Rob Helm Quotes (25 Quotes)

Windows is Microsoft's biggest business unit, and Vista is it's biggest challenge. Frankly, I think it's going to be very difficult for Microsoft to make its case to corporations.

There were political problems and technical problems. The two divisions have different business incentives, and the company, knowingly or unknowingly, set up a situation where their business incentives were not the same as their technology incentives.

There was a perception that a major change had to happen.

Microsoft sees software as a service as a part-answer to the maturing software market.

I think they're going to announce business-focused services that are complements to Microsoft's software. I think at the July financial analyst meeting, executives said clearly they saw it as a viable business.... Outside vendors are proving it's a viable business.

There has to be a few widely accepted cards -- kind of the Visa and MasterCard of the identity world -- and it's not clear that anyone wants that job.

Microsoft is going to feel the pain over 80 percent of desktop Windows are through sales of new PCs.

It would have been a very tight squeeze. If they were going to miss Christmas, there just wasn't a good reason to push it for 2006.

It is even worse than a critical flaw.

Its engineers have not necessarily proven that they can ship software on time. Maybe Microsoft needs less heroic engineering and more of a business focus.

The Windows Client division has to tell corporate customers why they want Windows Vista, and why they shouldn't wait until they buy new hardware.

If he can discover some kind of service on top of word processing that helps people work with one another over the Web, then he may be on to something.

It was too early, and MSN didn't have a strong brand recognition in the small-business area, ... Since then, Salesforce.com has shown that hosted CRM is a viable business, and this time around Microsoft has a better understanding of how to get to customers.

Microsoft's engineers have been griping about too much bureaucracy, and this reorganization runs counter to it. It is bound to cause some discussion among employees as you are essentially putting a business manager on top of a very technical group.

There have been real attacks this is not theoretical. All you have to do is go to an evil Web site or click on a link in an e-mail and some hacker dude owns your computer.

Microsoft's server and tools unit has proved they can take something like Web 2.0 and make it easier to program for. It has a very viable business model there.

This one is particularly nasty because is allows people to take control of your computer from over the internet.

Because of the development cycles, it has become less and less attractive for enterprise customers to buy a contract where you are effectively pre-paying for the next version.

My sense is that the development and marketing effort of MSN will go into Windows Live, ... The MSN brand will stick around but it seems like the machines, the people and the services will be there, but more and more of them will be called Windows Live.

Microsoft is maturing, and they really need marketing and sales people at the top, but I am not sure employees want to hear that.

Windows Live is the next generation of MSN.

If Microsoft could make the same economics of the PC apply to telephony--a small number of dominant hardware standards, a large number of hardware players and one big software company--it could yield returns for the company commensurate to the PC market,

If you look at Microsoft's two biggest businesses, Windows and Office, they don't have an obvious Web 2.0 play. But the server and tools business at Microsoft has a vested interested in making Web 2.0 work, and they have a strategy to do it.

They needed a very senior engineer who could knock heads together when disputes arose and had backing from senior management. Steve is really tailor-made for the job.

I think it's a good decision. They can't afford to cut any more features to make a 2006 date. The features that need the most testing, frankly, are enterprise features related to the core of the product, like user account control and how it will lock down services to make them less vulnerable to a worm. Things like that fundamentally change the way Windows works, and they couldn't really back out of them.