I'm reposting Dana's article- as I actually havea different angleon this - and I'm using this as a launching pad.
I actually think Bill's biggest problem has always been his employees. Their arrogance and incompetance is why Bill can never retire....
Anyway - back to Longhorn and the future. Looking at Indigo - I really think that Microsoft thinks they've won. There's no reason to hide behind or play games with inter-operability and compatibility anymore. Indigo REALLY seems open and fully capable of meshing into anything, whether it's their own legacy technology or others.
Don Box appears to be a real hero.
Microsoft's Biggest Problem.
Microsoft's Biggest Problem
Microsoft's biggest problem is that it has become too political.
This is partly the fault of the government. The antitrust case greatly increased the number of lawyers and PR people working for the company. Questions involving the DMCA and security have been driven by government demands, not customers.
This was apparent in looking at the company's recent developer conference. Longhorn is a big bet, but it's the kind of bet a smaller company should be making. Decisions like the one to kill Windows Messenger in favor of a firewall default are inherently driven by politics, not customers. All of its stupid codenames are created by bureaucrats with too much time on their hands -- fewer codenames, more code please. And the continuing failures of its PDAs and smartphones are driven by its continuing demand to embrace and extend than making anyone's life easier.
These are not the kinds of decisions an entrepreneurial company takes, because they weren't made in an entrepreneurial way. These are government decisions made with a bureaucratic process.
Partly this is a function of the company's size. There is one product line, thus one bottleneck through which all good ideas must pass. The process becomes inherently political.
But founder Bill Gates must also take some blame. He has defined his career as a fight for control of the growing industry's direction. There are two important words in the previous sentence, fight and control. Gates thinks the key is control. It's not. It's fight.
Maintaining control is a political struggle. Fighting, in the case of business, is a market struggle. There is a big difference.
When control is the key, you're choosing one alternative among many, then putting all your eggs in one basket. When you're fighting for business, you follow demand -- you try to figure out what customers want and give it to them, even if that means giving them alternatives.
The easiest way for Microsoft to eliminate its political problems would be to break up. That was the ultimate aim of the antitrust suit, which Microsoft won.
But was it a pyrrhic victory? I think so.
Back in 1911 John D. Rockefeller was playing golf with a friend, when word came in that the Supreme Court had ruled a break-up of his Standard Oil trust must proceed. Informed of the news, Rockefeller calmly holed his putt and offered one piece of advice -- "buy Standard." Those who took his advice prospered. They wound up holding shares in a large number of highly-competitive, aggressive companies. The same thing happened many decades later when AT&T was broken up. (The massive Worldcom fraud cost AT&T shareholders more than anyone else, but they would still hold stock in three regional Bells, several other companies, and cash from their sale to Qwest.)
The point is that monopolies engage in political struggles, which makes them inefficient. Whether those struggles are against the government, or internal -- between and within product groups -- doesn't matter. What matters is that energy and talent are being wasted.
There may be ways for Microsoft to re-organize so as to reduce its political conflicts. Those ways should be sought. And when they're implemented, you will have created ready fault lines along which the company could be broken up, once the inefficiency of fighting the government becomes obvious.
In other words, to solve the problem of politics, break up the company. Break it up symbolically now, even if you continue to resist breaking it up for real.
Then, find some entrepreneurs and give them control of the pieces. Bureaucrats are fine, in their place. But their place is in the engine room, not on the bridge.
Dana Blankenhorn [Corante: Moore's Lore]
