Resolve and Fortitude : Microsoft's ''SECRET POWER BROKER'' breaks his silence by Joachim Kempin
Authors: Joachim Kempin
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support group into shape. Only Lotus, WordStar, and WordPerfect remained the lone holdouts exclusively seated in the OS/2 tent.
CRISIS IN THE FAR EAST
With Windows finally on an uptrend, I visited my Far East customers again. We had succeeded in obtaining commitments from them for our printer OS. In the fall of ’90, the project ran into serious trouble. Not only had we missed all promised deadlines, but also worse, the code itself was not stabilizing. Product management was seriously considering abandoning the well over one million lines already written. I decided to personally give customers the bad news. Not an easy task, considering the investments they had made and the loss of face our decision would cause for the Japanese execs who had signed on. My meetings with Canon and NEC had the singular goal of minimizing damages. Delegating the unpleasant task would have set a bad example. I knew these customers were unhappy even as we offered to give them the unfinished source code at no charge, allowing them to use it with no strings attached.
During my stay in Tokyo, I met a second time with Sony’s management. Our meetings were always cordial. Their executives spoke English well, having spent mandatory time in Sony’s US subsidiary. However, the electronic consumer giant was no intimate friend of MS. Sony’s president, Mr. Idei, later expressed this belief as “MS wants to control us.” I still do not understand how he drew such an inaccurate conclusion. We wanted cooperation and openness; he wanted proprietary secrets and unmerited advantages. The overly polite pins-and-needles atmosphere in meetings I attended did not signal trust.
Bill would have loved to have Sony on our side. He visited with her execs numerous times without achieving a relationship breakthrough. Sony was no doubt an innovative and powerful consumer electronics and entertainment company. If her top management would have opened the kimono just a little bit, the industry would have moved forward faster. Instead, maintaining distance, she included as many proprietary features in her PCs as possible at the cost of endangering the holy grail of compatibility. MS was eager to engage in media technologies with her where she had an undisputable lead. What I found was a company who reluctantly bought our OS products and was barely willing to work with us. Sony obviously had her own agenda and ambitions. MS found herself stuck in the role of being just another of her nonstrategic vendors.
Before returning to Seattle, I stopped in Hong Kong. The local OEM group had organized a small Asian customer summit. I delivered a keynote speech and met with several key Asian manufacturers. What I heard in regard to losing business came as quite a shock. Therefore, I extended my stay and gave the Asian sales team a pep talk, repeating key OEM strategies and reemphasizing our business objectives. We were under severe attack by DRI, particularly in Taiwan. Several medium-size Taiwanese OEMs had abandoned us and signed up for DRI’s new DOS version. I made time to be interviewed by a local journalist who had, a couple months earlier, done the same with DRI’s executive responsible for Asia. He had named twenty-nine different companies in Southeast Asia, which he claimed were licensing from DRI exclusively. The journalist gave me a hard time, chiding me over how we had lost the edge and wanting to know what I planned to do about it. I told him in no uncertain terms would we make a serious effort to bring these customers back into the MS igloo where they, as I saw it, belonged. After the interview, I asked an aide to dig out the article he had mentioned. Fortunately written in English, it contained a treasure trove of information the DRI guy had foolishly disclosed. We immediately proceeded with mapping out a counterstrategy. We took the target list of prospects straight from the newspaper article. Whoever volunteered this should surely have been fired! Bragging rights
CRISIS IN THE FAR EAST
With Windows finally on an uptrend, I visited my Far East customers again. We had succeeded in obtaining commitments from them for our printer OS. In the fall of ’90, the project ran into serious trouble. Not only had we missed all promised deadlines, but also worse, the code itself was not stabilizing. Product management was seriously considering abandoning the well over one million lines already written. I decided to personally give customers the bad news. Not an easy task, considering the investments they had made and the loss of face our decision would cause for the Japanese execs who had signed on. My meetings with Canon and NEC had the singular goal of minimizing damages. Delegating the unpleasant task would have set a bad example. I knew these customers were unhappy even as we offered to give them the unfinished source code at no charge, allowing them to use it with no strings attached.
During my stay in Tokyo, I met a second time with Sony’s management. Our meetings were always cordial. Their executives spoke English well, having spent mandatory time in Sony’s US subsidiary. However, the electronic consumer giant was no intimate friend of MS. Sony’s president, Mr. Idei, later expressed this belief as “MS wants to control us.” I still do not understand how he drew such an inaccurate conclusion. We wanted cooperation and openness; he wanted proprietary secrets and unmerited advantages. The overly polite pins-and-needles atmosphere in meetings I attended did not signal trust.
Bill would have loved to have Sony on our side. He visited with her execs numerous times without achieving a relationship breakthrough. Sony was no doubt an innovative and powerful consumer electronics and entertainment company. If her top management would have opened the kimono just a little bit, the industry would have moved forward faster. Instead, maintaining distance, she included as many proprietary features in her PCs as possible at the cost of endangering the holy grail of compatibility. MS was eager to engage in media technologies with her where she had an undisputable lead. What I found was a company who reluctantly bought our OS products and was barely willing to work with us. Sony obviously had her own agenda and ambitions. MS found herself stuck in the role of being just another of her nonstrategic vendors.
Before returning to Seattle, I stopped in Hong Kong. The local OEM group had organized a small Asian customer summit. I delivered a keynote speech and met with several key Asian manufacturers. What I heard in regard to losing business came as quite a shock. Therefore, I extended my stay and gave the Asian sales team a pep talk, repeating key OEM strategies and reemphasizing our business objectives. We were under severe attack by DRI, particularly in Taiwan. Several medium-size Taiwanese OEMs had abandoned us and signed up for DRI’s new DOS version. I made time to be interviewed by a local journalist who had, a couple months earlier, done the same with DRI’s executive responsible for Asia. He had named twenty-nine different companies in Southeast Asia, which he claimed were licensing from DRI exclusively. The journalist gave me a hard time, chiding me over how we had lost the edge and wanting to know what I planned to do about it. I told him in no uncertain terms would we make a serious effort to bring these customers back into the MS igloo where they, as I saw it, belonged. After the interview, I asked an aide to dig out the article he had mentioned. Fortunately written in English, it contained a treasure trove of information the DRI guy had foolishly disclosed. We immediately proceeded with mapping out a counterstrategy. We took the target list of prospects straight from the newspaper article. Whoever volunteered this should surely have been fired! Bragging rights
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