The major reasons for the timing were not strange at all. They made plenty
of sense and Jim Allchin conducted a press conference and a large number of
interviews on this, that were widely published all over the web.
I applaud Jim Allchin's integrity and dedication here and the people who
participated in the delay decision. He has meant an immeasurable amount to
every pc user and he will be badly missed at MSFT and by a lot of us who
benefit from his efforts for years. I have been critical when and where I
thought I should be, particularly of MSFT's refusal to allow most OEMs
although Dell bucked them admirably to ship an OS CD in XP and OS DVD in
Vista, and I stand by every scintilla of criticism. I have watched with
pain that they have ignored a lot of bugs and at times done it with
incredible condescension, insouciance, and an elete, effete, imperious tone.
I only wish that they had delayed Vista until the summer of 2007 and we
would have had better features and a lot less to now fix that are already
seeing in the posts on this and other groups and forums.
Actually what constitutes some of the major the advertising and sales
departments at MSFT where much energy is being directed by Steve Berkowitz
Senior Vice President, Online Services Group and newly promoted VP Jo Anne
Bradford Corporate Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing; Chief Media
Revenue Officer are far from lol weeping but are very focused on using MSN
and the web for advertising in a new paradigm that has been inspired by
Google and that article is included here for your viewing pleasure. If you
mean Wagner Edstrom and McCann Worldwide who will handle the multimillion
dollar Vista and Office 2007 promotions, they are extremely happy.
Microsoft won't miss out on a cent because of the timing of the release of
Vista and they have a slew of careful studies that bare this out.
Migration may not be as fast as MSFT's slides have projected but they are
not going to lose any money because of the timing. It will just be
realizized in a later quarter.
The reasons for this timing were simple:
1) Beta testers on the TBT had given the teams developers and PMs
significant numbers of bugs that Allchin and many others felt needed more
time.
2) Parts for PCs for OEMs were not going to arrive in time via boats and
this factored into the decision.
This article from NYT may be of interest to you or someone else:
March 22, 2006
Microsoft to Delay Next Version of Windows
By STEVE LOHR and LAURIE J. FLYNN
Microsoft's long effort to deliver the next version of its Windows operating
system suffered another setback yesterday when the company said that the
system would not be ready for consumer personal computers for the holiday
sales season.
The Microsoft announcement, made after the close of the stock market, came
as a surprise. For more than a year, the company had said it would deliver
the new operating system, Windows Vista, sometime in the second half of
2006.
Yesterday, Microsoft said Vista would be ready for large business customers,
who typically buy the company's software in multiyear licenses, in November.
But the consumer rollout will be pushed back to January 2007.
The slippage, analysts said, is likely to have little lasting impact on
Microsoft or PC sales. But it points to the trouble the company has had
designing and debugging the new operating system, brimming with features,
complexity and an estimated 50 million lines of code.
The analysts said the delay would be a disappointment for electronics store
chains, like Circuit City and Best Buy, and for PC makers. "This hits
retailers and it hits PC makers that were looking toward Vista for a surge
in consumer PC sales at the end of the year," said Tim Bajarin, principal
analyst at Creative Strategies, a technology consultant.
The Windows delay follows Microsoft's difficulties in meeting its production
goals for its Xbox 360 video game console after its release last November.
Yesterday, however, Microsoft said it was accelerating output of the
devices, potentially helping it capitalize on the postponement of Sony's
rival PlayStation 3. Microsoft attributed the further delay in Windows Vista
as a matter of a few weeks to ensure quality and security testing.
Over the last year, Microsoft executives have emphasized the importance of
reducing the vulnerability of their products to computer viruses and other
malicious code. If the security focus means product development takes
longer, they have said, so be it.
"We won't compromise on product quality, and we needed just a few more
weeks," James Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Windows division, said in
a conference call with analysts and journalists.
In an interview after the conference call, Mr. Allchin said that he made the
decision to take a few more weeks yesterday mornning after a meeting with
the leaders of the Windows development team. No single feature or problem
prompted his move, he said.
"But I wanted to push up the quality even higher," Mr. Allchin said. "And
the balance between usability and security is a tricky one."
The security testing process, for example, has included dozens of outside
computer security consulting companies — known as blue-hat hackers — who are
given access to the Windows Vista code and its documentation and asked to
try to find any ways to break in. Mr. Allchin characterized that program
alone as the "largest penetration-testing effort ever conducted on a
commercial software product."
