From: Costa Kapantais Tuesday, Aug 25 1998 10:22PM ET
Reply # of 23617
Taking the fifth
If you are interested in the future directions of Microsoft and the
NT/NetWare/Linux debate, it is well worth reading this 1500 word
article. In particular, the analysis at the end of the article on the
three stage marketing of NT is excellent.
-----Original Message-----
Taking the fifth: Why Microsoft has more than executive image at stake
with Windows NT 5.0
By Robert X. Cringely
In this week that has been so dominated by the giving of testimony,
why was it that Bill Gates didn't want to allow the public to view his
deposition in the pending anti-trust suit? Well I'm no lawyer, but I
have been sued in Federal Court and deposed by attorneys for the hated
"other side," and to me the answer is obvious, and it has less to do
with trade secrets than Microsoft claims. What is smart behavior in a
deposition isn't at all attractive in public. In order to protect his
company, Gates will have to be terse, vague, and difficult, all of
which will be interpreted by the press as indicating that he has
something to hide, which he probably does. What they won't say is that
EVERYBODY who isn't an idiot sounds like that in a deposition, even if
they have nothing at all to hide.
In a deposition, lawyers for the other side ask questions trying to
obtain incriminating evidence. There is no way for the person being
deposed to "win" a deposition. The best they can hope for is to not
lose. This is because the lawyers do this kind of thing every day and
we don't. It's because they get to excerpt the testimony for their
written briefs, sometimes putting it in the worst of contexts. The
best the witness can do to protect his interests is to say as little
as possible. So Gates is likely to come across as a contentious,
difficult smart-ass. Fortunately for Bill, the appeals court agreed
this week to keep any weaseling private.
Or he could take the high road and become a storyteller, which is
where most CEOs screw-up in their depositions. Lawyers for the other
side love storytellers because they voluntarily bring into evidence
incriminating facts that could never otherwise be introduced. CEOs are
used to being listened-to and used to being in charge, so they often
get into trouble in depositions, telling far too much. But Gates is
the disciplined, highly intelligent son of a big-shot corporate
lawyer, so he won't make the mistake of telling stories. Instead,
he'll just look bad, which Microsoft would like to avoid. It's all
about image.
Right now, though, Microsoft has an even bigger image problems with
Windows NT 5.0, which seems to be in one of those perpetual holding
patterns, never quite ready to be released. The new shipping deadline
for NT 5.0 is summer of 1999 and impatient corporate buyers are
expressing public doubts about Microsoft even meeting that goal. Jim
Allchin, Microsoft's god of NT development, has been making public
apologies all over the place as well he should, since his position in
the NT hierarchy is very shaky. Not that there are lots of folks
angling for Allchin's job: the NT group is short of top programmers
and managers and losing more every day. What's amiss here is that
there are major internal doubts emerging about NT 5.0 and nobody wants
to be the champion of a product that can't be made to work.
Desktop and home PC users may think none of this matters, but they're
wrong because the grand plan at Microsoft has long been to merge
Windows 9X and NT. The further out NT 5 is pushed, the further out
will be Windows 2000, or whatever they plan to call it. To Microsoft,
NT is important not just because it is a very profitable multi-billion
dollar business, but because it has been battling with Netware and
Unix and for the most part winning. Another year of delay (and the
successful introduction of Netware 5) could change that.
So let's take a moment to understand where Windows NT came from, why
it has been so successful, and why some of those same reasons can
explain its current difficulties.
Microsoft does its best work in reaction to a real or implied
threat. Tell a group of Microsoft engineers to dream up some great new
technology and they'll almost always disappoint. Tell them to reverse
engineer someone else's great new technology or to react to a specific
external technical threat and they respond beautifully. Companies that
are aggressive yet lack imagination play good defense.
