More stuff from Thomas to chew on in How To Turn Microsoft Around. I'm glad he caveated the post at the beginning and end with the note about armchair quarterbacking. I'm glad to see some folks setting the record straight in the comments over on his blog, so I would encourage you to go read those. Anywho, my two cents about what Thomas wrote follows -- please go read his entire post -- I'm just going to try and boil it down to the action items he recommends in summary.
1) "...create a Microsoft certification whereby thoroughly tested systems receive a special Microsoft seal of approval. This would be reserved only for PCs that met the most rigorous testing requirements."
Done -- see http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx. I expect Thomas' answer will be 'that's broke, you need something better'. My belief: Our ecosystem of partnerships (Chris loves it when I use that particular group think Microsoft-ism) isn't broke, and in many ways is quite healthy.
2) "Microsoft should spend $3 billion buying everything cool that it can get it's hands on irrespective of the busness outlooks of the individual internet properties. By combining these properties into something cool they *can* build a presence yet on the net."
Yikes. Throwing money around 'irrespective of the business outlook' is absolutely irresponsible, both to our employees and shareholders. The logic here doesn't make sense to me at all: Ignore the business fundamentals and make a decision solely on a nebulous perception of 'cool'. Friendster used to be cool, and now seems to be a footnote in the annals of Web 2.0 supplanted by MySpace and Facebook. Let's chat in 10-20 years and see how sound an investment it was to shell out $1.65 billion for YouTube or $35 million for Flickr -- I for one largely think the jury is still out on those. Anyone remember the dotcom bust around 2000? That was largely fueled by just this sort of approach in regards to investment. No thanks -- been there, done that, got the t-shirt (which is the only thing left for my personal 10 grand -- ouch).
3) "Open an incubator in San Francisco."
Done. How about Redmond, Cambridge, Bangalore and Beijing as well. Don't forget our university partnerships either. Not to mention we fund more 'startups' than you can imagine outside of these research groups in product groups themselves. In fact, Windows Media Center (itself a internal startup which has been highly sucessful, shipping 5 great versions in 5 years) just recently spun off its own startup group (can't say more, sorry). Heck, why limit it to only what we can do ourselves -- we should think about how we invest in others. Oh, wait -- that's done too: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/. Don't get me wrong: San Francisco is a lovely place -- but not the only place -- for great ideas and startups.
4) "Rather than one or two top evangelists though they should hire about 30 of these connectors and also give them direct access to the executives making the business decisions at Microsoft."
Evangelism works best when it's grass roots (I think Robert would tend to agree with me here). I think the answer here is not bringing in folks from outside as high profile connectors but rather encouraging and increasing the profile of folks from within. (I'm pretty sure MiniMicrosoft would agree.)
Thomas, you should seriously think about joining Microsoft personally -- you've got the right mindset that change is good -- come and work for a company that really believes that and empowers you to make it happen.