If there's one thing an effective empire builder needs, it's a good map. Microsoft's map for reshaping and reviving the world of business software can be found on floor two of Building Four on the company's campus, in the office of a technology strategist named Norm Judah. The map itself doesn't look like much. If anything, it resembles a microchip design or possibly an org chart gone mad. But this poster-sized piece of cardboard is nothing less than a schematic of how business works. Not how Microsoft works. How business works.
The "module map," as it's known at Microsoft, is the product of a kind of business genome project. As with the human genome project, which helps researchers target drugs at particular genes, the module map helps Microsoft target software at particular processes within a business. Microsoft is particularly interested in selling software to companies with sales of $500 million or less. "In order to get to small business, we had to get in their world," Judah says simply, as if diagramming a good part of the American microeconomic infrastructure was something one does just before lunch.
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