Get Off Microsoft

Microsoft is talking about getting back to where it once belonged: providing better tools for developers to help them grow new business opportunities using Microsoft technology. I think the company’s move to offer a services platform for developers puts Microsoft between a rock and a hard place with regard to its existing software business models. So Microsoft has got to start over. The company as it is today just wasn’t made for these times.

By now you’ve probably read about the internal memo from Bill Gates to Microsoft key executives, dated Oct. 30, 2005. According to Gates memo warns of ‘disruptive’ changes by Ina Fried of CNET News.com:

Aiming to stir up the same kind of momentum as his Internet Tidal Wave memo of a decade earlier, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has penned a memo outlining the challenges Microsoft faces from a host of online competitors.

Bloggers scoff at the way Microsoft orchestrated the leak of this memo to the mainstream press — it was leaked to the mainstream papers before bloggers got hold of it (here’s the full text, thanks to Hypercamp). That scenario suggests that the leak was a shrewd PR operation, not an organic outpouring of internal ranting and raving.

Well-known blogger Dave Winer, burning the midnight oil, found it frustrating to have to read the memo “through the filters of mainstream reporters.” He describes how he eventually got hold of the memos in a Hypercamp blog entry. Winer writes:

At midnight Eastern, all those papers getting the story at exactly the same moment. It looked orchestrated. Old School. Microsoft is talking about getting in the loop on the web, and they’re feeding the story to the print people? That’s something I expect Google to do, not Microsoft. So I went on an instant letter-writing campaign to everyone I knew at the company, and some I didn’t know so well, and said I was determined that the blogosphere would get the story in a way that the mainstream guys can’t.

Indeed, it seems quite calculated. Gates starts off by referring to his monumental memo of ten years ago, “The Internet Tidal Wave”. And he ends the memo with yet another reference: “I’ve attached a memo from Ray [Ozzie] which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as The Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out.”

But what is truly critical is spin control, and this memo provides it in spades — the memo is like a cover letter for the Ozzie memo, which provides a more detailed vision. Microsoft has been getting a lot of bad press lately, but in general, the press treats Microsoft’s pronouncements as news, and anything Gates says or writes as noteworthy. Microsoft manipulates the press same way presidents get away with it: by restricting press access to the Oval Office, or as Microsoft plays it, by playing favorites with journalists and reporters. Obey the rules, and you receive carrot-like access to previews and demos — and leaks such as this one.

It has always been known in press circles that you can figure out where Microsoft is going next by reading Bill’s lips in interviews, speeches, and press conferences. Like Babe Ruth, Gates points in the direction of his next home run and gets ready to swing at the pitch. With absolutely no humility, Gates sees himself as the Great Helmsman. His twice-yearly “think weeks” shake up the company. Robert Guth’s report in the Wall St. Journal of March 28, 2005 (”In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft’s Future”) quoted Gates as saying “If I write a comment that says, ‘We should do this,’ things will be re-orged, engineers will move… It’s not like I can just read this paper and say, ‘Hey, cool, looks good.’ They’ll assign 20 people to it then.”

The Microsoft PR machine cranks Bill Gates up to monstrous proportions as the Ford and Edison of our times, even though he hasn’t actually invented anything as startlingly innovative as the light bulb or the Model T factory. But all these media circus acts are diversions. All the reports about viruses, zombie PCs, and systems that always crash also miss the forest for the trees. No one effectively takes on Microsoft’s monopoly power — the elephant in the room.

But don’t look for these memos to provide any smoking guns of Microsoft impropriety. Both the Gates memo and the Ozzie memo seemed to have been scrubbed legally before they sent out. They do, however, outline the future — in detail in Ozzie’s memo, and in plain, simple terms in Gates’ “cover letter” memo:

The broad and rich foundation of the internet will unleash a “services wave” of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet to millions of users. Advertising has emerged as a powerful new means by which to directly and indirectly fund the creation and delivery of software and services along with subscriptions and license fees. Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses.

