I am one who gets easily mired in the negativity of others, and so I fight constantly to stop myself from becoming jaded. Jillian and I took a hike recently, and at the end, we were treated to one of those moments of breathtaking beauty that are so rare but so easily achievable if only you know where to look. It is so easy to ignore good things when there is so much bad stuff in the world, but foolish hope and optimism have always been the cornerstone of human development.
…It’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life
- American Beauty
There is a great article from Wired that describes Ray Ozzie as the “microprocessor” of the development engine at Microsoft:
The company must transform itself from a manufacturer that dumps out a big product every couple of years to a customer-obsessed enterprise devoted to continually producing, updating, and supporting a full panoply of services. In his speech, Ozzie puts it this way: “When packaged software ships, services go live. What was our end is now the beginning. The gold disk”—from which all retail copies of a new piece of software are made—”is now the grand opening.”
This means two things:
- The products matter more than ever. When you compete in this space you lower the switching costs, and people are less likely to hesitate to vote against you with their dollars.
- Microsoft has to undo years of overconfidence and employee training in the way things get done. There must be zero tolerance for old processes that lead to stupid and frustrating decisions in their software.
I wish them luck, but I suspect that #2 will be an 50 ton anchor that may take them long enough to shed as to make them a strong second or third instead of first.
