Interview mit Ken Levy

Von Hans Wagner

Auf der 8. Visual FoxPro Entwicklerkonferenz in Frankfurt am Main wurde der neue Microsoft-Produktmanager für Visual FoxPro Ken Levy von Hans Wagner interviewt mit Übersetzungsunterstützung von Rainer Becker. Dies geschah im Anschluß an die Keynote, deren Zusammenfassung an anderer Stelle in der Loseblattsammlung FoxX Professional abgedruckt wird und im Zusammenhang mit diesem Interview gelesen werden sollte, da im Interview nicht auf alle Punkte der Keynote erneut eingegangen wird.

HW: Hans Wagner
RB: Rainer Becker
KEN LEVY: Ken Levy

HW: Erste Frage: Wie hoch ist der Etat, der Marketingetat allgemein für FoxPro?

RB:.We will have an introduction about your person at the beginning of the interview, you have sent a lot of words about that and then Hans has some critical questions and you must know which way you are allowed to answer and how you can answer that, okay? His first question is: What’s the amount of your marketing-budget?

KEN LEVY: We don’t disclose any information about that.

HW: Keine Information?

RB: Not even a relative answer?

KEN LEVY: Not a bit!

RB: Not a bit?

KEN LEVY: Not a hint!

RB: Not a hint? Okay….

KEN LEVY:I will say that in generall it’s relative to the sales. More the sales - more budget. That’s the way all Microsoft products are. Unless it is something unique like the Xbox, the Xbox game system.

RB: Okay, there and then, it’s a special budget to put a new product into the market.

KEN LEVY: Yeah – so I don’t know if you want to include that question into your interview. If so do the same with my answer. We don’t disclose that now, I gave you the answer.

HW: Erstreckt sich seine Tätigkeit weltweit oder werden für Deutschland bestimmte Pläne gemacht?

RB: Are you responsible for the United States or is your responsibility for Microsoft in general?

KEN LEVY: I am responsible for the marketing and evangelizing of Visual FoxPro worldwide.

RB: Worldwide?

KEN LEVY: Worldwide!

HW: Wie steht es um ihn als Produktmanager? Ist er weisungsberechtigt? Ist er in einer Stabs- oder Linienfunktion?

RB: The next question is about your position: Are you more in a – that’s difficult to translate! If you have a management organigram where we have management positions - are you in an.executive position or in a line position?

KEN LEVY: I know what you are asking. Basically, in our group Ricardo Wenger is the group manager, so he is responsible for the FoxPro product in business and so I report directly to him the same way Randy Brown does and Calvin Hsia does. The program management and the belt man. And so I am the product manager responsible for the marketing. So I am a product manager but I’m not necessarily in some upper management because my focus is on marketing FoxPro, not on managing people.

RB: So you are in a line position?

KEN LEVY: …sure!

RB: chief executive?

KEN LEVY: Yeah.

HW: Stichwort Weisungsbefugnis: Kann er in den einzelnen Ländern anweisen, z.B. in Deutschland, dass Microsoft z.B. jetzt das und das tut?

RB: The question is – sorry that we go into detail that but people do not understand your position...

KEN LEVY: …yeah, especially in Germany..

RB:..We just wanna say: that and that it is. The next question is: So you are responsible for evangelizing, marketing and starting activities all over the world.

KEN LEVY: Yes.

RB: In which way do you force marketing outside of the United States. Do you tell the people what they have to do, do you have the authority to issue orders to them, do you make suggestions?

KEN LEVY: Well, I have the ability to do things marketingwise that go beyond the United States. Could be wether it’s information in magazines that are distributed outside the United States or things on websites or conferences outside the United States. As for Microsoft employees I’m responsible for educating what we call subs and the dealed xxx?xxx office people. Could be sales, could be evangelist, could be some consulting. And so I am responsible for supplying them the right information about Visual FoxPro, both technically and positioning and marketing. And so that then they would communicate to the customers in the region the right information. So I hope that answers what you want to know.

RB: Excellent!

HW: Das, was ich vorhin bei seiner Keynote gehört habe, war ja sehr viel für den Bereich der Entwickler, der Programmierer, aber wenig auf der Kundenseite. Wie erreicht man die Kunden der Programmierer? Ich habe einige Programmierer gesprochen. Sie sagen alle, ich muss meine Kunden überzeugen – wie erkläre ich jetzt dem Kunden, was FoxPro ist und was es kann?