We will build our strategies around Internet services and we will provide a broad set of service APIs and use them in all of our key applications.

The services wave may swamp Microsoft. Services are perhaps the fastest and easiest ways for small- and medium-sized businesses to gain some measure of reliability and cost-effectiveness while also breaking the lock of Microsoft software.

The Ozzie memo (here’s the text, thanks to Hypercamp) is far more specific and detailed. Here’s the nut of what Ray Ozzie has to say:

The ubiquity of broadband and wireless networking has changed the nature of how people interact, and they’re increasingly drawn toward the simplicity of services and service-enabled software that ‘just works’. Businesses are increasingly considering what services-based economics of scale might do to help them reduce infrastructure costs or deploy solutions as-needed and on subscription basis.

This is the challenge Microsoft faces. Its most important competitors for market share in services are Google and Yahoo, and its most influential competitor in the race to be the Great Innovator is Apple, which, according to Ozzie, “has done an enviable job integrating hardware, software and services into a seamless experience with dotMac [.Mac], iPod and iTunes…”

So how will Microsoft compete? Ozzie makes it clear that the company is painfully aware of legal repercussions:

We will compete energetically but also responsibly and with recognition of our high legal responsibilities.  We will design and license Windows and our internet-based services as separate products, so customers can choose Windows with or without Microsoft’s services.  We’ll design and license Windows and our services on terms that provide third parties with the same ability to benefit from the Windows platform that Microsoft’s services enjoy.  Our services innovations will include tight integration with the Windows client via documented interfaces, so that competing services can plug into Windows in the same manner as Microsoft’s services.  We will compete hard and responsibly in services on the basis of software innovation and price – and on that basis we will offer consumers and businesses the best value in the market.

The problem with this statement is that “tight integration” with the Windows client doesn’t jive with today’s “loosely coupled” interfaces that accommodate compatibility and free competition. In fact, loose coupling is a solution that Ozzie could well have applied to his next series of questions about Office:

How would we extend or re-conceptualize Office modules to fit in this seamless model of connectedness to others, and to other applications? Should PowerPoint directly ‘broadcast to the web’, or let the audience take notes and respond? How should we increase the role of Office Online as the portal for productivity?  What should we do to bring Office’s classic COM-based publish-and-subscribe capabilities to a world where RSS and XML have become the de facto publish-and-subscribe mechanisms?

Ozzie doesn’t answer these questions in the memo. But he does offer a wonderfully articulate view of what ails Microsoft’s software — in particular, Windows and Office — at this very moment (though probably not meaning to):

Complexity kills.  It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.  Moving forward, within all parts of the organization, each of us should ask “What’s different?”, and explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity.

Ozzie outlined Microsoft’s strategy in detail. One aspect that’s important for the new wave of alternatives is that Microsoft will provide a services platform for developers. As Ozzie pointed out:

Many startups treat the ‘raw’ internet as their platform.  At the grassroots level, such projects actively use standards such as vCards and iCal for sharing contacts and calendars.  Most all use RSS in one way or another for data sharing.  Remixing and mashing of multiple web applications using XML, REST and WS is common… Developers needing tools and libraries to do their work just search the internet, download, develop & integrate, deploy, refine. Speed, simplicity and loose coupling are paramount.

And the work of these startups could be improved with a ‘services platform’. 

Not a bad idea, but first Microsoft has to deal with the “Complexity kills” bit. To ensure a seamless experience for users, all Microsoft enterprise clients and servers will need to interoperate with and complement its internet services. Good luck with that.

I think we can all benefit by watching Microsoft thrash about in this new “services wave” while we choose alternatives among the service offerings of the likes of Google, Yahoo, Apple, and hundreds or even thousands of new startups that turn the internet itself into a platform, bypassing Microsoft’s systems and programming interfaces.

Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future said it best (in Untangling the Future in Business 2.0): “When cutting-edge fields of knowledge come into contact, new disciplines can be spawned, and progress can go zooming off in unexpected directions.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Office, Apple, Services, MSN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.