Remember that Windows NT began as the next version of OS/2, so
Microsoft learned a great deal at IBM's expense. Right from the start,
Microsoft addressed every shortcoming the world had with
OS/2. Microsoft made NT developer-friendly nine months BEFORE the
product shipped. The 3.x versions were based on
technology. Engineering goals guided the development and feature
set. It is important to note the 3.1 version while given a bad quality
rap compared to the more mature Unix and Netware versions, was in fact
one of the highest quality first-release operating systems.
The 4.X version of Windows NT was the finish up, clean up, pretty up
version. A mixture of technical and business objectives resulted in a
nice full-featured, mature operating system.
But Windows NT 5.X is something completely different. Microsoft is
attempting to add a very aggressive number of major features, with the
killer being NT's Active Directory. This is probably a situation where
they should not try to release a single major version, but a series of
smaller improvements.
It took Novell a long time to perfect NDS, its enterprise-quality
directory service. There are a lot of very subtle things that need to
be done to keep a complex distributed directory service healthy and
reliable. Microsoft has a lot of experience to gain to equal Netware
4.11. And with Netware 5 on the horizon, extending NDS across the
Internet, Microsoft is even more vulnerable.
But even Novell is failing to see the big picture. Long file names and
distributed directory services treat a symptom but ignore the
underlying problem. Its a human factors problem. The current approach
-- Novell's approach, now being copied by Microsoft -- operates on the
assumption that the user actually understands a computer file
system. Big mistake. As you get more and more files, and more and more
servers, the approach has been to present users with an
enterprise-wide directory listing. You can easily navigate through the
haystack but there is little or no help finding the needle.
The other area where Microsoft is especially vulnerable is complexity
for the sake of marketing. The OLE/ActiveX, ODBC, and other stuff
Microsoft is using for all their products is complex and difficult to
support. They've wired it into their WWW server and, with Win98, into
the Internet browser as well. The performance of this stuff is at
best, clunky. When you wire it into a good sized network you can
easily slow everything down. It is difficult to control access rights
and still keep the application working. There are many new security
risks developing from the stuff from Redmond. But Microsoft's internal
view of this, as always, is that more cumbersome software sells new
hardware which sells new software. There is an end to this food chain,
though, when some righteous third-party swoops in with a simple and
insanely great alternative. I choose the words "insanely great" quite
deliberately if you know what I mean.
Could Windows NT 5.0 be Microsoft's OS/2? Has marketing and ambition
overcome technical vision and engineering practicality? Microsoft has
thrived on the ability to rapidly develop, ship, improve, and ship
product. Once the motion starts, no one has been able to keep up with
them. NT 5.0 is clearly bogged down. The risk to Microsoft is its
focus on marketing features. To implement them they must use public
domain technology developed outside of Microsoft, opening the door for
their competition. Being slow, releasing immature technology, and
giving others time to adapt their mature technology, is a good way to
mess up one's business.
There are certain litmus tests that can be applied to the marketing of
high technology and one of the most important is looking at the
arguments used to keep current customers in line. This generally goes
in three steps. Step one is to say bad things about competitive
technology when you don't, yourself, have any products that can
actually go head-to-head. Step two is to say your stuff is just as
good as the competitor's stuff because you finally have a
semi-competitive release. Note that step two requires the complete
repudiation of step one, which somehow never seems to bother
Microsoft. Finally step three -- the desperation step -- is to say
that switching to a competitive technology isn't cost-effective. It's
cheaper to stay with our mediocre stuff than to switch to the better
stuff coming from somewhere else.
Now look at Microsoft's claims for Windows NT versus specifically
Netware and Linux. Bill Gates has dismissed both products as great
80's technology, but not appropriate for the 90's. That's step
one. And with NT 5.0, Microsoft is claiming its Active Directory is
the equal of Netware's NDS. That's step two. And in recent discussions
with Microsoft salespeople, some of my corporate contacts now report a
shift in the anti-Linux strategy from "NT is better" to "its going to
cost a lot of money to move away from NT." Step three. |
