Interesting view about Microsoft and SAP on the new AOL Bloggingstocks Blog.

Since this conversation started, we’ve heard from Gartner with opinions that Microsoft will further delay the release of Vista. Microsoft says that’s not true.

Who do you believe? Even Scoble says he’s keeping out of any discussion.

The problem is Ballmer and his minions - who admits he doesn’t read blogs. He’s a 20th century salesman in a world that’s moved from underneath him. He’s not a vision guy but an execution guy. Scott McNeally wasn’t immune and neither is Ballmer.

Crazy though this sounds, he should do as Dave Duffield did years ago at PSFT and recognise he’s not the man to lead MSFT into the future. Interesting to note - Duffield - at 60 is still developing leading edge software. On his own $$.

SAP is not a lot better with its announcement yesterday. It was pretty old-hat and retroactive. Which surprised me as they have a fair wdge invested in OSS/Web 2.0

I think you have a pretty good assessment of issues confronting Microsoft. The market certainly wasn’t impressed with the additional spending plans they announced last week ($30 billion knocked off their market value). Reading Mini Microsoft gives you a grassroots sense of big concerns by employees. Robert Scoble has been banging a drum for quite a while for more innovation in the company. Pundits and commentators everywhere seem to be ready to hang Microsoft out to dry re MSN, etc.

The feeling I get is that Microsoft is like a lumbering giant, slow to respond and with little in the way of proaction. Little excitement (apart from Xbox). May not be a fair picture, but that’s a feeling I have. Kind of drawing a parallel to early nimble startup Microsoft and big lumbering IBM at the time of the very first PC, where Microsoft today is like IBM was then. One difference - IBM enabled a small (and nimble) group within the lumbering organization to actually bring to market a product that changed everything.

Maybe Microsoft needs to find someone, a new Don Estridge, and force change in the company and drive a push to market with Office and the OS. And maybe the delays in Vista will be the cause of grief for Microsoft more than seems likely at the moment.

But just speculatory opinions. Still, the SAPs and Oracles (not to mention the Yahoos and Googles) aren’t just sitting on their hands.

To date, most of the drum banging has been for consumer apps. Now it is creeping into the enterprise. SAP has serious people doing serious things around Web 2.0. OSS R&D skunkworks are floating to the surface and not being slapped down. The Attack Oracle team is working hard to spread the OSS word. They’ve developed FF plug-ins for R/3. IBM/Oracle? (’nuff said). i am seeing a very different SAP to the one I knew in the late 90’s. And at this point in time, I have no reason to assume adoption or buzz will be any different for this segment as it has for consumers.

These are the companies that will decide Vista, IE etc fate. Because unlike consumers who make passive decisions, the folk who are trying to work out how to wire business communities make active technology choices.

These will be the innovators. Instead of which what do we have? MSFT trying to take on Google and Yahoo! in the ad space with what looks suspciiously like a tin spend of $2.4 billion. Investors hate it. Seen what users think of MSN Live?

If MSFT would concentrate on what it does best - Office Windows, and hive off the exciting bits like Xbox, then maybe we’d have a more vibrant, focused MSFT. At the moment, they look a bit shabby and disorganised.

Here’s my own experience example to that point.

At the time Win 3.1 came out in early 1992, the US company I was working for in the UK used office apps like WordPerfect 5.x and Lotus 1-2-3, all running on DOS. I knew no one anywhere else who used Word or any Microsoft productivity software. And no one starting to use Windows until around a year or so later when Win for Workgroups 3.11 came out and then NT.

Win 3.1 could well have been the starting catalyst that drove the subsequent deployment of a GUI tool within organizations, in tandem with the availability of more powerful PCs (heh! my company had IBM PS2s: remember those?). And which led to productivity apps like Office being better developed and taken up as well. Fierce competition in that business space which Microosft won (do you know anyone in a company today running anything Lotus? Apart from Notes?)

But I suppose all this depends on what you mean by ‘innovative’ and so we could spend a lot of to-and-fro with personal opinions about this.

Is it not the case that averything we’re discussing here has roots in the original innovation of others, as per David’s examples? And if so, does that take anything away from Microsoft who refined what their predecessors had done? That’s innovation as well.