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By Ina Fried, 8 January 2009 11:44

COMMENT

There's a whole set of really interesting regulatory things that you hit when you go across the world attached to this. Turns out, some of our products, like unified communications, have VoIP capabilities. Well, you go and take that to many countries of the world, and they call those telephone companies. They call you a telco, and all of a sudden, there's a conversation about being regulated like a telco, you know, in some countries around the world. That may or may not be pleasant.

There are issues about data and where data can reside and not reside, and so that's why when you spread geographically around the world, there's a wide variety of new issues that open up that are quite interesting - billing issues, because obviously, there are different issues with the way the banking systems in different countries work.

Let's talk about the economy. What are you seeing when you talk with customers?
People are afraid. I mean, I think we're all a bit afraid, at some fundamental level, because we don't know - no one knows where this is going to land in the long run.

No one really is clear as to how far the contraction is going to go and how long it's going to happen, and then there's a lack of clarity also as to how we get through this. Are we going to be tight six months of the year, then boom? Well, maybe. That would be kind of a good viewpoint of things right now. Or is it going to be a longer period of time, with a medium period of time with sort of a slow growth.

I always come back to a belief that the fundamentals will drive all of these things, and ultimately, it means that people have to produce things that others value that helps to drive the overall society forward and generate something that is of sustainable long-term value. Ultimately, one of the key things is, how can we make companies and individuals more productive and able to work together better?

As a business manager, what are the things that you might have done, had the economy continued, that you're not doing now? What are some of the things that remain priorities and what are some of the things that you're going to let happen slower?
Well, certainly, there's no question that Microsoft's not immune to the circumstances. There's no question about that. So we have slowed our growth. We are still growing as a company, and [the server and tools business] will grow overall this year, though I admit that we did most of our growth in Q1. We actually were incredibly successful in bringing a lot of folks on in Q1, so we would have had to slow [hiring] under any circumstances because we're out-achieving our plan, but we've slowed considerably.

So if you take some of the areas in the database space, like some of these areas around business intelligence and data analysis, we're actually investing in some of those areas. But we're taking resources off some things that don't have the same kind of results and long-term potential for us to have returns, one of which was pretty public recently: OneCare, where we decided to refocus that effort into a much more narrowly focused free anti-malware offering instead of providing a broader suite.

Are there other things about which you, as a business leader, are saying, 'this is going to have to wait a little or move slower'?
Yeah there certainly are. I think that we've looked inside, at what we're doing really in almost every one of our groups. If you look at almost every one of the things that we're doing and say, OK, there's a set of things we want to do in management, let's tighten the belt a little bit, as to where we're going. Yet we're continuing to invest in this whole virtualisation and management space, coherence with Azure, all those sorts of things we're continuing to invest in.

So in each one of our business areas, we've looked at how we could reallocate and refocus, and then across the board, we've made some fairly fundamental shifts like we did with OneCare.