The shipment delay, he conceded, was "a bit painful, but we're trying to
take a leadership role here and do the right thing."
The new version of Windows has encountered repeated delays. The last major
release of Microsoft's operating system, Windows XP, was in 2001. The gap of
more than five years is a long one for Microsoft, which has generally
shipped a new version of Windows every three or four years.
In August 2004, Microsoft said that it would release Vista sometime in 2006,
and that it was scaling back its technical ambitions for the product by
removing an intelligent data-storage system, called WinFS.
Mr. Allchin stressed that the current delay had no effect on the set of
features now planned for Vista — features that Microsoft has shown off at
customer conferences in the last week.
Microsoft's shares fell more than 3 percent in after-hours trading following
the announcement, easing to $26.82 a share, down from the close of $27.74 in
regular trading.
Analysts did not expect the Vista delay to hurt Microsoft's financial
performance in the 2007 fiscal year, which will end in June 2007. Mostly,
they said, revenue anticipated in one quarter will move into a later
quarter.
Some analysts were surprised that a few weeks' delay could be predicted so
early in the year. And Charles Di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein &
Company, said sales of Microsoft's Xbox video game consoles might benefit
during the holiday season from not having to compete with new Vista-based
PC's for consumers' dollars.
"You won't have new PC's crowding out the Xbox, and that could work to
Microsoft's advantage in a holiday season when it looks as if there won't be
competition from Sony PlayStation 3, because of Sony's shipment delays," Mr.
Di Bona said.
Sony disclosed last week that the PlayStation 3, originally due this spring
in Japan, would not be available until November, giving Microsoft a full
year's head start.
Microsoft said yesterday that starting this week it was increasing by two or
three times the number of Xbox 360 consoles sent to retailers each week, a
figure it did not specify.
"Today we have turned a major corner," Peter Moore, corporate vice president
of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, said in a statement
yesterday, adding that by June the company expected 80 games to be ready for
the machine.
When it introduced the console last November, Microsoft said it expected to
ship three million Xbox 360's in the first three months, and 4.5 million to
5.5 million by the end of June. But it encountered component shortages and
was forced to lower its projection for the first three months to 2.5 million
to 2.75 million. It has not said whether it met that target.
But even with Microsoft's acceleration in production, analysts said,
frustration over the Xbox 360 shortage may have led some game enthusiasts to
decide to wait the extra months for the PlayStation 3.
"The question is, How many of those who didn't buy a 360 in December will
now wait for the Sony?" said Michael Pachter, a game industry analyst with
Wedbush Morgan Securities. "Some will."
For Microsoft, the Xbox 360 is a critical part of the strategy of converging
home electronics and entertainment, eventually integrating computing, music
and gaming through a home media system in consumers' living rooms.
Some analysts say they believe that as part of that strategy, Microsoft is
in the early stages of developing a hand-held device that will combine the
features of a music player like the Apple iPod with a gaming machine that
would compete with Sony's PlayStation Portable.
The San Jose Mercury News reported Monday that Microsoft was designing such
a product; Microsoft officials declined to comment.
__________________________
I like ***this story.*** After being called in and abusively called
"Stupid" by her boss at MSFT for years, this lady has been promoted to a VP
at the Executive Level of MSFT and has helped shape a major new direction of
revenue and potential products for the company and has modded Yusuf Mehdi's
Senior Vice President, Chief Advertising Strategist new title with her
philosophy.
New Tricks: How Microsoft Is Learning to Love Online Advertising
By Robert A. Guth
The Wall Street JournalNovember 16, 2006
When Joanne Bradford joined Microsoft Corp. in 2001 as head of online
advertising sales, it quickly became clear to her that advertising was a
lower life form at the software giant. Her direct boss called her ideas
"stupid," she recalls. In one meeting in 2004, a representative of General
Motors Corp. berated her for Microsoft's terrible service.
Ms. Bradford had run afoul of a Microsoft corporate culture that elevated
technology above all else. The bias would soon haunt the company as it
struggled to compete with Google Inc., a company that rose to prominence
through the power of online advertising. For Microsoft, says company Vice
President Yusuf Mehdi, " advertising was a bad word."
Today, Microsoft is making up for lost time. It now has a fully staffed
sales force on par with the rest of the Internet industry. It's investing in
a broad range of services for placing ads on the Web, in videogames, on
mobile phones and alongside Internet search results.
