From our sister publication Software Futures
When you’re growing up under the public eye, life is never easy. Everyone’s watching for you to slip up and make a mistake, say the wrong thing, trip up, anything really that makes you seem at least for one split-second just like the average person in the street. An action that marks you out as frailly human as the rest of us. Golden guy Microsoft is just such a star, but more like one of those juvenile delinquent wild cats gone off of the rails. The teenage Macaulay Culkin of the software industry perhaps? Once a bankable star, now something of a has-been? Uncanny resemblance time. Don’t you think that Mac will end up looking just like Bill when he’s finally gotten forty years under his belt? Certainly, the rise of the Internet has caught Mr Gates looking like the enfant terrible actor, with his famous shocked look, his hands to his face and his mouth wide open in horror or panic, or both! Equally, writing about Microsoft can often times be a bit like writing about a celebrity. The retiring (natch!) Redmond primadonna seems to believe it’s not in anyone’s interests for them to tell you anything more than they feel is absolutely necessary to promote their latest product. The sense of having an overall direction, product map, if you will, is frequently lacking. We guess something of that sort is hidden in Bill’s vaults. The trouble, these days, is that you begin to sense they’re either tearing up one blueprint after another, or just making it up as they go along. How come? Well, Microsoft made its substantial fortune, for the most part, from its operating systems. We’re talking DOS, Windows and latterly Windows NT. All that other stuff, applications et al, is mere window dressing for shifting yet more operating systems.
Where Does Microsoft Want To Go Today?
Rather like someone who’s had the rug pulled from under them – Microsoft didn’t see stuff like the World Wide Web coming, even when it was bearing down on them like a ten ton truck – the company is struggling to maintain both its equilibrium and its dignity. It puffs out its chest once more and says, Sure, we understand the Internet, and we have a strategy to prove it. The trouble is, the company has too much to lose in its operating systems heartland to go all out and fully support, say, Sun’s Java. Also, the Redmond Rampager really isn’t in the business of supporting non home-grown produce. That’s not to say it doesn’t intend to embed Java in its operating systems, because it does. But then again, so is everyone else, therefore Redmond can’t not sign up on the dotted line for Java. Like a circus act plate spinner, Bill and the guys have to keep shifting and darting about to keep each of its areas of focus in play. This often results in disjointed strategy messages, or as we said earlier, stuff that sounds like it was thought up on the spur of the moment as a face saving device, because, actually, they hadn’t thought of that one yet!
Where Does Microsoft Think It’s Going?
Let’s examine Microsoft’s operating systems strategy, such as it is. It does seem to resemble a house built on shifting sand, which the company can move at will or at whim, whatever. It will tell you until it’s blue in the face that there’s no confusion out there about the roles of its three existing operating systems – on the desktop – Windows 95 and NT Workstation – and on the server – surprisingly enough, NT Server. But this is at striking variance with the reality. Take the current Microsoft white paper on its operating systems strategy – well at least that’s what we were assured it was! Entitled The Best Way to a 32-bit Desktop – Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 95, it seemed designed precisely to dispel users’ confusion about where and when to use Windows 95 and where and when to employ NT Workstation. Surely some mistake?
There Is Confusion
Also, in a recent worldwide survey carried out under the aegis of the company, close to a third of users questioned said they were confused by Microsoft’s positioning of the two operating systems. Dig a little deeper, and 40% of that confused third had decided to delay the decision making process of what O/S to go with precisely because they didn’t know which was the better bet for their particular computing needs. Hmmm. Do the necessary arithmetic, and that means that around 12% of those surveyed called a temporary halt to their O/S plans because they didn’t get where Microsoft was coming from with its operating systems strategy. Has the company got a problem? We think they have, but the Redmond Rampager marches on regardless. Altho ugh David Bridger, Windows product manager at Microsoft UK, based in Winnersh, Berkshire did admit when pushed: We definitely would have liked to have had as clear position with our operating systems strategy as we have now. Ideally with hindsight, we could have done better. Perhaps, we could have been looking more at customer scenarios instead of technology features. It’s a learning process.
