Microsoft Straightens Up
Microsoft's Office team, for example, is gearing up for organizational changes for the Office 14 (post-Office 2007) release, CRN has learned. Chief among the proposed tweaks will be the elimination of a layer of management that had been instituted with the Office 12 (aka Office 2007) development cycle. Those "uber-managers" headed up groups of development, test and group program managers.
It turns out these jobs were hard to define and their existence led to confusion even as they eased the collection and aggregation of project data. The problem was overlap between what these managers themselves were doing and what their direct reports did, according to a memo sent by Antoine LeBlond, corporate vice president for Office Productivity Applications, and viewed by CRN.
LeBlond and Kurt DelBene share the reins of the critical Information Worker group responsible for the Microsoft Office juggernaut. LeBlond heads up the Office client team and related areas. DelBene is corporate vice president for the Office Business Platform and is charged with overseeing the server-oriented SharePoint, Groove and Project lineups. They stepped into those roles in June after Steven Sinofsky moved over to the Windows side of the house.
The unit will reorganize from a fairly large number of small teams to a smaller number of large teams, to eliminate organizational boundaries and foster better communication between the various groups. Paradoxically, LeBlond maintains that the fewer, bigger groups will facilitate agility.
In addition, each manager will oversee a minimum of four people. Ideal team size will be closer to five or six people per manager, according to the memo.
The group was close to designating the key development, test and group program managers for Office 14 last week. This, as the company prepped a technical refresh of Office 2007 Beta 2.
A source close to Microsoft said that in the past few years, the company has "hyper-inflated" titles in order to keep good people. "They rewarded good people who maybe were not cut out for management with a bunch of titles. Sounds like now they'll regroup people and have them reporting to others. Some egos will get bruised, but hey, they're grownups, and in engineering, people are used to working in teams," the source said.
In terms of the larger picture, while the company appears on track to deliver the Vista and Office releases to volume customers this year and to everyone else in early 2007, the question remains if Microsoft has missed a golden opportunity.
Indeed, many solution providers, who have long been anxious to have something new to sell, say the buzz has died around a Office and Windows upgradealthough they hope to rekindle the fervor once the bits are for real.
Asked whether there is pent-up demand around the releases, one systems integration executive said, "Not really. Microsoft is playing the application compatibility opportunity with a few integrators, and there is some excitement in the ISV channel, but apart from some early adopter activity, Vista will be in the corporate budget cycle for 2007 and 2008, and that's it."
The executive said most of the potential for enterprise partners and their customers lies in implementing Microsoft's Unified Communications platform, which integrates VoIP and other collaborative capabilities. Other than that, the enterprise focus will be on "SOA wraps for legacy applications and new server capabilitiesrather than new productsplus manageability. But most of that is a year away," he said.
Implementing service-oriented architectures and wrapping them around legacy big-iron or green-screen applications is an important way to preserve that technology and meld it into the newer Web-based world.
Of course, that very argument plays into Microsoft's strategy of building a service-rich and less product-focused channel.
Said another solution provider in the Microsoft camp about customer sentiment: "Right now, nobody cares much [about Vista or Office]. I think people will start caring again when there's something real to discuss."
News of the organizational changes comes on the heels of some Vista-related milestones.
Microsoft announced availability of Vista Release Candidate 1 on Sept. 1 and acknowledged the departure of Brian Valentine, a key figure behind the Windows Vista client just days later. Valentine is taking an executive position at Amazon.com.
And Jim Allchin, co-president of platforms and tools, has pegged his own retirement to the release of Vista.