All About Microsoft

February 9th, 2010

Microsoft on Google Buzz: Been there, done that

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, SharePoint Server, Web 2.0, Windows Live

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Social Networking, Groupware, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Enterprise Software, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Google Buzz, which sounds like the slightly less confusing successor to Google’s “future of e-mail” Wave product, is coming in both consumer and enterprise flavors, according to Google. Are the Softies quaking in their boots?

Not exactly. I asked Microsoft officials for comment on Google Buzz, which Google unveiled on February 9.

I received a response attributable to Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

(Not sure I’d call that statement a “slam,” like TechCrunch did… Felt to me more like attempted buzzzzzzkill.)

Microsoft also has been working to integrate social networks from third parties not just into its Web-mail product, but also into its Outlook mail client, via the Outlook Social Connector that the company unveiled at the Professional Developers Conference in 2009.

Microsoft is integrating the Social Connector into the Outlook 2010 product which is due out in the first half of this year. Microsoft’s Social Connector is designed to do a lot of what Buzz does, except with more of a business-centric focus.When Microsoft announced the Connector, there weren’t major providers on board (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.), but company officials did say Windows Live integration, unsurprisingly, would be happening in 2010.

Microsoft’s Social Connector also provides regularly updated “activity feeds” for those in a user’s social connector via a connection with SharePoint 2010.

(My ZDNet blogging colleague Larry Dignan blogged today that Google’s real target with Buzz was Microsoft SharePoint, not Twitter or FriendFeed. With the Social Connector front end taken into account, I wouldn’t say he’s far off the mark.)

In the longer term, Microsoft is working on infusing a lot of its products with more social networking capabilities. That’s a key piece of the mission of the recently created FUSE Labs at Microsoft, headed by Lili Cheng. Cheng, as Microsoft watchers may recall, has been working on the Social Desktop concept for a few years now….

Is Google actually chasing Microsoft’s taillights with Buzz — despite the lack of mentions of competitive offerings from Redmond by the majority of the press/bloggers covering today’s Buzz launch? What’s your take?

February 9th, 2010

Microsoft's weakest cloud link: The Windows Azure Console?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:11 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Console, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

It’s just one early user’s opinion, but it sounds like Microsoft needs to beef up the integrated console component of Windows Azure to keep its cloud-computing customers happy.

Microsoft began charging users for Azure compute and storage as of February 2, 2010. One of the showcase customers the company has trotted out as an early adopter is Lokad, a forecasting software/services vendor.

On February 8, Lokad founder Joannes Vermorel, blogged his “big wish list” for Windows Azure.  He itemized his suggestions for new features and tweaks that the “would turn Azure into a killer product, deserving a lion-sized market share in the cloud computing marketplace.”

Having used the Azure service in beta/pilot form for a year, Vermorel knows well the ins and outs of Microsoft’s offering. He had a number of suggestions for Microsoft about the core Windows Azure cloud-operating-system core, ranging from smaller virtual machines, to per-minute (as opposed to current) per-hour pricing. (There have been other calls for Microsoft to offer cheaper pricing for smaller Azure customers.) Vermorel also made a case for some new features for SQL Azure.

But there’s one piece of Azure that Vermorel said he doesn’t like at all: The Windows Azure Console. From his post:

“The Windows Azure Console is probably the weakest component of Windows Azure. In many ways, it’s a real shame to see such a good piece of technology so much dragged down by the abysmal usability of its administrative web client.”

What’s wrong with the console? Vermorel said it needs a 100-times speed-up (he says users can be required to wait 20 minutes for an update after a configuration of a role). And don’t get him started on billing; it’s a mess. He noted:

“(B)eside the fact that about 10 counter-intuitive clicks are required to navigate from the console toward your consumption records; the consumption reporting is still of substandard quality. Billing cries for massive look & feel improvements.”

Vermorel listed some new services he’d like to see added to Azure, including Google’s MapReduce distributed framework for processing large datasets. He noted that Microsoft has been making strides in this space with its own DryadLINQ (which is currently a Microsoft Research project).

