When my company launched Windows NT Magazine in 1995, the NT community was alive and well. We believed we were on the brink of something special—that NT would let PCs eventually handle any IT computing problem we could throw at them. The early NT adopters were as enthusiastic as the most rabid Linux follower is today. The NT community helped build the NT industry into the market leader it now is. But is Microsoft grateful for our loyalty and support? Not that I can tell.

In 1995, Novell NetWare constituted 70 percent of the file and print market, and the UNIX and AS/400 platforms dominated the business application market. NT was a toy. Microsoft talked about only Windows 95, and few Microsoft employees knew what enterprise computing was about.

Microsoft pursued the commercial software developer community with enthusiasm by practically giving away the OS, a tactic that ensured ample numbers of customers for the newly developed applications, and by making it easy to develop server applications as desktop applications. Compared with NetWare, the NT platform presented a dream development platform, and the promise of a huge installation base lured software companies away from other platforms to NT.

With the launch of NT 4.0, Microsoft emphasized grass-roots marketing efforts. Microsoft helped launch user groups, enthusiast parties at trade shows, and other community-building initiatives that centered on products such as SQL Server, Exchange Server, and IIS. NT was never about hiring the Rolling Stones to pitch the product. It was about supporting the community. The buzz turned into market share—NT's share of the server market soared from 0 percent to 40 percent in 5 years. NetWare became a minor player, UNIX vendors fought for the leftovers in the high-end enterprise market, and NT replaced UNIX as the most popular high-end workstation OS.

Then a funny thing happened. Microsoft ran into heavy resistance in the enterprise market. IT administrators wanted more security, scalability, availability, and all the other abilities. Rather than elicit the IT community's help, Microsoft decided to follow the enterprise leader, IBM. Microsoft adopted IBM-like marketing and began promoting vague concepts rather than products and community. The result was "The Digital Nervous System," "One Degree of Separation," agile computing, and "The Business Internet Starts Here." Microsoft marketing executives told me, "We don't need to talk to our existing customers; they will upgrade anyway." So now that we're all married to Microsoft, the honeymoon is over. Microsoft can take us for granted.

The Death of Community
Before I helped launch Windows NT Magazine, I developed business applications for the AS/400 platform. I worked for an IBM shop and considered myself an IBM guru. A few months ago, my colleagues at iSeries NEWS, a magazine for IBM administrators, told me that the concept of an "IBM shop" died years ago. IBM spent so little time courting its community that the community simply died. IBM now makes most of its money servicing other vendors' products.

Meanwhile, the Linux community is thriving. Linux users want to see Linux change the world. They want Linux to be the tool they can use to solve business problems with off-the-shelf computing power in devices ranging from PCs to wristwatches. They want to accomplish this mission faster, cheaper, and better with the shared efforts of open-source developers, and they want to dethrone Microsoft. The Linux community has suffered setbacks. But Linux's share of the server market continues to increase, mostly at the expense of UNIX and NetWare. The Linux community reminds me of the NT market in 1995, except that the Windows community didn't hate anyone in the way the Linux folks seem to hate Gates.

Winning Them Back
The disparity between the Linux and Windows communities has caught Steve Ballmer's attention. He has directed his staff to start cultivating the community again. Microsoft is even considering marketing to its existing customers and, in rare moments, concedes that people will divorce Microsoft if the company doesn't take care of its marriage to customers.

To be fair, Gates has been courting developers again with the Microsoft .NET Framework. But Microsoft has ignored the Windows administrators, even though they account for 90 percent of the IT market by spending money on infrastructure and applications to keep their companies running. It's not that Microsoft's products aren't good—they are. But the company strives to increase its profits without helping its customers increase their profits. Here's a message to Microsoft from IT administrators: Reduce our costs, make our lives easier, and help us get projects approved—then we'll start liking you again. All we get from Microsoft today is increased licensing (subscription) fees for staying in place. Where's the reward for our loyalty, for spending billions of dollars on upgrades, and for staying true to the platform?

Microsoft needs to renew its vows to the Windows community. The company could start by empowering and funding an MVP group of users to drive the future direction of its products, services, marketing, and community-building efforts. The MVPs ideally would represent all the varied IT community members but would include an ample number of core developers and administrators—the technical decision makers who helped Microsoft get where it is today.

Gates had a simple vision—that PCs would eventually scale to handle any size of computing problem. NT was part of that solution. The other part was the early adopters who believed in that dream and used NT to make it happen. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the company might see the Linux community fulfill Gates's dream because achieving his vision is simpler, cheaper, and more fun with Linux than with Windows.

End of Article


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Reader Comments

Great article. I've used NT since 3.51 and have been a vocal proponent for the NT product family. I agree with Mark's description of the early days and I remember them fondly!