In the latest signal that Microsoft has gotten the online-ad religion, a
company official said yesterday that Ms. Bradford, 43 years old, will soon
be named to head its MSN online group, which runs a Web site delivering
news, video and services such as email and instant messaging. The promotion
makes Ms. Bradford a central figure in Microsoft's fight against Google and
Internet darlings such as YouTube and MySpace.
For years, Microsoft's culture equated smarts with pure technical
brainpower. The company's internal systems, from hiring to strategic
planning, were structured around building and licensing software, notably
Microsoft's core Windows and Office products, which are still responsible
for most of its revenue and profit. Engineering talent gravitated toward
those businesses. Most of Microsoft's sales efforts revolved around managing
large corporate buyers of software.
The growing role of advertising on the Web has put Microsoft in the
uncomfortable position of being a laggard while Google's market share
continues to grow. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Google's revenue was $2.69
billion, virtually all of which came from online advertising. Microsoft's
online group posted online advertising revenue of $374 million in the same
quarter.
Online advertising has emerged as the foundation stone of a whole host of
new Web businesses. Research eMarketer forecasts that the market will
balloon to $25 billion in 2010 from $15.9 billion today. As a result,
Microsoft has started to learn what makes advertisers tick as a way to get
deep into a business that's as much Madison Avenue salesmanship as Silicon
Valley genius.
Yesterday's news is part of a broader effort being led by Steve Berkowitz, a
senior vice president who was plucked from IAC/InterActiveCorp in April to
inject new blood into the company's online businesses. Mr. Berkowitz says
Microsoft needs to attract consumers by better melding its technology
services with its content offerings. "If you have an audience, advertisers
will come," he says.
Mr. Berkowitz acknowledges Microsoft was slow to take advertising seriously.
" I think every day it's becoming more of an advertising company than it was
the day before," he says.
Ms. Bradford has been a catalyst for that change, although at times her
brash style made her an ineffective evangelist for Web advertising. In a
2004 performance review, a colleague praised her leadership skills and her
"deep knowledge" of advertisers. But it also described the "downward spiral"
of relations with her peers that resulted in Ms. Bradford being
"condescending and most of all cynical," according to a copy of the review.
The reviewer called for "a new start" in Ms. Bradford's dealings with her
bosses. She acknowledges these shortcomings.
That same year, after a company meeting, Ms. Bradford confided to her
husband from a hotel in Atlanta that she didn't know what she was doing
working for Microsoft. "These people don't like me," she recalls telling
him.
Ms. Bradford joined Microsoft as head of MSN's 115-strong ad-sales team in
late 2001 after 13 years selling print ads for McGraw-Hill Cos.
publications, including BusinessWeek. A journalism major from San Diego
State University, she had none of the technological skills admired at
Microsoft. For her, the gift of gab and a memory for names and faces were
the talents necessary to coax advertising from America's largest companies.
A month after joining Microsoft, Ms. Bradford saw a copy of Advertising Age
magazine that ranked Internet sites by how well they satisfied ad agencies.
MSN was last, "more interested in pushing its services than understanding
advertisers," the survey concluded. Clients told her first-hand about
Microsoft's unresponsive sales teams and unreliable systems. Ads got lost.
Bills were late. A Microsoft spokesman says the company acknowledges these
problems.
Ms. Bradford sought to educate the company from the top. In late 2002, she
escorted Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on a trip to visit
advertisers including Hollywood movie studios and Toyota Motor Corp. On the
plane, she gave him a 26-page paper on the state of the ad business. He
burned through it in about 10 minutes and spent the rest of the flight
firing off questions, some of which she says she couldn't answer. His
data-oriented approach was a dramatic change from the media world she had
recently left.
Microsoft at the time didn't have a team that could design special campaigns
for advertisers launching new products. Ms. Bradford managed to line up a
budget, Web designers and support from other Microsoft technicians to the
surprise of some of her colleagues.
Progress in securing resources endeared Ms. Bradford to the sales team.
Occasional stunts helped, too. At one point, she told 300 MSN people she'd
give $500 to anyone who could name everyone in the room. She paid the two
who managed the feat out of her own pocket.
But she was gaining little headway with Microsoft's upper management. At
that time, MSN was focused on competing with Time Warner Inc.'s America
Online in the old-fashioned Internet access business. Both companies were
caught off guard when consumers bypassed them by switching to high-speed
broadband lines. MSN's subscriber revenues plummeted just as an upstart
named Google came on the scene without a dial-up operation but with a
growing advertising business.