Speaking of LINQ, cloud expert and Oakleaf Systems blogger Roger Jennigs recently had an interesting update on the “father of LINQ” Erik Meijer. Connecting some dots, Jennings came to the realization that Microsoft’s discontinued Volta project has been reborn as the Reactive Extensions for .Net (and is still being championed by Meijer). Meijer is running the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft these days. Those Reactive Extensions are currently not on a path to commercialization; they’re a project in Microsoft’s DevLabs. But who knows when and how they’ll surface as elements of future releases of .Net and Silverlight?

So, back to Azure present, not future. Any early testers/adopters have anything to add, re: Vermorel’s console comments?

February 8th, 2010

Microsoft's Windows 7 chief: It's not us; it's your batteries

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:34 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Resellers, Support, System builders, Windows 7, Windows client

Tags: Battery, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows 7, Engineering, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s President of Windows has weighed in about the reports of alleged problems with PC batteries coming from some Windows 7 users.

Steven Sinofsky posted to the Engineering Windows 7 blog about the battery-notification issue on February 8. If you want to know all about battery performance, telemetry data, and more, read the full post. If you don’t have time, here’s the synopsis: It’s not us; it’s your batteries.

Sinofsky blogged:

“(E)very single indication we have regarding the reports we’ve seen are simply Windows 7 reporting the state of the battery using this new feature and we’re simply seeing batteries that are not performing above the designated threshold.”

Sinofsky said that Microsoft and its partners have been investigating the reports, especially over the past few days, and have found the battery-metering feature of Windows 7 to be working fine. Because previous versions of Windows didn’t include this meter, some users may not have been aware their batteries were degrading, he said. But there is no truth to reports that Windows 7 is sapping batteries prematurely or that any drivers or the BIOS in Windows 7 PCs are not functioning correctly, Sinofsky said.

Microsoft is advising any Windows 7 customers who are receiving unwarranted battery-expiration notices or experiencing other battery-related issues to file a report with Microsoft or the original PC maker. Sinofsky advised those individuals to email him directly via the Engineering 7 contact page, use the TechNet forum, the Microsoft Answers forum, “or visit support.microsoft.com where you can get additional information about how to contact Microsoft assisted support in your region.”

There you have it. Are those of you experiencing problems satisfied by this explanation? Meanwhile, how about those Windows 7 reliability-update issues?

February 8th, 2010

A leaner, meaner Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate expected later this week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:58 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Visual Studio 10 ("Hawaii")

Tags: Blog, Release Candidate, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Development Tools, Microsoft Windows, Development Tools, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Operating Systems

Microsoft is poised to release the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of Visual Studio 2010 later this week, according to a mention on February 8 on a Microsoft development blog. The RC should be a lot leaner and better performing than the previous test builds, according to other blog posts from the company.

Update: The VS2010/.Net 4 RC is out, as of the evening of February 8. Microsoft is now confirming it. MSDN subscribers can get it immediately, and the public, as of February 10.

News about this week’s RC is mentioned in passing at  the top of the post on the Visual Studio Lab Management Team Blog, It’s not too big a surprise, given that  Microsoft officials said late last year to expect the RC of VS2010 in February 2010.

(Microsoft is slated to launch VS2010 on April 12. The final version of the product is expected to ship on or around that date.)

The RC build of VS2010 was not originally part of the VS2010 development plan. Microsoft officials said late last year they’d decided to add one more public test build in order to be able to iron out some of the performance-related problems testers were reporting with Microsoft’s next version of its development tool suite. I’ve heard and received quite a few complaints about the Beta 2 version of VS2010.

Microsoft execs have acknowledged publicly the problems with VS2010. Just today, I read a February 7 blog post from a member of the Visual Studio Quality Assurance team, Kirill Osenkov, that explained succinctly some of the problems with the product:

“During Beta 1 and Beta 2 it became painfully obvious that the new VS had an obesity problem: it was slow, consumed a lot of memory and the worst thing, with enough modules loaded it stopped fitting into the 2GB address space on 32-bit machines…. In a nutshell, with a lot of new functionality a lot more modules were loaded into memory. Besides, we now had to fully load the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) at application startup. Moreover, there were all kinds of memory leaks all over the place.”

