Around Microsoft's campus, some colleagues jokingly refer to Martin Taylor as their Joe Friday. The story goes that whenever they begin gushing about the company's latest product or technology, he routinely demands the data that would clinch such claims with customers.
In the software business, where companies routinely hype their newest releases to the heavens, Microsoft is no stranger to hyperbole. But the gathering momentum behind Linux provides Taylor, the software maker's newly appointed general manager for platform strategies, with extra incentive to promote his just-the-facts, ma'am, approach.
Three weeks into the job, Taylor has been given the monumental task of coordinating a companywide strategy to support its proprietary technology so that Microsoft can counter the open-source camp. The software giant needs to make a compelling case for cash-strapped IT buyers to buy its story. And sceptical CIOs have heard it all before. Taylor knows this is going to take more than a selling job. But Taylor, who joined Microsoft in 1992, says the battle will ultimately turn on making sure customer satisfaction is more than lip service. That has sometimes proved more difficult than it might sound at first blush.
"Most of our folks come up through the development ranks and don't have a whole lot of experience managing customer relationships," said Taylor, who worked his way up the ranks the last decade holding a variety of posts involved with customer and partner satisfaction issues -- most recently reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer as his director of business strategy.
At this point, Microsoft's strategy for Linux remains one of studied ambiguity. Under pressure from governments and customers, the company has borrowed some aspects of the open-source development model with its so-called shared code initiative. For the most part, however, the company's argument comes down to a strict total-cost-of-ownership comparison, with a checklist of Microsoft features and services set against a rival Linux offering. That's an argument Taylor believes he can win.
A self-described closet geek, Taylor used to break apart his Commodore 64 and rewrite his own games. "But I used my hacking skills for good, not evil," Taylor said. He spoke with CNET News.com on the eve of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.
Q: Considering Linux's momentum, it doesn't seem Microsoft has yet come up with an answer on how to turn back the tide.
A: This may disappoint you, but I hope we don't say, "This is why Linux is bad and Microsoft is good." That's not the direction that I want to head. I want to say, "Listen, companies are now taking decisions across the stack. They might deploy Linux as a single-purpose server; they might move off Unix and try to deploy Linux in a variety of ways; but at the end of the day enterprises are looking at the stack." They either want to move Linux up the stack or they want to do different things.
Put another way, then, what are going to be the key issues when you have those conversations with customers?
I see my job not so much as to beat my chest and tell the world why we're great, but rather as moving this to a fact-based discussion that will be validated by third parties in a variety of ways. I look at cost and security as the top two things.
So then what will be your role as far as figuring out Microsoft's approach to Linux?
Job No. 1 is to orchestrate our cross-company efforts as we talk about our platform and stack versus the Linux stack. And here there are really two things to consider: the complete open-source community free Linux stack, which is Apache, Samba; and the commercial Linux stack, such as WebSphere or Oracle, running on top of this kernel. The conversations in the company now are to make sure we're thinking about this collectively.
