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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
dhlii@1dla.com
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
—Jeff Bach
bachjeff@hotmail.com
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.
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.
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."
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.
—Mark Smith
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
andrew.szasz@oxford.ccac-ont.ca
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
tfortner@classicnet.net
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
schultzg@michigan.gov
The Eleventh Hiding Place
Regarding Michael Otey's Top 10: "Windows Program Startup Locations" (December 2002, http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 27100), I hate to say this, but there's an 11th place to look for pesky, unwanted Windows programs. The load and run lines in win.ini, a holdover from the Windows 3.1 days, still work, and many programs lurk there. I run Sysedit to check for real-mode drivers in config.sys and autoexec.bat files at the same time.
—Bruce Ballard
bruce@riverbank.co.uk
More Safe Email Practices
In Letters to the Editor: "Another File Extension to Avoid" (December 2002, http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 27209), John E. Quigley suggests, regarding Michael Otey's Top 10: "Safe Email Practices" (October 2002, InstantDoc ID 26422), that you avoid ".src files." I think this should be ".scr files" because that's the extension for screensavers and scripts (and of several viruses). I found "Safe Email Practices" very useful. However, the article missed an obvious one: Don't open .exe files." Also, number 10, "Install an antivirus product," is good but useless if you install the product and never update it.
—André van den Beukel
andre.van.den.beukel@nl.yachtgroup.com
FASTFACT
42% of respondents to a recent Windows & .NET Magazine Instant Poll still use Windows NT Server 4.0 as their enterprise server system.
FASTFACT
67% of respondents to a recent Windows & .NET Magazine Instant Poll said their organizations had no plans to implement the Microsoft .NET Framework. Twenty percent of respondents had already implemented it; 13 percent plan to in 2003.
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