Silicon Valley yearning for a user-friendly Microsoft...
An interesting Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) on Microsoft and whether it really is suicide or not to work with Microsoft rather than compete with it, and how some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are choosing to work with it:
Others in Silicon Valley question whether Microsoft will ever change its elbows-out competitive style, or act with the responsiveness of a company that faces true competition. Mr. Perlman, who most recently started a digital-entertainment company called Moxi Digital Inc., which just merged with Digeo Inc., tells the story of an e-mail he received when he worked at Microsoft after the WebTV purchase.
Mr. Perlman says he wrote a note to Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft's No. 2 man and now its chief executive officer, complaining about technical glitches in Office's Outlook e-mail product. Mr. Perlman had been testing the product because Microsoft wanted WebTV employees to switch to Outlook after Microsoft acquired WebTV, Mr. Perlman recalls.
A manager in the Office group who responded to the note on Mr. Ballmer's behalf was "outraged" at the complaint about Outlook, Mr. Perlman says. The manager wrote back, "My job is not making Outlook reliable. My job is killing Lotus Notes," a competing product sold by IBM, Mr. Perlman says.
Microsoft's Mr. Smith, the company's general counsel, says he's "obviously not familiar with whoever it was in Office who may have said that," adding that he "couldn't disagree more strongly with anybody who characterizes their job in that way." He adds that "there's no way we're going to be successful as a company unless we make our products better."