Q&A: Microsoft UK MD Gordon Frazer

Microsoft's new UK MD, Gordon Frazer, has been in his role for just over three months after relocating from South Africa, where he ran the software giant's local operation for four years.

Frazer is responsible for one of Microsoft's largest, and oldest, subsidiaries outside of the US, and in an exclusive interview with silicon.com he gives his views on why businesses should upgrade to Windows Vista, the threat from Google and Linux, 'green' IT, the consumerisation of technology and the launch of Microsoft's 'iPod-killer' - the Zune digital media player.

Windows Vista and Office 2007 are due to launch at the end of this month for businesses. Some analysts and users are questioning the value in the upgrade - what are your predictions for the adoption of the new products?

Gordon Frazer: Our expectation of Vista is that it will be the fastest-adopted operating system ever. We are predicting that within the first year 100 million PCs will be running Windows Vista, and certainly in the UK I don't see why that would be any different. In fact I'm very encouraged by the kind of customers we have on our early adopter programmes, who are helping us understand what it takes to deploy Vista and figure out things like potential compatibility challenges.

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We think there are many compelling reasons to get into it. With power management such an issue, that alone can generate sufficient savings to justify that upgrade. We also see massive improvements in security because BitLocker enables you to encrypt the contents of your hard-drive. I was chatting to one of the large banks' CIOs the other day and they lose more than 100 notebooks a week across the world. The replacement of a notebook is one cost but the management of that data is another. So that sort of technology, for an organisation like that, makes an enormous amount of sense.

The hype around Linux on the desktop has died down somewhat. Is that still a credible threat to Windows and Office?

GF: Linux will remain in its various forms, certainly on the server side of things and potentially on the desktop. There was a lot of hype around it a couple of years ago but people started to understand there's no real 'free' and maybe the functionality isn't as good.

But we recognise that customers in organisations are going to have Microsoft technologies, and they are going to have our competitors technologies, so we're really reaching out to the industry trying to find ways to collaborate. We'd prefer them to run Windows, let's not try to pretend anything different, but we recognise that people are going to run a combination in their environment and we need to make it better for them to connect those things up.

But you've also got the likes of Google increasingly posing a threat to Microsoft in the business IT environment?

GF: For a while maybe we didn't pay enough attention to search on the desktop. Today enterprise search is very much front and centre. Part of the innovation in Vista, Office 2007 and SharePoint is really making sure businesses are able get access not just to their Microsoft information but to their corporate information - connecting up to their SAP system, their CRM system, but at the same time giving the organisation control of that from a privacy perspective so that they know what's going on, so they can manage it within their corporate environment.

And then you have a grocer - albeit the world's largest one, Tesco - which decides to launch its own £20 desktop PC software, at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office.

GF: It's an interesting one. I guess what will happen is that consumers will vote with their wallets. We firmly believe in the value proposition of Office. We're not going to compete with 'free' on the basis of cutting our price, we actually compete with 'free' by being a better product.

How do you see the consumerisation of technology changing the corporate working environment in the future?

GF: There is a change in the workplace coming through. The number of graduates entering the workplace is at an all-time high. The people coming out of university today have lived in an instant messaging, text message-based, iPod-type world. They are very much used to this internet-connected, wireless world. If they go to a workplace that says you can have email and that's your collaboration and social networking, they're going to be frustrated by that.

In today's day and age if you went to a company that didn't have email you'd be amazed at how they ever get things done. Ten years ago the vast majority of companies didn't have electronic mail. I think a couple of years from now corporate-wide instant messaging, collaboration, real-time across wireless networks will become the norm that companies have to deal with. The challenge for IT organisations is to think about how do you implement that inside the corporate firewall, rather than relying on internet-type technologies, which while very effective and very powerful don't have security built into them.

Climate change and energy consumption are again in the headlines with the Stern Report and it seems every tech company is jumping on the 'green IT' bandwagon, but is it an issue that is really having an impact on IT buying decisions?

GF: I think it genuinely is coming onto the radar of more and more organisations. As we get to the better part of half a billion PCs across the world we can make improvements in the way computers consume power. With more sophisticated power management we can actually make a big contribution, and that's not just us but the industry overall.

With Windows Vista together with the advances we are seeing in hardware we are able to do much more sophisticated power management, particularly as you start thinking about new chip technology, where you've got dual or even multi-core, being able to switch that up or down as you need to, so you can turn up the power based on the processing demand. And it's being more sophisticated in terms of the ability to put the computer into sleep mode very quickly, virtually instantaneous.

Microsoft launches the Zune digital media player on 14 November in the US but what are the plans for a UK launch, given the rumours that it could be as late as 2008?

GF: At this stage we have no firm plans to launch anywhere else globally. Does this mean we'll launch in the UK? I can't tell you when [it will launch] for sure and I can't even necessarily tell you if. We're going to see how this goes in the US and what lessons we learn and see if we get that right, and then make the right decision for the UK. But right now that decision hasn't been made, so the launch will only be in the US.

Today certainly Apple is the market leader, I don't think anybody is questioning that and they are out ahead in a lot of ways. They deserve the credit they get, they've built up a large installed base, they continue to be the market leader. But we think there are things that can be done better. One of the big trends, broadly, not just in music, is around social networking and the ability for people to exchange and share information, ideas, music and experiences. It's a new business for us and we're enthusiastic about it. We'll see where it goes.