Fred Harper- January 14, 2003

Re: the soul of Windows. Led Zepplin said it best: "and as we wind on down the road our shadow taller than our soul"

penguinz- January 30, 2003

"Unfortunately for Microsoft, the company might see the Linux community fulfill Gates's dream because achieving his vision is simpler, cheaper, and more fun with Linux than with Windows."

Please God , make it so.

peter- January 30, 2003

Actually, Microsoft just helped launch the Chicago Windows Users Group (cwug.net) - exactly to the audience of administrators you're talking about.

Stan Balog- June 25, 2003

Mark Smith deserves kudos for Fast Forward: "The Soul of Windows" (January 2003, http://www.win netmag.com, InstantDoc ID 27392) and "The Soul of Windows Revisited." His point about Microsoft switching the focus of the advertising message in commercials is right on. Mark requested suggestions about how Microsoft can "improve relations with the Windows administrator community," and I can think of only one thing*a free Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) software subscription for the Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). I have been an MCP since the release of NT 4.0, and I think that certified administrators should have unfettered access to software to set up in a home or work lab for testing, practicing, and gaining "real" experience. (By lab I mean a nonproduction system. I'm not an advocate of the open-source initiative, and I believe Microsoft should be paid for its intellectual property.) A CD-ROM with a key based on a hash that uses the user's MCP ID plus birth date and social security number would deter anyone who tries to give the resource to friends and family. One of the reasons I'm interested in free software is that I've taken about 25 IT exams at a cost of more than $100 per exam. I don't mind paying for exams; I think that charging a fee to take the exams separates the people who are serious about certification from the people who aren't.

Nick Boardman- January 12, 2004

In Mark Smith's Fast Forward: "The Soul of Windows" (January 2003, http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 27392), the author states, "The Windows community didn't hate anyone in the way the Linux folks seem to hate Gates." I also consider myself to have been a part of the Windows NT community (which is quite distinct from the Windows community). I recall holding a visceral dislike for Apple Computer, IBM, Corel's WordPerfect, and particularly Novell.<P>

Today, I consider myself to be more a part of the Linux community. I don't hate either Bill Gates or Microsoft. But it seems to me that as Microsoft vanquished its competitors, it moved on to targeting its customers.<P>

One of the fundamental issues in the antitrust suit is that we expect achieving success to be a forceful and often brutal process. We also expect that upon achieving dominance, the vicious tactics we admired on the way up will be abandoned for more subtle ones. Microsoft still hasn't learned subtlety.<P>

Microsoft has not only abandoned its community, but it seems to have lost focus on its customers. What both Microsoft and its critics fail to appreciate is that Microsoft's success was driven more by the failures of its competitors than by Microsoft's aggressive tactics. Microsoft needs to worry less about crushing Linux and more about making its customers happy.<P>

Microsoft's products aren't that good—they're just better than those they supplanted. But other vendors will eventually replace Microsoft products with products that are even better. The Linux community is striving for and will attain that. The open-source initiative will improve inexorably at a slowly accelerating pace. The open question is whether Microsoft will also significantly improve the quality of its products in a reasonable amount of time. Occasionally the right words emanate from Redmond, but Microsoft has lost credibility. Promises of stable, secure software 3 years down the road requiring costly upgrades of both software and hardware aren't going to cut it.

David H. Lynch, Jr.- January 15, 2004

Mark Smith's Fast Forward: "The Soul of Windows" was well written, but you could make myriad analogies and comparisons that put Microsoft's behavior in a different light. First, there seems to be a cycle of aging in the business world. Your description of Microsoft's early days seems comparable to the first steps in that cycle. Microsoft's current behavior seems analogous to a more mature part of that same cycle. Companies grow up and mature. Should Microsoft not be allowed to do that? Should Microsoft be allowed to remain only in its startup phase with startup-style marketing and not be allowed to grow and mature as the early-style marketing brings success and growth?<P>

Second, wasn't this magazine formerly Windows NT Magazine—before you sold out to a big behemoth? I liked Windows NT Magazine's early days and its early style of writing and marketing and advertising. Now that the magazine is older, everything has changed. The publisher is big-time and not grassroots anymore. Can't you go back to the way it used to be?<P>

Third, look at Hewlett-Packard (HP). The company went from a garage to a gigantic global company. Think you can still walk into the garage and talk to Carly? Do you think HP still maintains grassroots marketing styles? Products change and mature. Companies grow and mature.<P>

I think we should applaud Microsoft because it's trying to look forward and create the next great thing. Although I agree with your initial premise and I do miss the grassroots days of the early and mid-1990s, would you still have Microsoft looking back to 7 years ago rather than marching forward?<P>