Microsoft subsequently formed a virtual “Perf SWAT” team to focus on remedying performance, memory consumption and design-time stress with VS2010, Osenkov noted. He said that team has made progress. From his blog post:

“The good news is that we’ve made tremendous progress since Beta 2 and have brought the product into a much better state: it is much faster, more responsive, takes up much less memory and we also hope to have eliminated all major known memory leaks. A common complaint was that VS was growing in memory during usage and you had to restart it after a certain time. Right now we hope that you can mostly keep Visual Studio open for days (even weeks) without having to restart it.”

Microsoft also has made some changes to the first-launch-after-install sequence for VS2010, which testers will see as of the RC.

One Microsoft partner, who requested anonymity, said he believed Visual Studio 2010 may end up being just a step along the path toward a more solid, next-generation VS release (a VS 2010/.Net 4.5 or whatever it ends up being called.) The VS folks are facing problems the Windows team knows all too well, he said, further explaining:

“Microsoft is simply feeling the pains of dealing with 20+ year old code bases. Vista was ultimately a step on the way to Windows 7, and the same thing may happen here, though I fervently hope not.  I have to believe a pattern is developing here, though, and Microsoftwould do well to start cleaning up their codebase (as with MinWin and the Win 7 kernel) or starting over from scratch more often (Windows Mobile 7, we hope).”

Microsoft is positioning Visual Studio 2010 as its tool platform to support Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Azure, SQL Server, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. The four versions of the suite are slated to include new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation; built-in support for building ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) 2.0 applications, better multicore support and UML support, among other new features.

February 8th, 2010

Is Windows 7 reliability fix making PCs less reliable?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:55 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Resellers, System builders, Windows 7, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

There are reports in a TechNet forum that claim a recently released reliability and stability patch for Windows 7 may end up making some PCs less reliable and stable.

The Ars Technica site discovered the thread about the fix, KB977074, late last week. KB977074, one of a number of Windows 7 updates Microsoft made available for download at the end of January, was designed to “resolve some reliability issues in Windows 7.”

Some users commenting on TechNet said they were experiencing blue screens and hangs when trying to start up their Windows 7 PCs since applying the reliability patch; others say they are experiencing shut-down lags which may be connected to the same patch. Some users claim that by hiding the reliability update, these problems are alleviated.

When I asked Microsoft officials about the alleged problem, I received the following statement via a spokesperson:

“We have not seen this (reliability/stability problems resulting from the patch) as a major issue within our customer support channels; however, we are aware of it and are working to identify the cause.  At this point, there is no indication that this specific update is the cause of the install issues. We will share more information when it becomes available.”

Microsoft officials also said recently they had not received reports via the company’s official customer support channels of alleged battery issues that some Windows 7 users said they’ve been experiencing. I’ve heard back from two users (one of whom, a Microsoft Gold reseller partner, I quote here) who’ve been willing to share their real names and details about these problems, so I’m a bit puzzled about Microsoft’s claim that they haven’t heard direct complaints. (Maybe there are some official help-desk hoops these individuals aren’t jumping through? Or maybe Microsoft isn’t getting complaints directly, but certain OEMs are? Not sure….)

I myself have noticed that applications that I haven’t closed before attempting to shut down Windows 7 are more noticeably delaying my PC shutdown in the couple of weeks. I have not experienced any new boot-up problems, however.

I’m curious if anyone else out there is having reliability/stability problems since applying the above-mentioned fix. If so, please chime in via Talkback or send email to me using the form at the bottom of my site. (I won’t share anyone’s names or information unless I ask and you OK it.)

February 5th, 2010

Windows 7 battery update: Still no conclusive findings

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:56 pm

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Resellers, System builders, Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows client

Tags: Battery, Microsoft Corp., Laptop Computer, Engineering, Microsoft Windows 7, Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft and its PC maker partners are continuing to look into battery problems which some Windows 7 users have said they’ve been experiencing. So far, there’s nothing new to report, Microsoft officials said on Friday, February 5, but their investigation is continuing.

