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To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (22660)	2/13/1999 2:52:00 AM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

The Mother of All Software Projects Microsoft's Windows 2000 program is big. Really big. And it has problems to match Business Week Online Welcome to the software factory. Here, in buildings 9, 10, 26, 27, and 28 on Microsoft Corp.'s sprawling Redmond (Wash.) campus, the company's mammoth Windows 2000 operating system is assembled and torn apart once every 24 hours. The ''daily build'' begins at 6 p.m. That's when engineering managers gather all of the new features and bug fixes that thousands of programmers produced during the day and bolt them together like so many auto parts. Twelve hours later--if all goes well--the build is done and quality assurance technicians take over. They test the code on 200 computers and ferret out anywhere from 250 to 400 new bugs. ''Triage'' teams comb over the bug reports and dole out assignments. Programmers type away all day in their rabbit-warren offices. Then, at 6 p.m., the whole process begins again. It's a factory-style process, but this is no widget plant. With 30 million lines of code, Windows 2000 is by far the largest and most complicated commercial software project ever undertaken--dwarfing even IBM's mainframe software. Microsoft's goal: to produce the first operating system that runs everything from laptops to ''dumb'' terminals to huge back-office computers. To accomplish this, it's welding in pieces of software that rivals treat as separate programs. And because the process has been under way for so long--since 1995--the design goals have shifted. Customers are demanding Internet-style software and more simplicity, adding to the time it takes to get it done. ''This is a monumental project,'' says analyst Jon Oltsik of market researcher Forrester Research Inc. ''It's the Panama Canal of software--but the oceans keep shifting on either side, too.'' To Microsoft's critics, Win2000 is the ultimate act of hubris by a company they would like to see fall flat on its face. ''It's a cancerous growth of code,'' scoffs William N. Joy, a top scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc., whose Solaris operating system is about one-third as large. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux freeware operating system, calls the making of Win2000 ''witchcraft'' and predicts Microsoft will have to lop off some features if it ever hopes to get the product out the door. Microsoft's top engineers are growing accustomed to the sniping. Their response: a prickly we'll-show-'em attitude. ''We just keep focused on customers and quality, no matter what stones are thrown,'' snaps James E. Allchin, the senior vice-president in charge of Windows products. Still, Allchin admits that building Windows 2000 has been a soul-wrenching experience. ''One day I can be horribly depressed, and the next day we'll be in the clear again,'' he says. APRIL DEADLINE. The long and winding road has taken a toll. Moshe T. Dunie, a vice-president who had led the core engineering team, left on an unscheduled sabbatical in mid-December. ''He had been building Windows full-time for 12 years,'' explains Mike Nash, marketing director for server products. ''When you miss your kid's 12th piano recital in a row, you know you need a breather.'' But there's no rest for the remainder of Microsoft's army of engineers. Dunie's replacement, Brian Valentine, 39, is a hard-driving individual who earned his reputation as a closer by delivering the company's hot-selling Exchange corporate E-mail package three years ago. He has set an ambitious deadline of Apr. 21 for releasing the third and final Win2000 test version to more than 250,000 testers worldwide. Feb. 15 is lock-down day: After that, no new features are to be added. ''The only way you ever stop is you stop changing the code,'' he says. Valentine has had no problem getting fired up for the job. He grew up poor in the sleepy town of Centralia, Wash. ''I have a nice perspective on what it means to be in charge of the most important project in the history of mankind,'' he says. With that kind of hyperbole at his command, it's no wonder Valentine has been able to get the rest of the crew pumped up--again. They had fallen into a morale slump in the autumn after working overtime to release the second test version last August. Two weeks after Valentine took the job, on Dec. 22, he assembled 3,000 engineers in the cavernous cafeteria of building 26 and delivered an old-fashioned halftime rant. WORKING HOLIDAY. It was nothing fancy. He laid out his 10 rules for success (Rule 1: Make decisions in 10 minutes) and his six rules for completing projects (Rule 1: Get into lock-down A.S.A.P.). He told them they were crossing the chasm from the design phase to release. And he told them how important the project is to Microsoft. The reaction? Cheers. Hundreds volunteered to work during the traditional one-week Christmas shutdown. ''For him it was something new and exciting, and that kind of energy spreads,'' says