Stop! An IT Spending Manifesto 2005-2007, Jul 11

It's time for CIOs, IT Managers, and IT Professionals to stop wasting money on technologies that are mature and that offer limited opportunities for business improvement. That means immediately stopping spending on:

1. Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Whatever version your people are running is good enough. Let it be. What was the last major change in Word that made a significant difference? Probably "Track Changes". Excel? Pivot Tables? PowerPoint? I'm struggling here. Sure, there will be some power users who need some new feature in the latest edition ... buy that tactically, but stop rolling out the latest edition to everyone. It's money that doesn't need to be spent.


2. Email Upgrades and Competitive Cross-grades. Your current email server is good enough for what email as a category can deliver. Will you really notice a business impact by upgrading from Exchange 2000 to 2003? Or 5.5 to 2003? Or GroupWise to Exchange? Or Exchange to GroupWise? Or Domino to Exchange or GroupWise? At an email level, it's a mature field. Email (the technology) wasn't designed to solve the team coordination problem, so stop thinking that it will. Be content with what you have. Now if your box is continually falling over, or you see significant opportunities to rationalize the number of email servers you have by upgrading or cross-grading, or if you want to take advantage of an order-of-magnitude operational cost savings by shifting to something like Mirapoint, do so, but don't make the decision to move without a robust, tested and very solid business case. Team-aware calendaring (Pillar 4) and Enterprise Task Action Management (Pillar 6) are seriously lacking from today's email servers ... buying some new version of your email server won't address that either.


3. Windows OS. Longhorn is hardly a compelling proposition from a productivity standpoint, and it's merely the latest ploy from Microsoft to wrangle more cash from the market (you and me!). Within a couple of years, Microsoft will ramp up its machine again to say how the next release beyond Longhorn is a "must have", and that all earlier versions are "dumb". Why do we buy into these lies? If your Windows box has major problems, and you've experienced this for years with all of Microsoft's client OS platforms, then switch!

So what should you do instead with all of this freed up cash?

1. Investigate collaborative workspaces. Collaborative workspaces provide a structured environment to enable a team to work together, resolve a problem, and coordinate around an opportunity. There are some good product offerings on the market, some that are less than stellar, and some that even partners think are stink. But if there is an opportunity to improve team communication productivity, it will come from here, NOT from email.


2. Investigate workforce mobility technologies. Enabling people to work in the field (with customers, with partners, with suppliers), and still be connected into the wider organizational communication and collaboration channels is a big opportunity for business improvement. Presence, availability, instant messaging, conferencing ... and all from an anywhere/anytime perspective, are key things to be investigating.


3. Do something unique. Go against the current of "normal" and "average" business IT thinking, and do something that will endear you to your customers. Put some of your IT money into building systems that will make a quantitative difference in their lives. Only you know ... or can know ... or can know in conjunction with other dreamers at your place ... what that is within your company.

Finally, work with vendors who leverage what you already have. Due to its Office and Windows cash cows, Microsoft is wrongly incented when it comes to application server-level capabilities; it will force upgrades on customers on Microsoft's schedule, not on the customer's schedule. Stop buying into it, and invest in products from vendors that (a) are agreeable to working with your current Office and Windows infrastructures, and (b) have been doing the application server-level stuff as their primary focus for years.

Comments

[Peter de Haas]

Michael,
I read in this manifesto not so much a drive for cost consciousness, but more a Specificly focussed quest against Microsoft, sort of a Don Quichote-like. I wonder why that is, and if your advise is truly objective …
Some of the conclusions you draw on the technologies and solutions described are preliminary and not in line with reality is my opinion.
Item Microsoft Office
You take the MS Office productivity tools out of the context of Office System, the approach introduced by Microsoft in 2003 and which I am sure you are aware of. The focus of Office System is not only on the continuous improvement of Office tools, but very much on the context in which people do their work : collaborative and based on (real time) information form business system.
Also the fact that Office today is fully ‘XML capable’ and therefore very versatile in creating and maintaining information you leave out of you analysis.
Lastly the latest version of Office (2003) also introduced important new tools like InfoPath (http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath/ )
August 15, 2003 : “Microsoft Office has evolved from a suite of personal productivity products to a more comprehensive and integrated system. Building on the familiar tools that many people already know, the Microsoft Office System includes programs, servers, services, and solutions designed to work together to help address a broad array of business problems.”
(http://www.microsoft.com/office/system/overview.mspx )