Update: On February 8, Microsoft issued a new statement, via the WIndows Engineering 7 blog. Bottom line: Microsoft says it’s the batteries, not Win7, at fault for the growing number of alleged battery-related Windows 7 problems.

It’s still unclear exactly what is going on — whether there’s a problem with the PC batteries themselves or there is something that could be fixed via a software update/patch. Reports about what’s happening are all over the map: Some are claiming they are getting less battery life with Windows 7 than Vista or XP. Others are saying they are getting false reports that their batteries are faulty. There are a variety of battery-related complaints, some dating back to before the final release of Windows 7, in the Microsoft TechNet forums.

Given the relatively small number of reports of problems (seeing that Microsoft has sold 60 million copies of Windows 7 to date), is this just a case of normal hardware failure?  From the TechNet forums, problems seem to be occurring across a variety of vendors’ systems, and aren’t just isolated to a single type of PC.

One source I spoke with this week, who asked not to be identified, threw cold water on the idea that Windows 7 itself could be destroying PC batteries.”There’s no way a Windows 7 interaction with the BIOS would cause any temporary or permanent battery damage,” the source said.

One of Microsoft’s Gold reseller partners told me he received a puzzling response when he contacted HP about 30 HP NC6400 laptops, purchased two years ago, which are experiencing battery-related issues.

“I escalated this with HP this past week and they were ignorant of the issue (still waiting for resolution and callbacks),” said Scott Hill, CIO of RightSize IT. “One recommendation was to roll back to Vista (never again), another was to roll back a laptop to XP to verify if the battery was good (loss of productivity), and the final one was to replace all my laptops with a Win 7 compatible laptop (over a $60,000 investment).

There’s no one “throat to choke,” Hill said. If this is a driver problem, is it a Microsoft issue or an HP one?

“HP states that the drivers (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, or ACPI) are Microsoft supplied so they are pointing to them, ” Hill said. “Further, I noticed in the Device Manager that I have one Unknown Driver – “ACPI\HPQ0004”. What drives me nuts is that this has occurred across all platforms at the same time – what is the possibility that 30 LION batteries in 30 laptops having the same condition? The only consistent variable is the ACPI drivers from Microsoft.”

Hill continued: “We show 100% charge using the ‘Balanced Power Plan’ and after about 10 minutes it reaches 92% then falls to 7% in less than a minute and shuts down the laptops – when previously with XP we were getting three to four hours per charge. What’s worse, is that we lost the utilities we used to have to calibrate and discharge the batteries to avoid battery memory issues. I think there is a bug in the ACPI in cycling the batteries through the charging, etc.”

If others have reported problems to Microsoft or their PC providers and have open helpdesk tickets, I’d be interested to hear what you’re hearing back….

February 5th, 2010

Microsoft to phase out its enterprise search offerings for Linux and Unix

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Corporate strategy, Office, Search, SharePoint Server

Tags: Enterprise Search, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Cloud Computing, Search, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is going to be phasing out support for Unix and Linux platforms for its FAST enterprise search products as of their next release (some time after 2010).

Microsoft shared that information, as well as other news about its near- and longer-term search plans as part of its latest update to its enterprise-search roadmap, which it made public on February 4. (Strangely, that blog post about ending support for Linux and Unix from FAST CTO Bjørn Olstad is entitled “Innovation on Linux and Unix.”)  Via a new post on the Microsoft Enterprise Search team blog, company officials detailed what customers can expect this year and beyond. From that post:

