Bye-Bye Bill

Bill’s Vision can be roughly translated as cheap processing power everywhere (running Windows, naturally). The Vision has changed a little over time as technology has moved forward; I wouldn’t have thought that the original Vision included the XBox, but still, Bill has kept Microsoft moving forward, brushing aside every competitor from Netscape to the mighty US Department of Justice itself. Where are Marc Andersson and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson now? Who cares and judging parking offences, respectively. But Bill? Bill is moving towards replacing Mother Teresa. Amazing.

For better or worse, Microsoft has transformed the way we live and work. There have been a few assistants, of course. Moore’s Law doubling the power of a chip every 18 months was essential. The incompetence of IBM was pretty important too. As was Apple. While Steve Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface (he stole it from Xerox), Apple popularised the idea but then failed to follow through. I still don’t really understand how Apple managed to screw up. I do remember in 1986 designing software on a tiny (a 9-inch screen – I had better eyesight then!) Mac while typing the design documents on Windows 2. I can tell you which was the better experience, and it wasn’t Bill’s Vision.

The Great Extinction

Microsoft really took off in 1990 with Windows 3. I still remember the ‘wow!’ feeling when I first saw it. But the practical effect was more interesting. For example, before Windows 3, there were little things called ‘printer drivers’. A word processing program had to interface to a printer using one of these. WordPerfect had a collection, as did WordStar. They were all different and all had different bugs. But after Windows 3.0, they were as dead as the dodo. As WordPerfect and WordStar were soon to become.

The point is that Windows 3 standardised the PC world. It defined the size of the rail tracks that the software rolling stock moved on. Even IBM with all its money and resources couldn’t stand against that and after a few years of pouring money down a bottomless pit of OS/2, it gave up.

But Bill’s Vision kept moving forward. Bill not only had the Vision, he had the smarts to hire really good people to implement it. One of the best of these was Dave Cutler, architect of DEC’s RSX11 and VMS operating systems. Cutler designed Windows NT, the basis of Microsoft’s ‘industrial strength’ current systems. Whatever Windows 3 and its 9x successors were, ‘industrial strength’ they were not. The successor to NT, Windows XP and friends are all pretty reliable, irrespective of the juvenile rantings of the SlashDot bunch. Interestingly, another of Bill’s better hires is Anders Hejlsberg. More on him and LINQ in a future column.

But there’s a downside to both Bill and his Vision. Microsoft is, in some ways, a seriously dysfunctional company. You just have to look at the Mini-Microsoft blog to see what’s wrong. I’ve been through review processes like that (at both ends, by the way) and I suspect that most people subject to review processes in a large company will see more than superficial resemblances. How on earth anyone can produce anything that’s good when you have to go through that junk beats me. It’s one of the reasons that I left working in large companies – they are all like that to a lesser or greater extent.

But where Bill’s Vision seems to have misfired is the Internet. Microsoft has simply had very little impact. Yes, 80 percent of us use Microsoft Explorer to surf (I use Opera myself, far better than FireFox), but the Internet is dominated by Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP). Microsoft’s Internet Information Server? Never heard of it. The interesting thing here is that while Microsoft may not have had much impact, neither has any other single company. Take Sun “the network is the computer ™”. Ha! Java was supposed to nix Microsoft and dominate the Net. It’s done neither: Java is firmly and irreversibly stuck between databases of various types (Oracle 48%, DB2 22%, SQL Server 16%). And Sun is irreversibly heading towards extinction.

I Want To Break Free

The point is though, that none of this has been directed by a Vision: it’s happened naturally. Or not so naturally, really. The LAMP stuff is used because its free. Incidentally, I don’t buy this guff about open source: if I have a choice between something that’s going to cost me a $1000 and something that’s free (and they do the same thing), I don’t give a toss which is ‘open source’: I’ll take the free one. It’s called economics, stupid.

And it’s the economics of the Net that is far more powerful than any Vision. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is vastly mightier than Microsoft, IBM and Oracle put together. What the Net provides is an essentially zero-cost distribution system for software. It’s global too. People do make money from free software: not from the software itself, but from supporting it. If you have a global market, with zero distribution cost, then you have a very wide and deep ocean of potential customers. All you need is a few of those to convert to a commercial license. MySQL is a good example – about 1 in 1000 downloads convert. True, MySQL is ‘open source’ – but as I’ve said, this is irrelevant. Don’t think that MySQL software is intrinsically good due to the myriads of dedicated ‘hackers’ beavering away for the benefit of mankind. It’s good because there is a small team of dedicated experts (who are paid, by the way, from the company profits) working on it. MySQL makes its money on supporting commercial users.

But just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s the best for a specific job. Microsoft has built a 10 billion dollar server business on Windows. That’s a lot of cash and generally people (governments are different) don’t throw that amount of cash at something unless there’s a good reason. Equally, take IBM. IBM’s ‘big iron’ still runs the vast majority of the world’s banking and airline reservation systems. I might be slightly annoyed if I can’t connect to my ISP running free Linux on some cheap hardware. I would be more than annoyed if my bank couldn’t transact my business.

It seems to me that Bill’s Vision has run it’s course. There are cheap microprocessors everywhere. Some will run Windows, most won’t. But the economic forces that are now arising (why employ an expensive European graduate when you can use a cheap one in India?) will make any single Vision redundant.

It’s a good time to move on, Bill.