Microsoft Reboots

It's hard to resist "how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb" jokes, with respect to the number of launches. Yesterday, Microsoft launched Windows Vista for businesses in New York.

An unofficial second launch will come next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The CES event, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will keynote, could be loads of competitive fun. Next year, CES and Macworld occur the same week, and it's a good bet Apple will reveal more about the next version of Mac OS X. It will be Vista versus Leopard week.

The third launch will bring reporters, analysts and some Microsoft customers back to New York presumably on January 30. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer disclosed the venue during yesterday's Vista business launch.

New York offered its own warm response to Ballmer, with unseasonably balmy weather.

Microsoft's CEO was true to form--animated, engaging--during his launch speech and dress rehearsal for late-January's Vista event. Microsoft's "integrated innovation" strategy was a strong undercurrent to Ballmer's presentation, although he didn't use the term. Maybe it's finally falling out of fashion at Microsoft.

Ballmer told eWEEK yesterday: "We are going to incubate, or incubate and innovate, instead of trying to do all this integrated innovation." That may be Ballmer's thinking about the future, but for the present he touted the benefits of cross-feature integration across products.

During his launch speech, Ballmer spent some time boasting about the 30 new products supporting Office 2007 and Windows Vista. "If you look at what we've done between Vista and Office, and the accompanying 30 products, we've done a lot in the ways in which people will work together," he said.

In an unprecedented disclosure, Ballmer discussed forthcoming products, some of which had not been broadly disclosed:

• Office Communicator 2007
• Office Communications Server 2007
• Voice Call Management for Office Communications Server 2007
• Data Mining Add-ins for Office
• Office PerfomancePoint Server 2007
• Windows Desktop Optimization Pack
• Forefont Client Security
• Two separate System Center client-and-server products

Some of the other new, supporting Office 2007 and Windows Vista products:

• Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance
• Office Project Portfolio Server 2007
• Office Forms Server 2007
• Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Voice Client-access License for Office Communications Server 2007
• Office Sharepoint Server for Search 2007
• SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007
• Office Groove Server 2007
• Office Groove 2007
• Hosted Exchange Services

Microsoft has never had a product launch quite like this one. As I explained on Tuesday, the software giant needs to convince Wall Street that Office and Windows--and Microsoft, for that matter--are still relevant.

Steve Ballmer attempted to do this and more by essentially relaunching, or rebooting, Microsoft. Most product groups are flush with new wares, somewhere. The effort is massive and really demonstrates how much better Microsoft product groups coordinate than they did five years ago.

Yesterday's event is the first wave of a massive relaunch effort. More will come when Microsoft figures out its software services strategy. Integrated innovation is the present, but I predict the future will be more one of loosely coupled products and services, residing on the desktop and in the Internet cloud. Ballmer hit the reset button once. Incoming software architect Ray Ozzie may hit it again.

Returning to the Question: How big are Office 2007 and Windows Vista? Three launches may not be enough.