Interesting Glitches On The O/S Front
More on the education front. What about that interesting glitch that means Microsoft has been forced to publicly warn existing Windows 95 users off of upgrading to the next version of NT, release 4.0, codenamed Cairo? Well, it appears to be another of those communication problems which seemed to plague the genesis of Windows New Technology, back in the days when it was OS/2 3.0, as chronicled in G. Pascal Zachary’s Show-Stopper! The Breakneck Race To Create Windows NT and the Next Generation a t Microsoft. Developers entombed inside the Redmond edifice just don’t seem to want to talk to each other, preferring to compete against each other rather than work together co-operatively. The company claims, citing in its defense analysts such as Gartner and Meta Group, that in actuality very few users will want to go this route. But if they do, the incompatibilities between the two operating systems mean reinstalling all your existing Windows 95 applications to run under NT 4.0. Cool… not ! Bridger explains, It’s a major function of the directions the two products are coming in. Their focuses are different. Windows 95’s main focus is on compatibility with 16-bit applications and device drivers, while NT Workstation is all about being totally robust, scalable [that’s debatable, we think!] and secure. If you’re coming from two different directions there’s going to be a conflict in product development. The point at issue is that the registry for the two operating systems is dif ferent in two of its areas – where it stores applications and where it stores device drivers. Bridger concludes, Potentially we could have done it better.
Changing Times?
And Microsoft is changing, oh yes! It has since reorganized its product development team on the desktop, merging the two divisions dealing with Windows 95 and NT Workstation development into one – the desktop and business systems division, headed up by company senior vice president Jim Allchin – so that now the guys in the labs will finally feel like they’re all on the same side. Or, maybe not! These moves are all part of the latest Microsoft operating systems strategy, in the words of company man Bridger, to synchronize how Windows 95 and NT Workstation look. To this end, the next major release of all three Microsoft operating systems is entitled the Shell Update Release, but don’t look for that until next year. All you’ll be seeing t his year is Nashville, an Internet add-on pack for the triumvirate of the Redmond Rampager’s O/Ss. It is expected to include Internet Explorer 3.0, will offer the ability to do data conferencing and peer-to-peer capability over the Net. Ultimately, Microsoft is purely in reactive, not proactive mode now. You can see that stamped on everything it does.
Visual Basic, Anyone?
Take, for instance, the suggestion it is to finally license its Visual Basic Applications, as a feeble attempt to staunch all the many wounds already inflicted upon it by Sun’s Java. About eighteen months ago, that could have been a smart, bold move, when everyone else in the market was busy trashing VB as so low-end as to be beneath contempt. Ah, but the developers understood, and there were at least a million of them out there . Suddenly, Oracle, IBM and Apple woke up and realized there was gold in them thar Visual Basic hills and begun to bring out their own product – in the case of Oracle, that means PowerObjects, or at least talk about them – witness IBM with its planned summer beta of VisualAge for Basic. So, Microsoft licensing Visual Basic now is a bit like shutting the stable door after the prize mare has bolted. In a word, pointless.
Playing Catch-up?
Similarly, with NT Server as the Unix competition, Microsoft is also bringing up the rear. Microsoft’s vice president Paul Maritz announced a 64-bit version of NT at Comdex Spring in Chicago earlier this month. This release of the operating system s hould appear towards the end of 1997 or early 1998, with the first platform of choice naturally enough being Digital’s Alpha. The two companies are working jointly on the software which has been set up as an answer to that earlier 64-bit initiative established by the company that would own Unix – Hewlett-Packard – in league with its own personal satyr, Santa Cruz Operation, the mugs that actually bought UnixWare from Novell! As befits the sad story that is Digital and its software, Robert Palmer’s outfit has had its own Digital Unix 64-bit system for ages, but because it was DEC, no one cared. Shame!
Whatever Happened To Cairo?
Just to show how much has shifted – and to be fair, look at what happened to the competition – remember when Cairo was to be the third horse in the object-oriented operating systems race, alongside NeXT and Taligent? Well, earlier this year, Microso ft abandoned what was supposed to be the jewel in the Cairo/NT 4.0 crown, its Object File System, for an enhanced version of the existing NT File System (NTFS). Something to do with if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, we suppose! Back to those rivals. NeXT is still running apparently, although these days Steve Jobs seems to be an all-out Redmond Rampager fan and Taligent ended up being ignominiously consigned to oblivion with the only thing to show for the many millions of dollars poured into its development being a bunch of class libraries being added to IBM’s OpenClass libraries for its VisualAge development tools family.
A Year’s A Hell Of A Long Time In The Software Biz
It’s interesting to see what difference a year has made. Only twelve months ago, Richard Finkelstein, president of Performance Computing, based in Chicago, Illinois and a well-known commentator on all matters connected with client/server technology, concluded that Windows NT would dominate the market. But since then he has done a complete about turn. This change he puts down to the enormous changes precipitated by the rise and rise of the Internet. It’s a whole different issue. You’re now talking centralized deployment, not distributed computing. The Internet really represents browsers and basically it’s easier to connect up browsers to Unix. Why? Because most of the development efforts there were initially geared towards Unix and so development efforts in general have shifted over to Unix where Web developers feel the most comfortable.
