From: Jason Lind [mailto:lind@yahoo.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 30, 2009 1:13 AM
To: Steve Ballmer
Subject: From a Microsoft Zealot





Quickly introducing myself, my name is Jason Lind, I am solutions architect specializing in the Microsoft stack and specifically .NET. First of all I would like to thank you for your continued focus on development tools and frameworks, Microsoft continues to offer the best overall server products and tools on the market and as far as I can tell you are only distancing yourself from the pack in that regard.





I have had the opportunity to use Windows 7 on a Dell Latitude XT multi-touch tablet PC and I am very impressed. Again I think Windows is a great product, actually I have very few complaints with Vista although I have not used that product as heavily as Server 2008 which is installed on my primary workstation. OS X may be a better and more stable product (although I'm not convinced that is the case), but Apple does not know how to treat their developers and as far as I'm concerned until they do they're a cute toy.





My issue with Microsoft today is what I see as a lack of aggressiveness when it comes to marketing. Take your response to the very amusing and effective Mac versus PC commercials, when I read an article about your new marketing strategy saying "Microsoft will attack Apple on price" I was excited. The commercials to date are weak and not effective. Try this, how about Dell Studio XPS 16 versus a Mac Book Pro 15", the Dell has a bigger and higher resolution screen and a larger hard drive than the Mac at $1559 versus $2499. What do you get for shelling out the extra cash for the Mac? A backlit keyboard and an unfamiliar operating system. You want BluRay, well you can't even get that on the Mac. I mean the car companies love doing this kind of stuff, why not you?





Show off the HP Touchsmart, or the tablet PC's, Apple doesn't have anything similar.  Microsoft has always been about enabling a diverse selection of manufacturers and products, Apple is the one who believes in vendor lock in. Imply they're un-American, because they are. Bottom line is its time to stop playing nice, they aren't so why should you?





And seriously, Bling? How much did you pay someone to come up with that? It sounds like you want to be the ghetto little sister of Google. I haven't had a chance to really dig into it, but it sounds like you're heading down the right road for search, although chew on this for a second. I think that Yahoo's biggest mistake was completely abandoning the directory in favor of full text search, when instead they should have innovated the directory and applied it to full text search. Google came out with full text search product that was better than anyone else's, and probably still is, and instead of innovating their concepts to compete Yahoo copied Google and look where they're at now. I'm just saying no matter how good of a full text search engine you build you'll never win significant market share from Google because there will not be enough differentiation for people to care.





The way to gain market share is do something different, which you have started to do with this categorization of full text search results, why not use a combination of indexes and social networking to build directory that is browsable and searchable. Think if you're searching for a 500W A/V Receiver, type that search term into Google what do you get? Mostly third party websites trying to sell you receivers, in fact on both Google and Live Search there isn't a single product manufacturer web site on the first page. What if you could constrain that search to a white list of sites, i.e.: a category, like Electronics Manufacturers? Now that would be something people would move sites for. That's just an idea, bottom line you need to come up with something different from full text search in order to compete with Google.





Well that's my 50 cents, I'd really like to know what you think.





Jason Lind
jason@lind-i.com
 President & Chief Software Architect
 Lind Innovation