On a January 2004 trip to New York, Ms. Bradford watched her staff at work
and noticed that top salespeople were spending too much time in the office.
Because the system for processing ads was slow and confusing, they spent too
much time doing technical work instead of going out to visit clients. At a
meeting, Ms. Bradford told the group, "I will get you more help."
Microsoft executives -- and the Internet industry at large -- were unsure
how deep the pool of online advertising would become. By 2004, Google
started taking in immense profits through an automated system that ran ads
alongside relevant search results. Soon, Google found a way to syndicate the
system around the Internet, allowing thousands of small Web publishers to
run ads, provided by Google, at zero cost. Both parties split the revenue.
The concept upended the traditional media business.
A year earlier, according to people involved in the discussions, Microsoft
had walked away from negotiations to buy Google competitor Overture, the
company that pioneered Internet ad-brokering. When Yahoo snapped up the
company for $ 1.63 billion, a sense of regret pervaded Microsoft -- it
should have been more aggressive, some insiders say. Instead, the company
started investing in its own search technology and a version of Overture.
As Ms. Bradford pushed her agenda, she sparked tensions with her boss, David
Cole, the senior vice president in charge of MSN, and a veteran manager of
Microsoft software projects. Mr. Cole brought to the table a healthy dose of
traditional Microsoft thinking, say people who have worked with him. At MSN,
Mr. Cole's focus was on shoring up the money-losing group and improving its
services such as email and instant messaging.
Ms. Bradford battled Mr. Cole, who at times would pound his fist on the
table and deride her proposals as "stupid," say several participants in
their meetings, including Ms. Bradford. In a sign of protest in 2004, a
group of MSN salespeople walked into a meeting with Mr. Cole wearing black
T-shirts with " Where are the Ads?" emblazoned on the back.
Looking back, Ms. Bradford says their spats were respectful. "David and I
liked to have a healthy open debate," she says. "He supported me, but did
push back." Mr. Cole has been on a leave of absence from Microsoft since
March and could not be reached for comment.
In late 2004, Ms. Bradford hosted a meeting between GM and Mr. Cole. She
says she coached her GM guests the night before not to pull any punches. The
next day, GM said it was boosting online advertising, but that Microsoft
didn't have enough salespeople in Detroit to serve the auto maker, says Curt
Hecht, chief digital officer of GM Planworks, a unit of media-buying firm
Starcom MediaVest.
On weekends, Ms. Bradford sought refuge 700 miles south of Seattle near San
Francisco where she lives with her husband and two children. It was a life
so far removed from Microsoft that Ms. Bradford's young daughter for a time
thought that her mother was in the golf business, thanks to a box of
MSN-branded golf balls sitting in the family's home office.
Ms. Bradford decided to change her approach. Instead of simply arguing the
point, she gave the Microsoft techies what they love: computer-generated
data. She ordered a survey of the entire sales force, collecting details on
how every member spent each day, from routine administrative tasks to
meeting with customers. For any given revenue projection, it listed the
number of staff needed. For the first time, she was able to put numbers into
the art of ad sales. She offered a deal -- provide the people, and she'd
guarantee the revenue.
Those meetings helped set up Ms. Bradford for Microsoft's annual hiring
meeting, held every May, where in the past her ideas had been shot down.
Armed with the latest data, she made her case for hiring hundreds of new
sales staff. She got the OK from Mr. Cole.
Nationwide, Microsoft tripled the number of sales support staff to about
150. In Detroit, over the same period, the sales group doubled to 12,
poaching salespeople from Yahoo Inc., AOL and BusinessWeek. With these new
workers, GM decided to boost its business with MSN. "Joanne is making a
difference," GM Planworks' Mr. Hecht says.
The sales group, which Ms. Bradford will continue to run until she starts
her new duties, is now central to Microsoft's advertising strategy. It's an
important part of two recent deals the company has struck. Microsoft in
April bought Massive Inc., a start-up that had developed technology for
placing ads alongside videogames. In August, it struck a deal to provide ads
on the social- networking site Facebook Inc.
Since September Ms. Bradford's team has been pitching a broad package of
Microsoft properties and partners to advertisers. Her next task is to build
services under the MSN brand -- online video and music, for instance -- that
will attract consumers and advertisers.
CH