The Net Loves Unix, Not NT
The Internet is a very different situation with TCP/IP and Java where people are familiar with the concept of the Unix server which is centralized and eminently more scalable. It’s preposterous [suggesting] that NT will scale as high as Unix does. There’s no longer any reason to distribute processors; we’ll just have larger and larger servers. He poohpoohs the argument put forward by other market commentators that NT will evolve over time to finally become a match for Unix, pointing to the p roblems Sun had in trying to turn Unix into a workstation environment. How will Microsoft take NT, which is essentially a workstation environment, and transform it to be able to compete against a mainframe? They literally have to come out with a whole new operating system. And Sun, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are not sitting back, they’re working feverishly to scale their systems up. People will not sit back and wait for NT to evolve. The center of gravity has shifted from the desktop to the server. NT will start falling behind again. That said, there are some strange NT alliances brewing. Novell is developing Novell Directory Services (formerly NetWare Directory Services) to work on NT platforms, presumably because Microsoft has had problems in managing its own directories in its own operating systems. We also hear of IBM trying to get NT on the mainframe – saints preserve us. By any analyst’s admission, NT doesn’t really scale much beyond four processors as yet, so there’s a good deal of work to be done in that direction.
Microsoft – Who Cares?
Back to Finkelstein. The whole Microsoft operating systems paradigm has now become uncertain, he continues. The company’s like a chicken with its head cut off wondering what to do. Microsoft has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in products that all of a sudden no one cares about. Microsoft’s problem is huge compared to the one IBM faced 10 to 15 years ago when it was called upon to change its culture. The people in Redmond are so disconnected from what’s going on that they actually believe users are waiting for Windows 97. The company doesn’t get it that people don’t want operating systems any more. They’re so out of it. There’s a general exhaustion of people in organizations with Microsoft’s strategy. I look upon the last 10 years as a whole era of lunacy when companies went about replacing perfectly good software with not-so good stuff. We’ve spun our wheels for 10 years. Now with the Net, we can move ahead with tremendous velocity.
All Hail The Network Computer
The first nail in the coffin is the network computer which is really a discussion of whether we really need the Windows operating system at the desktop. The NC’s hardware and capacity are the same as Windows, but it accepts the premise to deploy applications at the server, while Windows’ whole premise is applications deployed at the desktop. Yes, the Network Computer. Whatever you may think to the claims of Oracle’s head honcho Larry Ellison and Sun’s main man Scott McNealy about what it may achieve, it has lit a fire under the industry equal to that of Java, with everyone rushing to promise a prototype. It’s also undoubtedly a sign of the rest of the industry ganging up on Microsoft which stubbornly persists in its belief that whatever the question, Windows, in some shape or form, is the answer. Listen to Bill Gates concluding a recent article, entitled The Internet PC. I’m betting on the PC, as I always have. I’m betting on Windows, too. I think most people will, and for good reason. Hmmm, sounds a bit like panic to us. Could it be that the chinks in Microsoft’s armor are finally starting to show? Finkelstein points to all those software companies (RIP) which the industry once thought were totally invulnerable – VisiCalc, Ashton-Tate, Lotus, the list is endless, and gets longer day by day. Microsoft doesn’t add value to a word processor. They just keep changing the operating system underneath it. It’s like changing the color of your walls. It forces you to change your furniture. He also compares such shenanigans to the way car manufacturers in the 1950s changed the fins on their automobiles in the vain hope that such a purely cosmetic change would add value. People have become very skeptical about that kind of thing. Is there any real reason to go Windows 95 or 97? Windows 95 has done an excellent job of highlighting the basic problem of Windows-based systems – how do you maintain them going forward?
Conclusion
By damning its users to a perpetual upgrade hell, Microsoft seems to be ensuring increasing irrelevance for itself in the future. What will the world be like when the Redmond Rampager is, in the words of Finkelstein, only a company, not the company? A better place, we trust! He concludes, Microsoft are kids that don’t understand the repercussions of what they’re doing. People will say you have to experience or get burned to understand. Microsoft has not been burned yet, because they didn’ t have to eat the food they’d served. For the first time Microsoft is in reactive mode. They are no longer in control. That’s what it means to continually change direction, reorientate your organization and software in order to chase a moving target . They need to do a little growing up now. Here’s hoping!
