Do you think your role as one of the company's three chief technology officers is very well-defined right now?
The funny thing is that it's not well-defined, from the ability to explain it, but I know exactly what they want me to do.
Having dealt with Microsoft for a number of years, I'm very familiar with their organisation, and how decisions are made, and how things are built and get shipped. I think we both have specific ideas about how I can help to make a positive impact.
It's not as easy to explain, and as with any complex environment, you can oversimplify. That's why even if you look at the press release, it says "responsibility to influence the communications and collaboration offerings" and so on. There's a lot in those words. Because you don't make a difference from the top in a big organisation without effectively influencing them. Things don't happen necessarily by control. So we'll see how it pans out.
Well, you're not a product manager.
That's right. I don't have those organisations reporting to me. Jeff [Raikes] and Jim [Allchin] are two of the group vice-presidents who have a lot of people reporting to them. I've more of a staff role to Bill.
Presumably, you'll be giving some direction on where products should be headed or trends that the company should take hold of — almost an advisory role?
Presumably, but I haven't written up the job description yet *laughs*.
You've done a lot of proselytising around the notion that the way people work is changing — that they increasingly collaborate across geographically dispersed groups, and so on. Do you think the people at Microsoft, like Jeff Raikes, see things the same way you do? About how the work force is changing?
I think the higher up in the organisation, the more they see things as we do… The nature of the IT systems that we have built are increasingly toward the (regulatory) compliance side but not about effectively reaching out of the organisation. And there's an increasingly parallel view [at Microsoft] because of customers, because this is a real need.
What do you intend to tell Microsoft employees? What's your message to them going in, as one of the three CTOs?
Honestly, I haven't given it that much thought. If I had to, it'd be, "What can I offer you from 20 years of some success and many mistakes?" You learn from your mistakes.
