Microsoft's dog food diet
Published: 17 Jul 2003 10:32 BST
What do you see as some of the biggest technology changes you are making at Microsoft?
There are two things. Everything we do today is scenario-based instead of technology-based. When we first started the dog food (programme), we rolled the technology out there to see if the technology worked. Today, we roll out the product against defined scenarios with the product group that have to work before the product can ship.
So what are the key ones under test?
In terms of technologies, tablet (PC) is a big one for us. We've already rolled out wireless networks across our LAN. We're looking for a new type of user productivity through paperless meetings and using STS (SharePoint Team Services) as sites to hold documents to increase our collaboration and increase the effectiveness of meetings. We have an initiative within the IT organisation around employee productivity -- not IT employees but Microsoft employees. We think the tablet plays a big role in that. In fact, we will be eliminating from our standards list all thin notebooks in favour of tablet. We'll still have the big, multimedia notebooks. But in terms of thin notebooks, we want tablet (PCs) in their hands.
During the Windows Server 2003 launch, (Microsoft CEO) Steve Ballmer touted the benefits of SharePoint Services and about 12,000 team sites. That's not a management problem for you?
In terms of cost, when SharePoint was first introduced about three years ago, manageability was a problem for us... Now things are different. One of the things we asked the product group was to make saving to SharePoint as easy as saving to your hard drive. It's as cheap on a per-gigabyte basis as file-sharing.
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