Geoff Lawrie bags strategic role

By CHRIS BARTON

Bill Gates sees Geoff Lawrie as a strategic asset. It seems an impersonal way to regard staff but, in Microsoft, it is a high honour.

Two years ago, the former head of Microsoft New Zealand was given the Frank Gaudette Memorial Builder's Award and a Rolex watch by the software giant's chairman and chief software architect.

The rarely given award, named after the financial controller who took Microsoft public, recognises the exemplary and extraordinary performance of employees who, in accounting terms, are considered strategic company assets.

It is part of the reason Lawrie could pick and choose his next job after standing down from his New Zealand role in April.

The newly created position he has just accepted is also big on strategy: general manager strategic development for Asia Pacific and Japan. It involves mentoring and leadership development plus pushing Microsoft's game plan over a territory that takes in China and Pacific Rim subsidiaries.



There will be a lot of travelling, but Lawrie plans to limit time away to 30 per cent and manage the rest of the job from New Zealand through video conferencing and collaboration software such as Outlook, Net Meeting and Messenger.

He sees the job as unlocking subsidiaries' "latent potential" in the region. Lawrie knows that scenario well after a six-year stint as New Zealand managing director, during which the company grew from 40 to 109 staff and tripled revenue.

Profit as a percentage of revenue is three times what it was in 1993. Microsoft does not reveal its New Zealand numbers, but revenue is understood to exceed $100 million.

Companies Office filings for the year ending June last year show revenue of just under $36 million and profit after tax of $6.4 million.

The gap between the actual value of sales in New Zealand and the reported figure is explained by the local subsidiary recording sales as a commission. But, going on the numbers Lawrie reports to the United States, the New Zealand company doubled revenue early in his tenure and then settled to a growth rate of about 20 per cent.

Consistent growth makes Gates happy, and put the mild-mannered Lawrie centre-stage.

But he adopts a modest attitude: "It was hugely gratifying to be recognised in that way, but it wasn't to do with anything individual. It was to do with things the team accomplished in New Zealand."

Lawrie praises the local team, describing them as "excruciatingly professional people who worked long and hard because they believed in what they were doing".

Being a Microsoft believer comes with the job, but for Lawrie the beliefs run deep.

"Microsoft is very different when you sit inside it. It's one of the most empowered organisations I've ever seen."

In the Microsoft creed and Lawrie's management style, that means perform well and you will be left alone to get on with it, and given the resources to go forth and multiply.

"The consistent performance of Microsoft in New Zealand afforded a great deal of latitude in how we executed and that drifted down the organisation," Lawrie says.

He is quick to defend Microsoft's monopoly position in the market.

"Dominant is not a word you hear in Microsoft. It's not what makes Microsoft successful.

"What it did was create a successful ecosystem where thousands of other companies could also be successful."

But what about Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices, the subject of the long-running United States antitrust trial?

"Microsoft is very competitive. No apologies for that. It's successful because it's competitively aware. This is a highly competitive business.

"Sometimes we're aggressive in putting forward our offering to the market, but we have a responsibility to do this. I have personally seen nothing locally or internationally that makes me ashamed of that streak."

But he acknowledges that at times Microsoft did overstep the mark, such as when it sought to exclude competitors through its licensing agreements.

"Some of our licensing was pretty aggressive and we've stopped that."

Lawrie still has a copy of the first infamous "internet tidal wave" email Gates circulated in 1995, which declared that the internet was the future of computing and urged Microsoft to build internet capabilities into all of its products.

That led to the browser wars of the late 1990s, when Microsoft fought hard to win market share from Netscape.

Lawrie remembers the fight, but says that despite the evidence cited in the US antitrust case, there never was a deal to upgrade 9000 of Telecom's Windows 3.1 PCs to Windows 95 for free if Telecom would use Microsoft's web browser.

He acknowledges that locally the company worked hard to spread Internet Explorer and did offer bounty incentives to internet providers for every customer they wooed from using the Netscape Navigator browser to Microsoft. "They got a rebate on the cost of it."

Which is a unique way of describing the situation given that Microsoft's browser was given away free at the time.

But Lawrie says people forget during talk of the browser wars that "Explorer was a good product".

He is appalled at any suggestion that Microsoft should be prevented from making its operating system "as rich as possible", or internet aware, by integrating it with the browser.

And he is proud of the company's ability to alter direction so markedly. "Microsoft is one of the few organisations that could make that sort of change. Millions of dollars of development just stopped overnight and changed direction."

He is also pleased at progress with Microsoft's next web tsunami, the .net strategy, which ushers in the concept of software as a service rather than a boxed product.

He believes Microsoft is a leader in the emerging field and furthering that lead will be a key part of his new job.

Spoken like a true strategic asset.