Frank Artale, one of the engineering managers. What's next? The grueling task of trying to make all the pieces of Win2000 work together, then work with the payroll, sales automation, and myriad other applications that customers are already using on thousands of different computers and peripheral devices. But quality isn't Microsoft's strong suit, according to Bruce M. Brown, who heads BugNet, an online service that tracks software bugs and their fixes. In the past, users have tagged bugs in the various versions of Windows faster than Microsoft could fix them. Microsoft is intent on improving quality. Today it employs one tester for every programmer, up about 30% from the mid-'90s. And it's enlisting the help of customers to ensure that this product doesn't deliver another blow to its already poor reputation. Under the so-called Rapid Deployment Program, 40 companies, including Merrill Lynch & Co. and Ernst & Young, test updates of Win2000 once a month and keep in touch with Microsoft daily via E-mail and phone. When the time comes, the companies get to vote on whether Microsoft sends out the third test version. ''If they can't deploy, there is no way we ship it,'' says Valentine. So far, Microsoft's rapid-deployment partners seem to be satisfied with its progress. ''I haven't seen anything break the system,'' says John Parkinson, chief technologist at Ernst & Young. Merrill Lynch has found plenty of bugs--but no major design flaws. Still, even these allies are concerned about whether Microsoft will be able to make all of its features work well enough to be included in the final product. Last summer, when test version two shipped, there were big pieces missing. ''There may not be enough software hours in a day to make it all work together,'' frets Gregor S. Bailar, chief information officer for the National Association of Securities Dealers, another tester. BEATING BUGS. That's a funny thing about software. The more code you produce, the more bugs you get--typically at least five per thousand lines of code. So the solution isn't just throwing more people at the problem. Even Microsoft's Allchin admits: ''We're on a treadmill.'' But Microsoft claims it's making progress. Artale says the number of Win2000 bugs wiped out in a day recently exceeded the tally of new bugs. When will Windows 2000 finally ship? That's hard to predict. With such a complicated project, you never know when you'll run into a ''show-stopper'' that throws the schedule off. Microsoft is only saying it expects the big event to come before the end of the year. The pressure to deliver is intense--both internally and from customers. Valentine says he gets half a dozen E-mails a day from Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III. But the core message is always the same: Don't ship Windows 2000 before its time. As the months go by, though, that may turn out to be a difficult order for Valentine to carry out. By Steve Hamm in Redmond, Wash., with Otis Port in New York

To: Rusty Johnson who wrote (22660)	2/13/1999 2:56:00 AM
From: Rusty Johnson	Respond to of 24154

What Penalties for Microsoft? It's beginning to look as if the Feds may win serious remedies in court Business Week Online On top of its growing frustrations in the marketplace, Microsoft Corp. has an increasingly serious problem in Washington. Its witnesses are getting shredded by the Justice Dept. in the landmark antitrust suit, while its high-priced legal team is bumbling simple videotaped presentations. That doesn't bode well for Microsoft's big plans to turn products such as Windows 2000 and Windows CE into cash cows. As the company's legal fortunes slide, the odds are growing that trustbusters will be able to bar it from using some of the muscle tactics that helped to turn Windows 95, Windows 98, and Internet Explorer into such successes. More important, the lawsuit is likely to have a profound cultural impact on the software industry--no matter who wins. Now that Microsoft's behind-the-scenes arm-twisting has been exposed to regulators, judges, and the public, CEO William H. Gates III and his minions will probably never be able to intimidate other companies the way they used to. ''The marketplace will become a lot tougher'' for Microsoft, predicts Ernest Gellhorn, a professor of antitrust law at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. ''People will be more inclined to refuse deals, demand tougher deals, and sue them.'' EXTREME STEP. Although the antitrust trial is far from over, it appears as if Justice will win at least a partial victory. If that happens, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson could impose a wide range of remedies on Microsoft. At one extreme, he could seek a ''structural'' remedy, such as breaking the company up or forcing it to divest assets. This solution, which used to be considered so radical that even Microsoft's enemies wouldn't defend it, has been receiving more attention in recent weeks. On Feb. 5, former federal Judge Robert H. Bork, a legal consultant to Netscape Communications Corp., advocated splitting Microsoft into three self-sufficient