too young to be working as an employee of Global.com. Between that, the completely unnecessary espionage subplot, and the cameo by stillborn WebTV, this one is a keeper.

6. Microsoft Flight Simulator X (a.k.a. Virtual Air Traffic Controller)
See what they did here? You can buy a $50 software title and not even have to play it. You can just sit at home and help other people have fun by pretending to be an air traffic controller. Even better, couples can play together, the young and old can play together–it was like the Nintendo Wii, but before its time. Then end it all with an obligatory multicultural odd-couple moment and you’ve got one of the greatest promotional videos ever made.

5. If MS Vista Launches, and Nobody is There to See it…
Can’t get anyone to buy your fancy new operating system? Try making a slick video of your company blowing a ton of money on promotions worldwide. Then combine footage with explosive techno music.

4. Windows ME: It’s Hammer Time
Look it’s the same version of Windows Media player you’ve got in Windows 2000. But wait, we’ve got new keyboard protection in case your child attacks your computer with plastic hammers–forcing you to roll back your version of the OS to a more stable one. Oh yeah, there’s also a new version of Internet Explorer that you don’t need to upgrade your operating system to use. How ready are you to pay us $200?

3. MS-DOS 5 Upgrade (Give Me My 5 Minutes Back)
These working slubs were expecting a boring training session but look who turned up! It’s some guy that’s a cross between Bill Nye the science guy and crazy tax guy Matthew Lesko. He’s got The Dreams with him, too! With such awesomely bad lyrics as "Free more memory can’tcha see, spring those K’s that got to be free" how can you not want to upgrade?

2. Windows 386 Made Impossible
What could be in that large bag you ask? Why of course it’s a Mission Impossible-style self-destructing tape. What’s the impossible task? Using the latest version of Windows. How cute. That’s not the weirdest part though–when "Linda" goes New Wave and begins rapping about making her charts hot it’s an HR violation in the making. Don’t forget to check out Part 2 here, or else you’ll never know how the story ends.

1. The Windows 95 Ad that Offends Everyone
Parodies, bad costumes, even worse puns and the phrase "whip it on me" make this one of the worst offenders. Besides the fact that Windows 95 literally explodes out of a copy of MS DOS that’s cut in half with a chainsaw, it’s quickly followed up by screencasts put to saxophone music and an over-the-top actor who’s constantly putting out David Caruso-caliber one-liners. The worst part? It’s kind of enjoyable to watch.

News Source

You rarely hear about a new OS causing people to panic. But IT consultant Scott Pam says that’s exactly what his small-business clients are doing when they install Windows Vista on new PCs and run smack into compatibility or usability roadblocks.

Pam’s clients are not alone: Since InfoWorld launched its petition drive on Jan. 14 to ask Microsoft to continue selling new XP licenses indefinitely alongside its Vista licenses, more than 75,000 people have signed on. And hundreds of people have commented — many with ferocious, sometimes unprintable passion. “Right now I have a laptop with crap Vista and I’m going to downgrade to XP because Vista sucks,” reads one such comment.

Where does all the vitriol come from?

[ Get the big picture on Windows XP’s impending demise, from user reactions to licensing implications — and sign InfoWorld’s “Save XP” petition ]

IT managers and analysts suggest a range of reasons, some based on irrational fears and others based on rational reactions to disruptive changes.

Emotional effects
“When we first deployed Vista, people told us it sucks, that it’s not as good as XP,” recalled Sumeeth Evans, IT director at Collegiate Housing Services, an 80-person college facilities management firm. A month later, he surveyed the staff to see if their views had changed, and they had: “They said it was very good, that they were getting used to it. We asked what was different, and they said they originally didn’t like Vista because it was a change. That’s human nature.”

Microsoft’s overzealous schedule in replacing XP with Vista has exacerbated resistance to change, said Michael Silver, a research vice president at Gartner. The company had originally planned to discontinue XP sales on Dec. 31, 2007, just 11 months after Vista was made available to consumers and 14 months after it was made available to enterprises. The date for new license sales to end is now June 30.

In practice, XP’s consumer availability ended for many users even sooner — just six months after Vista’s release — since storefront retailers Best Buy and Circuit City and most computer manufacturers’ Web sites stopped selling XP-equipped computers in July 2007. Typically, Microsoft has given customers two years to make such a transition, Silver noted.

Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson suggested that the strong emotional identification with XP represented a fundamental shift in how people, including IT staff, now think of operating systems. They have become a familiar extension of what we do and how we work, thus not something want to change often. “When technology becomes part of you, you don’t want people to mess with it,” he said.