Finally, can you provide an example of a company that has experienced phenomenal success and growth and still has retained its grassroots marketing efforts? I hope one is out there, but I can't think of one at the moment.<P>

Thanks for your comments. The grassroots or bottoms-up marketing approach is still possible for Microsoft but a lot trickier given the overwhelming success of the Windows platform. Microsoft has finally admitted, however, that IT administrators won't automatically run out and buy the latest version of Windows Server and upgrade their entire shop.<P>

Every large company can spend its marketing money by taking a product approach or a branding approach. For example, General Motors (GM) could promote its brand or promote specific cars. The company chooses the latter approach because it works. The products build the brand. Think about it: GM could dump all its car-specific ads and simply advertise, "GM: The Car for the Agile Driver." People would say, "Yeah, but what are the features, what am I getting, and how does it compare with other cars? I don't get it." That's exactly what IT administrators are saying.<P>

Technical communities are built on products and product groupings. Are you a Microsoft SQL Server developer, an Exchange Server administrator, a .NET guy, a Windows 2000 administrator, or a Cisco Systems VPN expert? Or, are you an Agile computer guy? One of the results of Microsoft's success is the number of Microsoft products IT people need to be aware of. No one can be an expert at all of them—so we specialize and form product communities. We want Microsoft to talk about the overall vision but also talk to our community as if it's the most important community in the world to the company. Microsoft might find this tactic tough but not impossible to do. Marketing to CFOs and other business executives is an entirely different matter. Executives don't really care about the functionality or features of our technical gear—they just want to know the Return on Investment (ROI), the headcount impact, and the expense reductions. Perhaps "Agile" works with these guys, if Agile implies "Most bang for the buck."<P>

I gave Microsoft credit for getting Bill Gates out in the market to promote the .NET vision to developers. But Gates needs to talk to IT administrators or get someone else to do it. I don't think the size of the company affects this need for a strong vision in a rapidly changing market. The bottom line is that customers need to feel some sense of community around a product set. If they don't, they go somewhere where they do feel that community.<BR>

—Mark Smith

Jeff Bach- January 15, 2004

Regarding Mark Smith's Fast Forward: "The Soul of Windows," congratulations on saying what needed to be said. The author voiced the feelings of everyone involved with the trials and tribulations of Microsoft. I hope the company will sit up and take notice. In the meantime, I will continue to juggle my time between Windows NT and Linux, waiting to see who will come out on top.

Andrew Szasz- January 15, 2004

I've been a Microsoft support engineer since the release of Windows/286 and Windows NT 3.1, and I've subscribed to Windows & .NET Magazine since the first issue. I'm also a former Microsoft employee. In the last year, I've mostly returned to the UNIX environment where I began my computing career 12 years ago. Although I've felt slighted by Microsoft for the last several years, I made my decision to depart from Windows mainly because, as I told my supervisors, Microsoft doesn't understand computer security. The Klez and Bugbear worms are the latest examples of that lack of understanding.<P>

Regarding the Windows community, in the past, Microsoft cultivated the community by holding technical presentations in major cities and giving attendees CD-ROMs of Microsoft OSs and applications. I got my certifications not by attending expensive classes but by setting up small networks at home and living with the code so that I could learn how to deploy and support it long before I installed it in the office. I passed the certification tests by living in an NT environment at home first and later at work. I still have the NT 4.0 three­CD-ROM pack that Microsoft gave to those who attended the IT conference when NT 4.0 was released.<P>

Since then, Microsoft has stopped building the IT community that got NT into corporate offices. The company stopped listening to IT people and developed global products that have features that most offices never use and sometimes make the products poorly suited to small to midsized shops. For example, the integration of Microsoft Exchange Server with Active Directory (AD) prevents you from using a single Exchange Server system as a bridgehead to route mail to multiple Internet domains. If you're supporting several 100-user email domains, this "feature" makes Exchange 2000 Server an expensive choice. Exchange Server 5.5 was better suited to small to midsized offices, and I supported Exchange 5.5 at Nortel Networks, where we had 87,000 users at one point.<P>

I know that Microsoft, like any other software developer, makes most of its money by licensing software to businesses. I have no doubt that it's easier to ensure license compliance in corporations, which use license-metering applications to ensure compliance, than in small businesses that are more concerned with surviving to fight another day. But small businesses—not global corporations—made Microsoft successful. It was Microsoft's determination to scale Windows and Windows applications to global corporation sizes that exposed the security flaws in the Microsoft platform and the scalability limitations in SQL Server. Because of these problems, most Windows administrators still choose to scale out, rather than scale up, and use someone else's (read that non-Microsoft) tools to secure the network perimeter.<P>

