1TB Moonshot?
Scoble lists five ways to save Microsoft. My thoughts on each:
- 1TB Free Storage for everyone: Is that really a moonshot? 1TB costs less than $1000 now. 1TB sounds big to people like us who grew up when 64k was a lot of RAM, but I don’t think it’s going to impress the second-life generation.
- Dual monitors for everyone: Maybe. I don’t use monitors; I just use my laptop. If I need to use a PC, I just connect using my laptop screen.
- Accountability for marketing decisions like product names: HELL YES!
- Public compensation changes: The good teams at MSFT already operate this way. A good manager makes sure that everyone on the team knows who is going to be promoted and why, long before the promotion happens. Some teams have title structure that lets you know exactly what level (and rough compensation range) a person is at, simply by looking at the title.
- Slash the red tape: always a good idea
Personally, I think MSFT is already going through a pretty serious moonshot right now. We are attempting to shed a bit of our historical “platform” bias, and focus on creating seamless end-to-end experiences (or something like that).
Now, if I were to propose a new moonshot to replace “a PC on every desktop”, I would start by tracking the inevitable. “A PC on every desktop” was an inevitability, although few people saw it at the time.
Another inevitability, which is rather more obvious, is ubiquity of virtual community and semantics. Our vision should be, “four billion people, playing together and expressing themselves, all in a single seamless virtual environment”. Of course, that doesn’t mean “provided by MSFT”, just as we didn’t actually build the PCs that went on every desktop. My 3D world in Halo 2 should have connections and portals to my World of Warcraft worlds, which should connect with my e-bay auctions, and so on. I would also stipulate that the “virtual world” should touch and merge with the “real world” like a transparent overlay. Robert is right to be excited about second life. I recall a similar project nearly 10 years ago, called “Virtual Worlds”, which was run by Lili Cheng (now at MSFT). And there was a time before ICQ when it looked like 3D worlds would be the next big thing (it just took a bit longer). But I would also point out that the “virtual world” includes things which do not involve computer monitors or graphics; people with a pantechnicon in their pockets should be at all times in touch with the ambient information flowing around the ether.