Getting one of Microsoft's top managers to talk is achievement, but getting them all together in one room can mean only one thing: it's Microsoft's annual Financial Analysts Meeting (FAM). This is attended in the flesh by people from Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and so on, or virtually via streaming on Microsoft Investor Relations Web. And, of course, anyone can read the transcripts and download the slides afterwards.
Since Steve Ballmer's talk alone runs to more than 15,000 words, this is not a trivial undertaking. Also, the vast majority of Microsoft's $60 billion revenue comes from business software, which (apart from Windows and Office) may be of little or no interest to consumers, even if they have heard of it. An alternative is to read Mary-Jo Foley's reports at All About Microsoft for some of the highlights.
Naturally there was some talk of how Microsoft can change some people's perception of Vista -- which has now sold 180 million copies -- to match the reality. Bill Veghte from the Windows group showed a video where people who didn't like Vista were invited to try a new operating system called Mojave. As Foley notes:
The participants, a number of whom admitted they had no direct hands-on experience with Vista, said they were jazzed about Mojave and would definitely use it once it was released.
It was, of course, Vista.
Some of Vista's problems have been created by PC manufacturers shipping mediocre, crapware-infested installations, which they have every right to do, but Microsoft is trying to do something about it. Veghte said:
The final piece of it is what we do with our PC partners, whether that be HP or Dell or Sony or the many others that are a key part of the Windows ecosystem. We worked subsequent to general availability, we worked with each one of these vendors to do what we called the Windows Vista Velocity Program. And think of this as running a set of those systems and the entire software load that they have on them through a very extensive set of tests to measure everything from reliability to security to compatibility, boot time, et cetera. We ran over 280 systems through that process and you're starting to see the results of that in the market today.
In response to a question from the floor, Steve Ballmer rambled around the same topic, saying:
You can take the same laptop, oftentimes, and pre-configure it one way and you get almost instantaneous boot, and fantastic battery life. If you pre-configure it with software in another way you get long boots, and much less battery life. That kind of education, discussion, dialogue we find our OEMs appreciate. It doesn't mean they always follow our advice, and we certainly respect their right, under our consent decree and everything else, to preload any software they want to on those machines. But, we're trying to at least help people understand the opportunity to not only offer fantastic choice, low prices, different margins, but also some of our OEMs, I know, are going to step up and do a lot more to complete the end-to-end experience, software, hardware, et cetera. And that will be a great thing.
Microsoft has already put a lot of effort into tackling the software compatibility and driver issues. And as we've already noted, it has a new agency working on some new advertising.
Update: Microsoft plans to put some "Mojave Experiment" video online here.
Original here
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