RB: In your keynote you put forth a detailed list how you want to approach your customers who are active or potential users of the product Microsoft Visual FoxPro. Some of the attendees said: that’s great, we have the same problem on the next level to our customers for whom we produce applications. Some of your activities were to the general public, but can you say an additional word about the users of FoxPro applications? Your keynote looked quite aimed at the developers and Microsoft internals, but people are also interested how the word is spread into their customer base because they want to use Visual FoxPro in various projects and the problem is: if they do a project in Visual FoxPro that is fine and they can sell it and that is fine. But. I mean, obviously this is not an additional license for Microsoft.

KEN LEVY: Right, I know what you say. At the time of today I’ve been the product manager for Visual FoxPro for three months - ninety days - and my primary focus was helping launch Visual FoxPro 7 and getting a lot more awareness in the active FoxPro community and the current customer base about what’s going on at Microsoft, introduce details about the extended marketing efforts and the great features of FoxPro 7. So, starting in November here the efforts on my part will be primarly focused on two fronts and both relate outside the FoxPro community. One would be within Microsoft both in Redmond about general market efforts, so that more people in Microsoft are aware of FoxPro so that it gets probably listed and mentioned in the right places. Also with the people in the field offices all around the world who communicate with both FoxPro customers, developers as well as their clients? and customers. So if the potential client of a FoxPro developer questions the use of FoxPro and they call the local Germany Microsoft office for questions, my goal is to make them say the right things - that FoxPro is a great tool for building rich desktop data-base, client/server, web applications, whatever, it’s very powerful. And if it’s part of MSDN, you can use Visual Studio now with it or without it - and it works great with SQL-server but it doesn’t have to.

And so the other front is to have more and more mentions in the press, in magazine articles that are non-FoxPro magazines and analysts and decision makers, so that I’m targeting them so that they understand: FoxPro is evolving and Microsoft is committed to it. So my effort would be more for a while for most of the time outside of the FoxPro community, so that the perception is a lot better next year and ongoing. So I always remain communicating with the FoxPro community attending conferences like this one and Devcon and user groups and online Universal Thread but essentially having my efforts target the decision makers and the clients of the FoxPro developers which needs to be done more and that’s my effort.

HW: Wo sehen Sie die größten Probleme im Bereich FoxPro? Was sind die größten Probleme?

RB: What do you think are the main problem areas regarding FoxPro marketing? Where do you see the biggest issue? What do you think is going to be the toughest part of your job?

KEN LEVY: The biggest problem, the toughest issue right now, is the fact that for several years Visual FoxPro was a part of Visual Studio 6 and essentially it came with the product and so there was not the type of extended separate marketing message in effort that there is now. And so there needs to be some additional effort to make the people wonder what is going on with FoxPro, what’s exciting about FoxPro 7, there’s a new version coming, it’s separate from Visual Studio and why does Microsoft so care and how important the developement community is. And also I have to get more case studies up, highlighting all of the great functions in your applications built with Visual FoxPro. So that both, Microsoft and customers, bussinesses understand how FoxPro fits into solving bussines problems.

RB: You mentioned case studies and we know that Microsoft has been asking for case studies for a long time now. But there is a very very low number of Visual FoxPro case studies. In spite of the fact that there are a lot of very large applications out in the market. For example, the German Telekom has a billing system, all german Telekom bills except the phone-bill itself are running on a Visual FoxPro application which needs eight hundred servers with an unknown number of desktops each. And we have other applications which are running at ten thousand insurance clients or simultaneously with a thousand users in one hospital - so there are large applications. Why is it so complicated for Microsoft to get case studies, and are you going to do anything about that?

KEN LEVY: Well, I can’t speak for the efforts in the past before I took this position, but I will say that now I’m responsible for attaining and publishing those case studies and that is high on my priority. So regardless of anything in the past, it’s part of my major goals and it will happen, so I want to give the impression that things will changing to the people and Yeah, quite.

HW: Jetzt: .NET. Immer wieder werde ich hier von den einzelnen Programierern darauf angesprochen.

RB: So, again and again, people keep asking Hans about .NET…

HW: Ja, wie stellt man sich dazu. Glaubt er, dass es jetzt da irgendeinen Umschwung gibt?

RB: Umschwung, inwiefern?

HW: Dass sie rüberwandern zu .NET?

RB: There is a lot of marketing efforts from the side of Microsoft about .NET, the servers, the extensions, the functionality, as well as the programming languages running under .NET. As far as we understood, Visual FoxPro is part of .NET but it is not available in the common language runtime. Does Microsoft expect people to sooner or later move from all separate products into the common language runtime? Do you think that is the way, or is this issue still open, or is this not being planned at all due to different technical needs of the different kinds of applications?