Item Email Upgrades and Competitive Cross-grades
It is no longer a discussion about individual components, in my opinion it is a platform discussion. You can not see Email in isolation from other solutions and means of communication. The way forward is one of integrated communications, combining voice, video, IM, Email and so on in one environment. Achieving this requires integrated strategy of which the business benefits can be made quite clear to CIO and their business counterparts.
Realizing this integrated platform may require organisations to re-evaluate their current Email system(s) and consolidate / migrate them over as a result of their strategy.

Your advice to CIO’s :

Item Investigate collaborative workspaces.
Fully in agreement and by the way from a Microsoft perspective these are part of Office System. As I wrote earlier, you can not take Office productivity tools out of a collaboration context., if you do that, why not turn to a typewriter, I am sure they are a pretty good bargain these days.

Item Investigate workforce mobility technologies.
Fully agree. What you describe here is exactly the scope of integrated communications, mobility in my opinion is nothing but a channel / location of working (choice of the end user). Coming back to switching Email platforms: does the current email platform have native mobility capabilities (Mobile devices, Web Access, etc) and how is this evolving ? Yes and Presence, very important. What Presence without an Integrated Communications strategy ?

Item Do something unique
Yes do that, think out of the current Microsoft product cash cow paradigm and read into Office System and Microsoft’s true collaboration capabilities.
The major analysts are absolutely not in agreement with on your final conclusion
http://www.peterdehaas.com/2005/06/whats_microsoft.html

[Michael Sampson]

Peter,
Thanks for your comment above. I've been delayed in responding due to having numerous sick children at home ... including one needing a late night hospital visit. Anyway ...

Perhaps my view of "reality" is wrong. On the one hand, you've said it is, but on the other hand numerous other people have commented privately that it is "right on". Perhaps there are multiple concurrent "realities" at play here, and we're both looking at a different one.

Here's some further reflections from me:
1. I know all about the "Office System" strategy circa 2003. As an analyst and advisor to clients, however, the fundamental problem I have with the strategy is that since Microsoft makes most of its dosh from Windows and Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Microsoft is financially incented to tie the new "System" servers and services to newer versions of Windows and Office, regardless of whether the latter two actually change that much and actually make a day-to-day difference for end users ... but which they still have to pay for. In combination with the new backend capabilities, yes, there will be benefits (better team coordination, enhanced team productivity, etc) ... BUT ... does that justify the organization having to purchase new copies of Windows and Office? The alternative approach, and the one I tried to bring out in my Stop! Manifesto, was that if organizations just keep the Windows and Office stuff they have today, and then engage with other vendors who are not incented to tie backend features to new versions of Windows and Office, that the organization can derive the same benefits at a lower cost ... because they haven't *had to* buy into a new generation of Windows and Office. In addition, other vendors should theoretically be more willing to work with alternative desktop infrastructures ... because their incentives are to make the back-end system work *regardless* of what the customer has on the desktop.