parts. But there's probably not enough evidence of competitive harm for the federal judiciary to take such an extreme step, says San Francisco antitrust lawyer Samuel R. Miller, who helped to draft the Justice Dept.'s 1995 consent decree against Microsoft. That leaves ''conduct'' remedies: restrictions on some of Microsoft's specific business practices. While far less onerous than a structural solution, they could still put a big dent in the company's plans to tighten its hold on the desktop and conquer the enterprise and consumer-electronic software markets. For example, one of the key ways Justice claims Microsoft gained market share in the browser business was by pressuring business partners such as America Online Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp. to favor its Internet Explorer over Netscape's Navigator. To combat this practice, the government is expected to try to ban Microsoft from making exclusionary deals in the future--a remedy most experts reckon the judge might approve. That would be more painful than it might appear. Just last month, Microsoft partners Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell Computer announced plans to sell server computers using Linux--a network operating system that is one of the leading threats to Windows NT. In the past, one of the ways Microsoft would have tried to counter such a development would be to give the PC makers special incentives to ignore Linux, such as price breaks, prime real estate on the Windows desktop, or perhaps ad subsidies. But if the government blocks Microsoft from making exclusive deals, such tactics would be off limits. Until a few weeks ago, a check on Microsoft's preferential deals was the only remedy most experts thought the Justice Dept. could pull off. But because of the surprisingly strong cross-examination of Microsoft's witnesses by David Boies, Justice's lead litigator, some now think the trustbusters could justify even stronger restrictions on the company's conduct. The key is coming up with remedies that don't require judges to make technical decisions about software or to get too deeply involved in supervising the industry. The committee studying potential remedies, led by Timothy Bresnahan, a Stanford University economics professor who is consulting with the Justice Dept. and the state attorneys general suing Microsoft, isn't talking. But sources in contact with the committee say that one possibility under close consideration is forcing Microsoft to license the underlying source code to the various editions of Windows. That would give competitors the power to make their own Windows clones, thereby loosening the company's dominance of the software market. But even though there's some precedent for this step--Xerox was forced to license copier patents in 1975--it's unclear if such a seizure of Microsoft's intellectual property would be upheld in the courts. Another option under review is blocking Microsoft from integrating new features into its various operating systems, or perhaps forcing it to carry other companies' products. But that path is a tough sell because it requires judges to make technical decisions for which they are ill-suited. In the end, whatever remedies Justice wins, it's clear that the lawsuit has permanently eroded some of Microsoft's power. When the government first started investigating the company in the early 1990s, competitors and business partners alike were so afraid of retaliation that they refused to cooperate with the trustbusters. That climate of silence is gone forever. If Microsoft misbehaves in the future, ''everyone in the industry now knows the phone numbers to call'' at the Justice Dept. and state attorney general offices, observes William E. Kovacic, visiting professor of antitrust at George Washington University Law School. NEW THREAT. Another factor that will limit how aggressively Microsoft can promote its new products is the threat of private antitrust litigation. Even if Justice wins on only some of its charges, Microsoft's rivals may be able to use many of the government's legal and factual findings against the company--dramatically cutting down the cost and risk of litigation. Notwithstanding a few suits by rivals in the past, that's a threat Microsoft executives have little experience managing. Finally, it's possible that the government litigation may bring about a softening of Microsoft's aggressive culture. While Gates is well aware of how Justice's antitrust suit in the 1970s weakened IBM's competitive resolve--and has repeatedly warned employees about this threat--the company is getting bashed in court. Kovacic believes that experience will ''inevitably make the company more tentative'' in the future. For example, it may be hard for executives who are being publicly vilified for doing things like threatening competitors not to think twice before making similar threats again. This factor is difficult to quantify, but it will inevitably play a critical role in determining the extent of Microsoft's dominance in the years to come. By Mike France in New York, with Susan B. Garland in Washington, D.C.