• There are two standalone search products based on the technology Microsoft acquired in 2008 when it purchased FAST Search and Transfer for $1.23 billion. These products are due out in the first half of calendar 2010. These are FAST Search for Internet Sites and FAST Search for Internal Applications. As it indicated a year ago, Microsoft also is going to be offering two versions of SharePoint for Internet Sites (Enterprise and Standard) in the first half of this year. The Enterprise version will include rights to use FAST Search outside the firewall.
• FAST Search for Internet Sites includes the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) 5.3 core and includes content-transformation services, which are tools for processing structured and unstructured information, and Interaction Management Services (a new framework for building interactive user interfaces). This product will be licensable using a server-only model.
• FAST Search for Internal Applications includes the same ESP 5.3 search core which is licensable via a new Server/Client Access License (CAL) model.
• These two new FAST products will be the last release to include a serch core that runs on Linux and Unix. What does that mean for FAST users who have been running on those non-Microsoft operating systems, in terms of support? According to the blog post: “Microsoft is committed to supporting ESP 5.3—our multi-OS search core—for 10 years as per our support policy. Non-Windows customers who want to remain on the ESP 5.3 core can take advantage of new Windows-only innovations by using a mixed-platform architecture. Microsoft is also introducing a Customer Upgrade Program to help customers evaluate hosted solutions and/or a Windows-based deployment and remains fully committed to interoperability with non-Windows systems on both the front- and back-end.”
• Microsoft also is discontinuing FAST AdMomentum, “a search-based advertising solution,” company officials said.

In other, non-enterprise-focused search news, Microsoft announced on Februrary 5 that it had extended its search partnership with Facebook, but that Facebook would be taking over its own advertising business, a piece of which Microsoft had managed previously.

February 5th, 2010

Testers get alpha of next version of Silverlight for Linux

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:56 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Linux, Silverlight (wpf/e)

Tags: Mono, Novell Inc., Microsoft Silverlight, Mono Team, Moonlight 3, Moonlight 2, .Net, Development Tools, Open Source, Linux

The Mono team has made available a preview test build of Moonlight 3, the next version of Silverlight for Linux from Novell.

Preview 1 is downloadable from the Mono site, as of February 3.

Novell released Moonlight 2 in December 2009. Moonlight 2 is a superset of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2, though it did  include support for some of Microsoft’s Silverlight 3.0 features.

The new Moonlight 3 release is adding more updates to the Silverlight 3.0 programming interfaces; MP4 demuxer support (though there are no codecs for it yet); and some initial work on user interface virtualization, according to a blog post this week from Miguel de Icaza, Mono project founder and Novell Vice President of Developer Platforms.

With Moonlight 3, the Mono team has separated the Moonlight core from the windowing system engine, which “should make it possible for developers to port Moonlight to other windowing/graphics systems that are not X11/Gtk+ centric,” according to de Icaza.

Microsoft released Silverlight 3 in the spring of 2009 and is expected to release Silverlight 4 in the first half of 2010.

Moonlight 3 is expected to be released in final form in the third quarter of this year, Novell officials said late last year.

February 5th, 2010

Microsoft readies free upgrade program for Office buyers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 5:33 am

Categories: Channel, Corporate strategy, OEMs, Office 2010/Office 14, Resellers, SharePoint Server, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Just like it does with Windows to keep the bottom from dropping out of the market in the months prior to the launch of a new release, Microsoft does the same with Office via its Tech Guarantee program. It looks like that free-upgrade program is about to begin for Office 2010.

Ars Technica got a glimpse of a Microsoft partner’s blog post about the imminent launch of the Office 2010 Tech Guarantee program — just before the post was yanked. Here are some of the details (via Ars):

• The program runs between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010
• Customers who buy a copy of Office 2007 during that period — with or without a new PC — from a participating reseller will qualify for the promotion
• To qualify, customers must activate their copies of Office 2007 by September 30 and request their free upgrade to Office 2010 by October 31
• Those who are eligible will get a free download of Office 2010 (although discs will e purchasable for a shipping and handling fee)
• Limit is 25 free-upgrade copies per person

Microsoft is rapidly approaching the finish line with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. This week, Microsoft made the near-final Release Candidate (RC) of Office 2010 available to participants in its Technology Adoption Program (TAP). The company is not planning to make the RC more broadly available. Release to manufacturing could happen any time, but it’s likely this spring. Microsoft officials have said the final code will be available by June for sure. Microsoft execs said last year to expect SharePoint 2010 to be released alongside Office 2010.

Microsoft already has revealed the planned version line-up for Office 2010 (with seven different SKUs, the prices for most of which the company also has shared), as well as the system requirements for the final Office 2010 product.