2. Microsoft's collaboration strategy, with its multiple moving parts, is (a) an integrated collection of not-best-in-class components, (b) still a work-in-progress, and (c) has numerous first generation components.
(a) Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is currently key within Microsoft's collaboration strategy, forming the underpinnings of many of Microsoft's server products. Integration with Office applications is a proposed key selling point, but some customers (including ones that are strategic to Microsoft) that I've spoken with describe the Office integration as "clunky" and that they've given up on using WSS direct from Word, for example. Search requires three different products to get an all-round experience ... two from Microsoft (SQL Server and Portal Server), and another from a third-party vendor for nicer search capabilities, eg, boolean. Documents in a "Document Workspace" that are also on the desktop are dead unless opened and sync'd up.
(b) There is no strong content backbone underpinning Microsoft's collaboration offering. Will there be? What is going to happen with Groove Virtual Office (GVO) and WSS? Will they be integrated ... will a GVO space be able to be put online in WSS? ... will GVO be the offline story for WSS ... or will they remain standalone? What will Ray Ozzie do to Microsoft's collaboration strategy going forward? Bill sees him as a key CSCW person ... what impact will Ray have over the next few years as he works with the head-strong product teams? If a customer embraces GVO, does that mean they also have to embrace the Groove Servers? Those are not cheap. So ... all of this to say ... Microsoft's story is still a work-in-progress.
(c) The new servers coming out in the 2006 set of deliverables are "first generation" things from Microsoft, eg, Maestro, InfoPath Server, etc. Microsoft has never been good at v1 products, although by v3 they are usually okay. If v3 of the new stuff is 4-6 years away, why should a customer engage with it now ... isn't it better for the customer to look at alternative offerings?

With all of those things said, I think customers should look to other vendors for their requirements, unless they have no strong need to move ahead immediately ... in which case they should wait until 2007 to see the shape of Microsoft's things then. By 2007, you guys will have had time to consider roadmaps and deliverables more, will have Longhorn in the market ... and then customers can make an informed decision about whether they are willing to bear the costs of Microsoft's approach ... both on the server and services side, but also in terms of being pulled into Office and Windows upgrades.

Finally, Ballmer's ravings at the Partner Conference recently smack of extreme arrogance ... such as his push that partners should "force customers to upgrade" to Office 2003 and associated things. From my view of reality, that message is *wrong*.

[Peter de Haas]

Michael,
I hope all is ok at home and that everyone is back on his/her feet again …

It’s a pity that so many people comment privately, as I still think the view you give on the whole is a very coloured one and very much focussed only at Microsoft, as they would be the only opportunity for cost saving.
I would agree Microsoft is very present on the desktop and more and more on the server side and is an important factor in clients’ objectives to save money.
As to your further reflections :

1. Of course Microsoft is incented to sell and deploy the latest versions of it’s software. This is the case for every commercial software company. Of course this has to go hand in hand with proving the value of such new versions over the current (or older) versions as well as its competitors’

“…yes, there will be benefits (better team coordination, enhanced team productivity, etc) ... BUT ... does that justify the organization having to purchase new copies of Windows and Office?...”
These new versions provide that capability, that’s a fact. New versions bring new innovation. Office System proves to provide a not of new and very integrated Collaboration capability. This is recognised by the majority of industry analysts.

I very much doubt that other vendors who claim that Word, Excel, PowerPoint are just editors provide similar capability and value with their add-on tools and backend systems as does Office System.

Futhermore clients are not required to upgrade to the latest Office version to benefit from solutions such as Windows SharePoint Services. The following document describes how previous versions of Office (2000 and XP) integrate with WSS (http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/prodinfo/officeintegration.mspx )
Of course the document also highlights where benefits would be for organisations who deploy the latest technology.

2. I know there’s still the perception of “lots of moving parts” in Office System and indeed there are a number of server components. But none of these are 1st generation products as you claim. SharePoint is 2nd generation, Live Communications Server is 2nd Generation, Exchange is 3rd Generation, LiveMeeting (although a service) is 2nd Generation. Individually they may not be top of the class as you put it but they are certainly recognised as being part of the leading products in their field. As for the whole, as a platform they have received the recognition by Gartner Group and Forrester as I highlighted in my earlier comment.

As for Microsoft’s collaboration strategy, that is indeed a continuing story and I am sure there will be new announcements in the near future to be expected. The whole Office 12 wave will be part of the.

I do agree that clients continually need to look into solutions of different vendors and their strategy. I also hope that organisation do give Microsoft and/or their partners the chance, or better challenge them, to articulate the value of Office System. Not to wait until 2007, but in the short term, as there is a lot of improvement that can be gained from optimising their current environment when it comes to their collaboration infrastructure.

As for Ballmer’s speech on the Partner Conference,, I haven’t been there. I am very sure however he did his best to show the attendees how important partners are to Microsoft and to them how important Office is to Microsoft, afterall Microsoft sells software.