Microsoft is Nice!

Last month Microsoft Silicon Valley hosted a Carnegie Mellon/UC Berkeley conference on the New Software Industry. They provided a nice auditorium and an excellent lunch. Generally, Microsoft has been a good neighbor to our campus, which is one freeway stop away.

Every Silicon Valley business discussion has an implicit subtext of "How do we avoid being crushed by Microsoft?" or "How do we overthrow the Microsoft empire?" and this conference was no exception. It was about Software as a Service, Open Source, and all the other things that may change the game. Most of the people at the conference were hoping that Microsoft, subject to the Innovator's Dilemma, will stay with its licensed desktop software model and allow them to play in the new sandbox. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer, gave a lunchtime talk that reassured them. He described how eight-core chips were going to make the desktop a good place to be, especially if we can figure out how to use all that parallelism to do something useful. We might not have been so complacent had we heard from his partner Ray Ozzie, who just announced something called Silverlight, a video platform, see http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/default01.aspx.

posted by Jim Morris @ 10:53 AM 

 Jarek Wilkiewicz said...

Or are they "dead" ?
Paul Graham posted an interesting essay about how and why companies, including startups, no longer fear Microsoft.
Here are the links :

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

and

http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html

7:05 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

• VCs: Yes to DW, DE. No to OS, AAA.
• A New Pittsburgh Project
• Gasoline is the New Tobacco
• Understanding Bureaucrats
• Reframing Education
• Campus IT Strategy Challenge
• Twenty-five Years of Andrew
• Dave Farber: Master Blogger
• BlackBerry + Google beats Windows Mobile
• Bluetooth Makes a Cable Look like an Elegant Solution