"Bill Gates - Challenges & Strategy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gates Bill)

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: It must be surprising that our two most visible
problems are in this category. Certainly I take the FTC inquiry seriously
and I am sure it will use up even more executive staff time than the Apple
lawsuit has. However I know we don't get unfair advantages in any of the
markets we are in. As Ruthann Quindlen stated recently in InfoWorld
(supported by many other editorials like Businessweek's) our combination
of products is similar to that of every other high technology company and our
success is based on having great products. I hope we can quickly educate
the FTC on our business.

RETIREMENT OF KEY EXECUTIVES: The retirement of Jon Shirley and Jeremy
Butler -- absolutely two of the finest executives anywhere -- are significant
losses for Microsoft. Last year's "think week" was my worst, because Mike
Hallman called me to say Jeremy was planning to retire. I had Jeremy fly
out and meet with me for hours to try and change his mind. I am sure more
people will be retiring in the future. However, I am confident that we are
developing a lot of great people internally and that we are hiring the
best people from outside the company. Just look at some of the recent
additions to our executive staff -- people like Brad Silverberg, Jeff
Raikes and Gary Gidot. Consider the talent pool right below the executive
staff level -- Jim Alichin, Pete Higgins, Patty Stonesifer, Rob Glaser,
Mike Murray, Mike Brown, and so many others. I love working with people
of this caliber -- not only do they do a good job but they keep me doing
my best. I certainly have no plans to back off from my dedication to the
company.

PRINTER BUSINESS UNIT: Generally when we enter a product category, we
innovate. Even if our first version is not a winner we establish a position
>from which we can make further improvements. Our entry into the printer
software business has not succeeded. Steve is considering what strategy
we shoud pursue to make the best of our errors. Our problems have educated
us to consider carefully the importanance and synergy of doing new things.
Offering cheap Postscript turned out to not only be very hard but completely
irrelevent to helping our other products. We overestimated the threat of
Adobe as a competitor and ended up making them an "enemy", while we hurt
our relationship with Hewlett-Packard and focused on non-Windows specific
issues. Selecting TrueType as a our font solution and building it into
the system was an excellent design decision despite the immense resources that
has cost us. TrueType -- our font format -- is separate from TrueImage
-- our Postscript clone. Printing is critical and we will be involved in
printing software, but in a a different way than we have to date. The caution
we have shown in making acquisitions is reinforced by this experience.

Category 2
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These are problems that are serious but solving them correctly will
provide growth so they can be thought of as opportunities.

DISLIKE OF MICROSOFT/OPENESS: Our applications have always succeeded