Most of my contracts currently involve integrating UNIX, particularly Linux, into already existing Windows networks. However, one client was redeveloping its point-of-sales application to run on Red Hat Linux 7.0, offering a non-Microsoft alternative that's easier to support than Windows 2000 or NT in a highly distributed environment (convenience store chains). Linux looks poised to eat up the low end of the Microsoft customer base just as Windows did to Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) several years ago. The Linux community very much reminds me of the NT community of the NT 4.0 days. Has Microsoft lost its community? Yes, but it doesn't seem to care. The company seems to think that CEOs, not IT managers, decide whose software gets installed. This top-down marketing scheme is one more slap in the face of those who really do implement the technology that runs businesses, daring us to try to go to some other platform. OK, Microsoft, we will.

Thomas S. Fortner- January 15, 2004

I agree with Mark Smith's assertion that Microsoft has abandoned IT administrators. The first version of Windows NT that I booted up was the October 1992 beta version of NT 3.1. At the time, I was researching alternatives to Windows 3.1, which required frequent reboots, and I wasn't looking forward to the warmed-over upgrade that Microsoft named Windows 95. NT has been a good choice for my organization, and I think it has contributed to making our organization productive. At the time that I recommended our organization standardize on NT, I expected the licensing cost to drop after Microsoft succeeded in migrating home users to an NT-based version of Windows. I based my expectations on the industrywide trend for software costs to fall over time. That has never happened with Windows. I am distressed to see licensing costs rise as Microsoft gains a larger share of the business enterprise. In addition, Microsoft's onerous licensing terms practically force regular upgrades according to Microsoft's schedule, paying for Windows twice on every desktop. Microsoft has deliberately confusing licensing terms, sales reps who feign ignorance of licensing details (I speak from experience), and (worst of all) Windows Product Activation (WPA). I feel betrayed by Microsoft. I am so philosophically opposed to WPA that I plan to load Linux on my next home computer.

Glenn Schultz- January 15, 2004

Mark Smith's "The Soul of Windows" (January 2003, http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc 27392) was informative, but I would like to present an additional view. I wasn't a part of the initial Windows "club" when it first started, and I've been a network administrator for only 4 years. Microsoft isn't a club or a hobby anymore. It's a company. Why is this so wrong? The company was successful and made money. Most of the magazine's readers have jobs because someone somewhere made a profit and hired people to help their company make a profit.<P>

Some of the readers responding to this article are looking for a warm and fuzzy club feeling from Microsoft. But considering the company's size, I think that's an unrealistic and possibly unfair expectation. I think Microsoft makes an honest effort to serve the customer and be helpful. I've found that Microsoft's technicians and customer representatives have great attitudes, and they're concerned about equipping me to help the people I support.<P>

Many new IT employees in the market aren't looking for a club but for employment. I read Windows & .NET Magazine for helpful instruction and advice, not to be in a community. For most of us, it's how we get a job. It's not about being in a club. So let's just get to work.

Ken Brooks- January 15, 2004

After reading several replies to Mark Smith's article "The Soul of Windows," I can't resist formulating my own theory about the reason Microsoft changed the marketing focus from systems administrators to top executives. This is what I think: As many of us agree, Microsoft didn't take market leadership because they offer better products. Was Windows 3.0 better than Macintosh? No. Was Windows NT Server better than Novell? No. The Microsoft products succeeded simply because they were less expensive.<P>

Microsoft's target used to be systems administrators. Microsoft was trying to convince administrators that its programs were good enough to replace the market leaders but at much less cost for the enterprise*so, we could make the appropriate justification (i.e., the Return on Investment—ROI—argument) to the finance group. Let's face it: We don't have any decision power in the enterprise. Or do we? Can any admins implement any high-tech project (e.g., Storage Area Network—SAN, wireless) without the approval of the chief financial guy? Our job is to evaluate, recommend, and, if approved, implement. Microsoft understood the buying process very well and still does. Now that the company has taken the enterprise environment, it doesn't need the systems administrators any more to justify its programs. Now it can go directly to that financial guy. The reason Microsoft is scared by Linux and the open-source initiative is not that the programs could be better than Microsoft's but because implementing and maintaining them could be much less expensive than using Microsoft products.<P>

Until one company demonstrates that it can live with open-source applications alone, Microsoft's dominance won't be threatened. But Microsoft doesn't want to wait for that day. What does that mean for systems administrators? Well, in the same way we brought Microsoft to the enterprise, we can get rid of Microsoft by justifying the cost of using alternatives to Microsoft products. I have to admit that this task is more difficult than it was in the early 1990s. But it's not impossible. Install a small network in your home, test the applications, extrapolate the results, and calculate the cost. You might be surprised!

Ricardo Torres- January 15, 2004