Who is Farhan Lalji?

There’s an interesting article from the Economist this week on Bill Gates and the future for Microsoft. I was skimming through it when one particular point caught my eye,

Microsoft will launch a $300m rebranding campaign later this year. To make Microsoft hip again, the firm has hired one of America’s coolest advertising agencies, Crispin Porter+Boguski.

I don’t think dumping money into branding will help MSFT become hip again. At the end of the day consumers can see through false messages.

Unless Microsoft backs up the branding dollars with openness, supporting the tech community, and innovating in a way that users really find engaging and attractive all the dollars they spend on branding might have been better spent as a grant to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

I was amused to see the article “EU to scrutinise Microsoft’s promise to open up Office” on my feed reader today. Not because I wasn’t expecting it - heck, I was wondering what the heck took the EC so long - but because Microsoft was actually trying to do something good, at least in principle, and was getting nailed for it. The trouble is Microsoft has a history of being bad, being anticompetitive and being closed. So people suspect that when they are trying to be nice that it’s just a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is genuinely trying to open up. Personally, I suspect it is a front or a ploy or a dishonest attempt to get away with something myself. But I think it’s interesting that not many would give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

This was the trouble I had with game theory or taking things down to one off games. It’s never a one off or even a zero-sum game. There are never only two players. By being bad and screwing someone or some company or some institution over you’re opening the door to bad karma and some other entity will get even on behalf of the universe.

By being bad you piss off the universe. By being good you open yourself up to good things. I think the harder part is trying to be good when you’ve got a history of being bad. Good luck Microsoft, I truly believe Ray Ozzie wants to be open and good. Whether the whole company wants this and whether the universe believes it and allows it will be an interesting next chapter.

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.

When I was in University the internet was just being discovered. I subscribed to a Yahoo! email account, taught myself html on Geocities and fell in love with the web. I was lucky to have such experiences.When I left University, circa 2000, I came to London at a time when you didn’t need a Computer Science or engineering degree to be a web developer. I got job offers for roles that were bigger then my skills. I got lucky.

Sure there were tough times; I went to work in the public sector when the private sector money was drying out. But I learnt a lot over that period. Mostly, I learnt I was cut out to be a developer.

I went back to school and graduated with a great class, as the current FT rankings will testify. Made some great friends during this time and had some phenomenal experiences.

We sold our flat a couple of months ago, before the sub prime mortgage crisis and now the housing market looks like it’s turning down. Luck was striking again.

Now that I’m at Yahoo! it kind of feels like I’ve come full circle. And with the latest news around the company I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a little nervous about what the future holds. But whatever it holds I’m looking forward to the ride.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say Shukar/shukran somewhere in this, so there it’s been said.

I raised an eyebrow yesterday when I saw that Google had acquired Zenter and was going to add presentations to its online docs and spreadsheets suite.

I’ve used G docs (but not G spreadsheets) and found it “okay”. I’m fairly certain G spreadsheets is the same, decent for collaboration and okay for the basics, but you wouldn’t create too extensive a document or model using the tools.

I’m not sure how good Zenter’s stuff is - has anyone use it? What I’m really hoping for is that this gives Google a bit of the office applications marketshare so we can see a bit of innovation around the Microsoft Office suite. Personally, I think Microsoft can do a lot more with Office online. Will this be the poke that the giant of Redmond needs to get it done?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen competition being the spark that lights innovation. Apple and Microsoft keep enhancing their OS offerings because of their competition. If Moz hadn’t developed Firefox would we see tabbed browsing in IE? Probably not. In a competitive market no one’s able to rest on their laurels. Competition sparks innovation and innovation is great for users so in the end we all win.