Anderson likened the reaction to XP’s impending demise to what happened in the 1980s when Coca-Cola replaced its classic Coke formula with New Coke, causing massive protests by customers who had no reason to change what they drank. The protests forced the company to bring back what we now call Coke Classic. “XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic,” he said, with Vista playing the role of New Coke.

The further the better
The Englewood (N.J.) Hospital Medical Center switched to Vista shortly after its enterprise release, since it had been in Microsoft’s early adopter program. Most users — mainly nurses and other medical staff — didn’t really notice the upgrade and had few complaints, noted Gary Wilhelm, the business and systems financial manager (a combination of CTO and CFO) at the 2,500-employee facility. That’s because they don’t really use the OS, but instead work directly in familiar applications that load when they sign in using their ID.

Capacitor manufacturer Kemet saw a similar ho-hum reaction from most of its staff, says Jeff Padgett, the global infrastructure manager. And for the same reason: Users have little direct interaction with the OS. But the staff did push back on Office 2007, whose ribbon interface is a departure from the previous versions. They rebelled to the degree that Padgett has delayed Office 2007 deployment and may not install it at all.

Back at the Englewood hospital, Wilhelm did hear anti-Vista grumbling from people in the administration department, who work more closely with the OS itself for file management and so on. And at Kemet, another group of hands-on users complained about the switch to Vista, noted Padgett: “The people who suffered the most were engineers and IT people.”

The phenomenon of hands-on users being the most resistant explains why so many small-business users and consultants have reacted so strongly against Vista, noted Gartner’s Silver.

Conversely, those enamored of the latest technology tend to be Vista enthusiasts, said David Fritzke, IT director at the YMCA Milwaukee, which has been adding Vista to its workforce as it buys new computers. “Some users bought Vista for home and then wanted it more quickly at work than we had initially planned to deploy it,” he said. Fritzke also found that younger users adapted to Vista more easily.

In search of ROI
Users’ personal reactions, positive or negative, ultimately impact the bottom line and help drive the business decision of whether to roll out Vista across an organization.

It’s all about basic cost-benefit analysis, says Gartner’s Silver. In most businesses, Vista offers few compelling advantages for users while introducing challenges. The cost of change is too high for the perceived benefit. For example, users often complain about Vista’s constant nagging about possible system threats, about applications that no longer run, or about files that appear to be “lost” because they’ve been moved to new places by the OS, Silver said.

“It’s really hard to convince someone to go to a product that’s not quite as stable or as capable as what they’re already using,” Silver noted — and so they get frustrated and angry. While IT managers and analysts appreciate some under-the-hood changes in Vista, these improvements don’t have an immediate, obvious benefit for users. “Vista’s benefits are not about the users,” concurred Collegiate Housing Services’ Evans.

Upgrades from Microsoft’s past have also colored expectations, Silver said. Users tend to remember the straightforward transition from Windows 2000 to XP, even though technically it was a “minor” upgrade, he said. (Silver also noted that until XP Service Pack 2, XP had its own share of compatibility and security flaws that annoyed users, something that most forgot with SP2’s release.)

And while the path from Windows 95 and 98 to Windows XP was rockier, the benefits were clear enough at each stage for most customers to make the upgrade investment gladly, Silver said.

Some users have decided to skip Vista altogether and instead wait for Windows 7, whose release date has been reported as anywhere between 2009 and 2011 “Why shoot yourself in the foot twice? Windows 7 will be out next year; I’ll wait till then,” said one InfoWorld reader. If Windows 7 arrives sooner rather than later — or if a miraculous Vista service pack addresses all the major objections in one swoop — then the uproar over upgrading to Vista will quickly fade into the hazy past of other Windows upgrade snafus.

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Did I mention I was Scobelized…? More on that later.
What to do if you’re laid off in 2008 recession

It’s sad to hear about layoffs at companies like Yahoo. Right now it seems like a bad time to be laid off. I’m here to offer some hope.

I laid myself off in February 2002. Remember that time? It was far worse than what we’ve seen so far in the economic turmoil of 2008. It seemed like EVERYONE was laid off. There was even a Website, fuckedcompany.com, that tracked layoff after layoff. No good news, like the funding of Automattic, was coming out. 9/11 just happened and it seemed to be particularly dire.

But even in that tough time I found a job working at NEC. Here’s some tips I learned from that time.

