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

support as a profit center? The creation of support as a channel hid its costs
>from the product groups. As CEO I take full responsiblity for these mistakes.
Our products can be far more usable and the product groups are focusing on
this opportunity -- particularly the Windows and Windows applications groups.
We will spend what it takes to have the best support (without an 800 number).
I think we can cut the number of phone calls generated by our products to
less than half of what it is today and use training and technology to cut the
length of the phone calls. However, we shouldn't assume this in our plans to
solve the problem. Excel 3, Win Word 2 and our BBU products have started to
move us in the right direction. Hopefully Windows 3.1 will generate a lot less
calls. The bandwidth of communications between the product groups and PSS
is going up dramatically, but there is still lots of room for creativity. I
insist that we are able to use our quality of support as a sales tool.
Surveys like the J.D. Powers survey done on cars will become important --
asking people: How many times were you confused? How many times did you
have to call? How good was the service you received? Fixing this problem
will cost us a lot of profits and we should make that clear to analysis.
With this problem fixed we can really start building some lifetime customers.
Only really usable software can be used by the "rest of the people who have
not bought PCs", so making software more usable expands the market. Likewise
it is the usability of software that will determine how many people decide to
use only a WORKS-like product or move up to a larger package and it will
determine how many large packages they can easily work with. Usability is
incredible stuff -- once it is designed it is easy to implement, saves money,
wins market share, makes customers happy and lets them buy more expensive
software!

NETWORKING: We knew it wasn't going to be easy but it has been even harder
than we expected to build a position in networking. You will see us
backing off on some of the spending level but don't doubt that we are
totally committed to the business. Our strategy is to build networking
into the operatin system. Some of the services will not be in the same box
but they will have been designed, evangelized, implemented and tested as
part of each system release. What this means is that we will define operations
on and attributes of entities like files, users, machines, mail, printer or
services that users or applications can have access to directly inside the
system software. Although we will allow connections to different systems we
will make ours the easiest to use by bundling some of them and making all
of them seamless. Architecting the extensions for these entities including
our evolution of the file system and how we tie in with standards like Novell
and DCE will be Jim Allchins's responsibility even though the implementation
of several of these will be in other parts of the company (for example OS
kernels or Mail). We are in a race to define these extensions because
Novells' dominance and DCE's popularity could allow them to usurp our role
unless we get a strong message, good tools and great implementations done
fairly quickly. We will embrace DCE as a weapon agaisnt Novell although
we don't know exactly how to relate to DCE quite yet. Our strength will
come from Windows, including the advanced implementation based on NT.

TECHNOLOGY: Technical change is always a challenge for the current