February 4th, 2010

Microsoft's challenge: Innovation, innovation, innovation

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:50 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy

Tags: Innovation, Team, Microsoft Corp., Tech World, Team Management, Leadership, Strategy, Human Capital Management, Management, Human Resources

Former Softies are weighing in publicly about Microsoft’s culture of innovation — or lack thereof — in the past couple of days. What they aren’t doing is offering any real suggestions about how Microsoft can make a company of 90,000 or so employees more agile, less insular and more innovative.

Don Dodge, who was cut in the last round of Microsoft layoffs, only to resurface days later at Google as an evangelist, is extolling the virtues of Macs this week. Dick Brass, who retired from Microsoft in 2004 and was instrumental in the Tablet PC launch, is airing his grievances about what went wrong back in 2000 in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. Bill Hill, the leader of the ClearType team at Microsoft who left Microsoft last summer, has a post on his personal blog that also criticizes Microsoft’s development and commercialization processes.

I’ve met and/or heard all of these folks speak during my time covering Microsoft. They’ve all had their share of justifiable frustrations with management, as have most folks who leave a company (voluntarily or not). Apple’s launch last week of the iPad, with many subsequent stories and blog posts declaring Microsoft had lost their ten-year lead in the tablet market, probably led, at least in part, to Brass’ and Hill’s discontent.

The most surprising thing about a number of industry watchers’ reactions to these complaints, in my mind, the fact that anyone is stunned to hear that Microsoft is a political place, populated by some execs who seem intent on building empires inside the Empire. Hello, corporate politics! Show me a big company that isn’t a shark tank, and I’ll show you a company that has no teeth.

Secondly, I’m also surprised that anyone familiar with Microsoft’s history is shocked that one Microsoft team tried to kill off another team’s project because it was viewed as internal competition. It was common knowledge that when Bill Gates was still CEO at Microsoft, and for years afterwards, Microsoft’s brass routinely pitted one team against another inside the company and let “the best” team win. Just one of many examples: Remember the Office vs. NetDocs contest? NetDocs — which could have become Microsoft’s equivalent to Google Docs if it had launched back in 2001 — lost.

Over time, many of the Microsoft teams and managers that “lost” didn’t succumb simply because their technology wasn’t innovative enough. Sometimes it was too ahead of its time. Other times, it lost because the Microsoft managers in charge of the company’s money-earning cash cows (like Windows and Office) didn’t want anything to upset their fiefdoms.

Are these healthy behaviors? No. Did they actually make Microsoft any more successful? I’m doubtful.

The other and more intersting question raised by Brass and others — besides which manager killed whose project ten years ago — is about innovation (whatever that really means). The tech world has changed a lot since the early part of the last decade — the period about which Brass’s criticisms focused. In spite of CEO Steve Ballmer’s public bluster, Microsoft execs actually do realize they can’t ignore Web apps and Web standards. Microsoft no longer acts as though Apple is nothing but a minor irritant; in fact, I and some other company watchers have said we think Microsoft is too Apple-obsessed for its own good.

In the past couple of years, in particular, I’ve felt that Microsoft’s top execs have come to understand (for the most part, not completely) that internal dog fights ended up causing more harm than good. To try to kick start innovation, new tactics are being put in place, like the creation of hybrid labs (Live Labs, Startup Labs, DevLabs, etc.), designed to allow smaller projects to have a better chance to make it to the commercial market. At the same time, Microsoft execs also have been incubating a number of other projects — things like Midori, Azure, the Online services, etc. — to give them a head start. And then there have been the attempts by Microsoft to spur innovation by sequestering certain teams and separating them (physically and virtually) from the rest of the company while they mature (think Xbox, Zune, Courier).

Will these kinds of changes be enough to keep Microsoft in leadership positions outside of Windows and Office — the two places it has a monopoly? I’m not sure. But at least management is making some changes in attempt to become more agile.

As others have said today, it’s easy to be the Monday morning quarterback, analyzing in hindsight what Microsoft could/should have done. It’s hard coming up with ideas about how to make a company as big and established as Microsoft able to keep pace with a rapidlychanging tech environment.

Would breaking the company into a consumer company and an enterprise company help achieve this goal? (Sometimes I think so….) Other thoughts about how  — and if — Microsoft can become more innovative?