Bill Gates' Birthday Memo : Well done Dave for the getting the exclusive following scoble's headsup earlier, I too prefer to have my coverage through the blogosphere rather than the big media.

It certainly makes good reading, Ozzie is laying it down to the folks fairly clearly. I would add that they need a lot more focus on the grass roots as well as the top down approach. i.e. revolution from the inside out rather than just top down. here is some of the things I personally would like to see change wise :

1) Developers, developers, developers - remember that speech ? Microsoft need to capture those developers, right now their stuff isn't cool and certainly isn't attractive to start-ups and the new generation of developers. I know this because I am working with these folks. We don't use Microsoft dev tools at all.

One of the problems I think is Microsoft's monolithic approach to developers. They are building these huge ivory towered platforms like ".net" . Guess what we are more interested in Ruby or Groovy etc.., why because they are simple agile, open and very very cool. Microsoft has nothing to compete with this category! But here is a clue how they can. Go straight to the grass roots of these developer communities and say hi we want to start using your great stuff, we realise it's better than what we have developed and we want our internal developers to use the best most agile tools for our new move forward embracing web 2.0 and open standards. Also whilst we are here is there anyway we can help? Can we add developers to your cause we don't want to "embrace and extend" we just want to contribute and make you even more successful (Maybe they might even suggest ports to the CLR).

If you can do that and succeed you will be well on your way to encouraging the next generation developers back into working with you.

2) Seperate your developers and tools from your operating system, don't weigh us down with that nonsense, the new platform is the internet and it's open standards. Don't punish developers that use Macs, linux or even BSD, encourage them, many of these are the Alpha geeks for christ sake, you need these guys on your side!

3) Stop reinventing standards such as your new gadgets. As Robert's ICC's are a fantastic idea, but only if they work in all web pages not just with Windows Live platform, duh.. you need these to be used by every developer , use open standards don't re-invent the wheel.

4) This is the toughest (real disruptive, google would never figure this), I think you need to spin of the Windows and office Apps divisions. If you don't I'm afraid that they will act like a damper on your plans, they will impose a massive drag on your vision to move forward. The new Microsoft needs to be Operating system agnostic, it's new platform is the internet, it's new apps are web pages/apps/gadgets and ICC's. Make a clean break separate the different interests or suffer the consequences.

There is probably a lot more to add to this list what do you think ?

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