The Soul of A New Microsoft

摘要

Allard was using one of the oldest motivational tricks in the book-his version of a football coach posting an opponent's quote on the locker room wall. "I for one...want to see this guy eat his words," Allard wrote. "Those are fighting words. He is speaking to every one of us and saying that we don't get it." Zune hit store shelves on Nov. 14-a mere eight months after Allard's team got the go-ahead for the seemingly impossible task of toppling Apple's iPod music player. Contrast that with the five years and some 10,000 Microsoft Corp. workers it took to give birth to the latest version of the company's Windows operating system, Vista, which begins selling to corporate customers on Nov. 30 (and to consumers in January). From the start, Vista has seemed like an anachronism-packaged software in a Web 2.0 era where ever more applications are moving off the PC and onto the Internet, some springing forth in a matter of weeks. Microsoft Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer vows that this time-consuming process of cranking out code, which created complexity and bogged down development, will never be repeated.