Microsoft is moving its Australian head to Microsoft’s Redmond HQ. Taken as a news item in isolation it has no great significance internationally. But it is a sign of the massive changes in thinking that are happening at Microsoft.

There is a major problem with Microsoft and that is the Redmond HQ. It is run as if it were an university campus and the permanent employees of Microsoft — there are long-term temporary employees who are thought of as being outside the law — sit around and view the world from a Microsoft perspective.

Think of the citizens of a village or a very small town saying this is the way the computing world will be and you have it in one.

It is not that they do not understand China or Brazil or Australia. They do not care about these places. They are not in Redmond, they do not have the privilege of working for Microsoft therefore they need not be considered.

Living in such an incestuous community brings odd results. During a drought the local householders pay to have their lawns sprayed green so that parched grass does not intrude into paradise.

It is this isolation that lets Microsoft produce such a lame duck as the Zune and then enthuse that its sales are ahead of target when the figures being quoted are ‘placed in store’ not ‘paid for by mug punter.’

By and large Microsoft does not innovate. Never has. It finds a product, buys the company, modifies the code to be Microsoft style and sells it.

Go back through almost every Microsoft program and you will find it originated elsewhere. Windows was designed by Xerox at the Palo Alto Research Center, DOS itself was written by the Seattle Hackers club and was originally called QDOS for quick and dirty operating system. Bill Gates paid something like $50,000 for it, then leased it to IBM which is why he is now richer than anyone else in the world.

But nothing new is coming out of Microsoft. The schloss Redmond mentality sees to that. Where was Microsoft when MySpace, YouTube, iPod, Google, Palm which became Treo, Blackberry and on and on were happening? Nowhere. Not interested.

True, Microsoft holds scores, hundreds, of patents and copyrights. But no creativity. (If you go to Microsoft Hall of Innovation  you will see a list of what Micorosft has invented from scratch. Very little. Maybe Bob and that is nothing anyone at Microsoft wants to talk about.)

Steve Vamos is very, very conscious of these problems. He is going to Redmond as Vice President International, Online Services Group where he will be using the expertise he acquired with the ninemsn joint venture with Microsoft to try and get a buzz flowing.

He will not be alone. Steve Ballmer, for all his daft chicken dances and schoolboy bully looks is shrewd and knows full well there is a problem. Which is why Ray Ozzie is there. He was the creator of IBM’s Lotus Notes, founded Groove Networks (which was bought by Microsoft) and was even involved in the development of VisiCalc which takes us back a long way. He is now Chief Software Architect and so things will now move along somewhat.

In an interview Steve Vamos sort of spelled out where he saw Microsoft going: ‘While most of us have come to terms with using email, browsing the internet for information and wrapping our thumbs around a mobile phone to send a text message, many of the consequences of being part of a more “connected” global economy are yet to be fully embraced.’

So Steve Vamos moving to Redmond, like Ray Ozzie, is a sign that Microsoft knows it has to innovate to keep ahead of the game. Let us hope that the Redmond clammy hand does not smother them.

Steve Vamos will know he is in trouble when he has his parched lawn sprayed green.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 1:34 pm under Microsoft, Technology.

Read more entries by Gareth Powell.
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