1. Don’t get lazy. It might seem dire, but if you work it you WILL find a job. Some of my friends went on vacation, started drinking, or generally just hung out with their families. Those people took a LOT longer to find a job than the friends of mine who approached their time off with these tips.
2. Make sure you spend at least 30% of every day trying to find a job. That means working on your resume. Getting your cover letter finished. Sending out resumes. Searching the web for work. Networking. Etc. At first your time spent on these tasks should be a lot higher, but after weeks of watching the job sites for jobs and having your resume checked over by 10 of your friends you will naturally have more time to spend on other things.
3. Start a blog on the field you want to work in. Want to be a PHP programmer? Start a PHP blog and make sure you put world class stuff there. Link to EVERYONE who has a PHP blog. But that’s only the beginning.
4. Do things that will get you to be recognized as a world leader in the field you want to be in. Are you a programmer? Build something and put it up! Share your knowledge on your blog (give tips you’ve learned). Are you a program manager? Those jobs will be tougher to find, but you should demonstrate that you are a great manager of people as well as that you’re expert on the kinds of things you want to do. Demo! Demo! Demo!
5. Learn from Loic Le Meur. How did he get thousands of videos uploaded on Seesmic everyday? He networked. He visited tons of journalists, bloggers, executives. He is a consumate networker (you should watch him work the halls here at the World Economic Forum).
6. Do a video everyday on YouTube that demonstrates something you know. Loic does a video everyday. If you’re laid off you have absolutely no excuses. Get a cheap Web cam and get over to YouTube or Seesmic.
7. Show your friends your resume and cover letter. Don’t have any friends? Now is the time to make some. Call up some interesting people and ask for an informational interview. This is particularly key if you work at a big company and are getting laid off. I watched people at Microsoft get laid off and the ones who had tons of internal informational interviews got new jobs fast. The key is to meet people everyday and get in front of them. Not to beg for a job, but to do research on the industry you want to work in. You’d be amazed how showing some interest in your industry will get noticed itself.
8. Do the basics. I got my NEC job by sending a resume into a job that I found on Craig’s List. Yes, my blog helped me AFTER I got the interview, but I got the interview just by having a great cover letter and an interesting resume.
9. Don’t feel bad about taking government assistance. You’ll need it to pay your bills. I took it and it helped me get over that tough period.
10. Go to any job networking session you learn about. All of them were valuable to me, even though they didn’t necessarily bring me a job. Part of it is just feeling like you’re doing everything you can to get back on your feet. It’s an attitude thing. If you have an attitude that you’re going to work at this that will come across and will bring opportunities to you.
11. Go where the money is. If you are laid off and you haven’t sent your resume to Matt Mullenweg this morning, why not? People with new funding are the ones who are hiring. You want to work for them, so do what you can to at minimum get an informational interview. Why don’t you interview Matt for your blog? You never know, he just might give you an interview and that might lead to a discussion about how you could fit into his company. Even if it doesn’t, at least you get an interesting interview with someone in the industry who is seeing success. Other employers want to be like Matt, so if you have some insights to his success you might be surprised by how that gets you job interviews.
12. Take a little bit of time to work on family and health. You probably haven’t been paying enough attention to these two things. This is the time to start some healthy habits. Give up smoking, if you’re doing that. Drink less (the temptation will be to drink more, don’t give in). Get more exercise. Yes, I should take my own advice (I went for a long walk this morning in Davos and had fish last night).
13. Volunteer. Let’s say you are going to be out of work for six months. What could you do with six months of your time? Make sure you come away with it with a great project under your belt. Why not volunteer your time with a charity that could use your skills? Not only will you feel good about yourself, you’ll come away with job experience so you won’t have a hole in your resume (building an IT system for the Red Cross looks damn impressive — saying you were “on the beach” for six months does not). Plus you’ll make great friends with people who are trying to improve the world (they are typically the kinds of friends you should have anyway).
14. Make sure you take advantage of any help your former employer is offering. Sometimes they have retraining or other programs that might help you land an even better job.
15. See if you can keep coming into the office. This isn’t open to everyone, but at Userland I kept coming into work everyday after the paychecks stopped. That made me feel better, plus it gave me the ability to use phones, stay away from negative situations (do you really want to be around family all day, everyday, who might remind you that you need to find a job?) as well as give you a place to work hard on finding your new job.
16. Go to every business event you can attend. Can’t afford to get in? Me neither and I have a job! Hang out in the hallways. You never know who you might meet. At minimum you’ll get interesting interviews for your blog. Have your resumes ready.
17. Always have your suit ready. Some interviews happen fast “can you be here this afternoon?” The one who is ready will get the interview.

On your resume and cover letter. I found a TON of tips online for how to improve yours. Those tips work. Listen to them. My cover letter is what got me my interview (the guy who ran the group told me that later). My cover letter’s approach came off of tips I found online. Do Google searches for things like “how to write a great cover letter.”

Do you have any tips? Help out people by posting your own blogs and linking to them in my comment area here. Good luck and keep your head up. Lots of people have gotten fired. I’ve talked with quite a few CEOs here at the World Economic Forum and you’d be surprised at how many of them have had bad times in their careers.

I’ll be asking business leaders this week for their tips and will come back to this topic later in the week.

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