More questions for BillG Further to my earlier post about questions to ask BillG , I got a terrific question overnight: “If Microsoft wish to continue to have partners in the industry, they need to leave room for the partners to make a living as well. With MBS, Microsoft is now directly competing with many of their partners (or former partners), particularly ISV’s. ISV’s need to feel secure that if they develop an area of software, they won’t have it invaded by their own partner if it becomes successful. If Microsoft’s partners end up with no room to make their own income, won’t they move to partner with other platform vendors that do leave them that room? Also, aren’t partners then less likely to trust Microsoft’s intentions in joint marketing efforts?” That’s a beauty! A few months back we had a visit by Satya Nadella , who is the Vice President for Microsoft Business Solutions Group. He was asked the same question and his answer was pretty cool. The basic gist of the response was that Microsoft can’t do every horizontal & vertical solution and this is where ISVs are so important. The ISVs have the domain knowledge for a particular industry. What MBS is trying to do is provide consistent plumbing layer for ISVs to innovate. There is a good discussion on this topic over at Directions On Microsoft. BTW, I used to work with Satya many many years ago. His office was across the corridor from me while I was in the Interactive TV group . Ah, those were the days. [Now Playing: Fatboy Slim - Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars - Demons (06:53)] Comments Anonymous June 27, 2004 Ah, Frank - indeed, Microsoft cannot do every horizontal and vertical solution. They can, however, do the very profitable ones. The problem is that if you are only squeaking out a living, then Microsoft will not invade a partner’s space. If, however, the area is extremely profitable, Microsoft has shown no qualms about stepping on their ‘partners’. Anonymous June 27, 2004 Hi Frank, Question for Bill for you. How will MS solve the internal trade off between the Longhorn and Office teams. Anyone goaled on Longhorn will want a Longhorn optimized version of Office to pull through Longhorn sales. The Office team will want to support the widest possible base. My own feeling is that Word especially is done and that MS needs to do a totally new version with clear separation between data and format so that Word can be used to author once and repurpose text easily from documents to web to applications etc. Anonymous June 27, 2004 I hope you don’t believe this nonsense yourself. Continue reading here: http://software.ericsink.com/item_10192.html Anonymous June 27, 2004 The comment has been removed Anonymous June 27, 2004 > and his answer was pretty cool I did not find his answer any cool at all. What basically said was that MS will actually limit the revenue of ISV’s by taking the best and most profitable piece of the pie, offering a layer that most ISV already have, leaving them the hard customization that has no added value for any company. No matter how many times Ballmer will say ‘Developers’ or Scoble ISV’s, in the future (that MS is planning), we will have only two choices, either be users or working for MS. Anonymous June 18, 2009 PingBack from http://firepitidea.info/story.php?id=1569 Additional resources Last updated on 2004-06-26