KEN LEVY: As for predicting what developers will do, I think for a long time there will be a range of developers that combine the .NET runtime platform with Windows in general. And so Windows is around any evolving and rich desktop data base client applications are gonna be needed for a very long time just like there are many FoxPro/Windows applications still used today. And so FoxPro is part of the .NET strategy in its support of .NET compatible web services and other XML features. It is a very good side-by-side product with Visual Studio.NET, especially in the area of consuming Visual Studio.NET web services, although you can certainly create web services with FoxPro 7 both for data access or application access. And this allows FoxPro to integrate with not only Visual Studio.NET, but other legacy systems and other platforms where is gonna be a common interface to communicate. So ask for the entire .NET branding and MSDN developer tools, FoxPro is a part of that and will remain a part of the strategy.

RB: As far as I understood now, you cannot foresee the future, but for the current position we can summarize that Microsoft does not expect any Visual FoxPro programmer to convert or move but to use his development environment in conjunction with .NET. Right now, just for the time being.

KEN LEVY: I’m trying to get the question right.

RB: Could I summarize the way that for the developers, Microsoft, right now for version 7.0 and 8.0 of Visual FoxPro, does not plan to migrate or move or force any Visual FoxPro programmer to change his development environment but he has his stable development environment, and what you want them to do is to interact with .NET. Is that the direction to use these new capabilities?

KEN LEVY: So, well, not commenting on specific features in the next version, I will say that one of the key strategic aspects that has always been around Visual FoxPro is its great backward compatibility capability. So moving forward it will always be easy for a FoxPro developer to move to the next version. Just like many Fox developers using Visual FoxPro 6 will be able to switch to Visual FoxPro 7 with very little effort, it’s very smooth; and we want to continue that. At the same time we want better compatibility and interoperability between FoxPro and .NET-technologies.

RB: Great answer!

HW: Wir sind praktisch am Ende. Was ich noch gar nicht erwähnt hatte, ist die Bekanntheit von FoxPro. Selbst im Hause Microsoft ist man erstaunt, dass FoxPro noch lebt.

RB: In a former answer you said that your challenge is to restart the marketing for the product Visual FoxPro as integrated in Visual Studio, there was no separate marketing anymore. So the visibility of the product was very low; and do you have a time perspective – what do you think for the first phase of your marketing efforts, when do you think that you have reached the majority of the microsoft executives that there is at least a visibility and awareness of the product within the company established. Do you have a time frame for that?

KEN LEVY: Well actually, in terms of the executives of management all the way to the top at Microsoft, they are very educated about FoxPro, the technology and its customer base as of now. The area of work that still needs to be done on my part is the people that are farther away from the Redmond offices, especially and people that within Microsoft aren’t actively involved with communicating about FoxPro positioning and technology and that is something that I will probably be doing very intensely over the next three months. But after that point of time, I won’t stop – it has to continue. So having other people within Microsoft help me do my job is a way of succeding and allowing me to reach more customers, more information, because I can’t do this alone, but it’s my efforts and information that will help drive that.

RB: You have been very successful in the first three months to get even the chief of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, to make a video about a product like Visual FoxPro. This is surprising as Mr. Ballmer certainly does not indeed need to do something like that. I think he is far beyond from this marketing work for a specific product. This was very convincing as well as you brought FoxPro on the MSDN magazine and into the Microsoft shop but this this is all Redmond-centric to the not upper but to the absolutely highest management. So obviously you started at the top and were very successful at that.

Our next question will be: Allright, you caught the top, you try to get the next management level, but you know, Germany is still far away from Redmond and there are other countries that are even much farther away. Have you started activities to get contacts to international subsidiaries? And do you think that they were reacting, that you really can reach them, that you do can really enhance awareness, not only in the absolute top level management and in Redmond and in the US? Er, you know, we are not in the United States.

KEN LEVY: So that effort has already started just recently, and it relates to my comments earlier were moving forward in my next so-called phase after my first three months of focussing on the outside of the FoxPro community. So my efforts internationally especially will target individuals that work in field offices within Microsoft. And I already have names, information and ways of communicating with them not only directly, but I have a weekly information flows to them about Visual FoxPro so that they are always up to date about things which should allow the effort from the top down to be succesful.

HW: Okay. I think that’s good.

RB: Now we have some answers and can close our interview. Any questions we forgot?

KEN LEVY: Because one thing I can tell is that especially people in Germany they don’t just wanna hear words, they wanna understand and believe that it can be done. So it’s like a program. If you say oh yeah, we have a database here and here the code, what’s the code let’s gonna make this happen – right!?

RB: You gave us a lot of details about what you did and what you are going to do. So I think the readers can see and believe that a lot of things are going to happen. I enjoyed this interview and I hope you liked this interview too?

KEN LEVY: Yeah. My only interviews so far have been via eMail. So it’s good for me doing this because its going to happen more often in the future and at an eMail you can sit there, mhh,mh,mh and think a long time for each answer.