Things you can learn from Microsoft

Stamina, developer outreach, and ruthless execution

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On June 3rd, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing and it was not a roaring success. I was at Google at the time and my younger colleagues were making a lot of fun about its lack of accuracy and overall poor search quality. Jokes about Bing not being able to find itself were rife, because if you asked Bing for a search engine, its top result was a link to Google 🙂. The general mood was that we were amazing and that Microsoft’s time was truly over. 

I wasn’t so sure and in typical “grandpa explains the world” fashion I told my colleagues that you always have to be afraid of Microsoft because the list of companies that dominated their respective spaces and that were taken out completely by Microsoft is very long and includes once famous names like WordPerfect, Lotus, Borland, Netscape, and Novell. 

The derogatory attitude towards Microsoft had a long history by then, grounded in more than ten years of hatred of the company, its perceived low product quality, and its ruthless business tactics.

Way back in the roaring nineties, Microsoft was the big enemy. Starting from humble beginnings as the creator of a Basic interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer (a fascinating story in itself), Microsoft had become a behemoth with a product portfolio that spanned operating systems, programming languages, office productivity software, games, and even a very decent flight simulator. Having overtaken IBM as the leading provider of software for the business environment, Microsoft was firmly committed to its principle of “desktop hegemony at all cost”. Consequently, it defended its interests with a lot of fervor.

In his 1976 (!!!)  Open Letter to Hobbyists, “[Bill] Gates expressed frustration with most computer hobbyists who were using his company's Altair BASIC software without having paid for it. He asserted that such widespread unauthorized copying in effect discouraged developers from investing time and money in creating high-quality software. He cited the unfairness of gaining the benefits of software authors' time, effort, and capital without paying them as a rationale for refusing to publish the machine code for his company's flagship product, thereby making it available to lower-income hobbyists who could have borrowed such program listings from their local library and entered the program into their hobby computer by data entry.”

source: Wikipedia

When Linux and other open source software started becoming popular, Microsoft was the enemy to beat. I myself swore off all Microsoft software and started an experiment on Living Without Windows. This brace choice led to a variety of problems for which I had to find creative solutions. 

For instance at one of my customers (a bank) all email was done using Lotus Notes. At the time there was no Lotus Notes client for Linux so I did all my work email using my Internet email address (josv@osp.nl). After a while I received some complaints that this exposed bank documents to the Internet and that this was a security problem. In response I found a TLD where the bank had not registered their brand name domain, registered it, and configured my mail setup to send and receive mail from josv@thebank.tld, quieting the critical voices. 

Throughout these years I did retain a great (but grudging) respect for Microsoft, even though all Microsoft operating systems (with the exception of Xenix) and most other Microsoft software (with the exception of Visual C++) annoyed me greatly.  One of the reasons Microsoft kept impressing me is because of their awesome execution on ideas and especially because of their tenacity.

Here is an example: When MS-DOS was still ruling the planet and 640KB was thought to be enough RAM for everyone, Microsoft started working on Windows.

The haters will say (ad nauseam)  that Microsoft didn’t invent any of that and stole the idea from Apple and others, which is true and completely irrelevant.

Microsoft went forth and created Windows 1.0. I am not sure how many of you remember it, but let’s say it wasn’t great and consequently it was not very successful. But, they persevered and created Windows 2.0. Still not great. Then they created Windows 2.1 (a.k.a. Windows 286 and Windows 386) which used some of the “advanced” features of more modern CPUs (like memory protection and virtual memory). Still not awesome, but you might have been excused for thinking that this was potentially going somewhere. 

In the meantime, the hardware had caught up and when Windows 3.0 and eventually Windows 3.1 came out it was not entirely terrible and could run on a lot of modern PCs. Then Windows for Workgroups was released and took the world by storm because of its effortless networking features. The rest, as they say, is history.

Many people will say that Windows 3.x still sucked, and it definitely had its problems. It had one overarching advantage though: It had unparalleled device driver support and ran the vast majority of the software that was out there and that people had invested uncounted billions in. At that time I ran FreeBSD (also on a 386), which is clearly the better operating system, but it didn’t run a decent spreadsheet and didn’t support any printers that were not Postscript, so who was going to use that?

Answer: Nerds.

Compare Microsoft’s tenacity in bringing Windows to the masses with Google’s attitude towards their new products. Anyone remember Google Wave? Or Glass? If it doesn’t immediately take off, Google forgets about it in a hot second and tries to find the next big thing, which is probably why they have not invented anything popular themselves since the search engine and GMail.

That’s definitely a bit unfair, but please remember that they bought YouTube, they bought Earth, they bought Flights, and they bought Android.

In contrast, when Microsoft is committed to something, they are committed. I cannot remember anything that Microsoft threw their weight behind and then discontinued, with the exception of OS/2, which, though stillborn, inexplicably had its fans.

Cue people replying to this article with examples of discontinued Microsoft products :-)

Another thing I really admire in Microsoft is its strength of execution. Somewhere in the early 1990s Microsoft, which started its life as a Basic vendor, had pretty much ceded the Basic market to Borland’s Turbo Basic. Microsoft’s Basic interpreters were so far behind that it was almost inconceivable that they would catch up. Almost. Microsoft decided to turn the table on them and commissioned two parallel projects to close the gap. The first project needed to make improvements to their current offering to make sure that it stayed vaguely competitive. The second project needed to come up with a completely new product that was going to capture the market. The first group of people did whatever needed to be done (by the way: Sucks to be in that team) whereas the second group created Visual Basic, changing software development on Windows forever. 

The third thing I would like to mention is the fantastic way in which Microsoft leveraged IT professionals in the market. In the days before the Internet, you could take out a subscription with Microsoft Tech Net and/or Microsoft Developer Net which would give you unparalleled access to almost all Microsoft software and tools. I had these two subscriptions and throughout the year I would get heaps and heaps of mail from Microsoft with CDs containing every version of almost every Microsoft software product in every language imaginable. If I wanted to test my code on an Arabic Windows NT 3.51 while talking to an Italian SQL Server, no problem, I had the software! These CDs also contained books, manuals, video lectures, courses, you name it. And all of that for the equivalent of about $1500 per year (if memory serves me right).

By doing that, Microsoft bound an incredible community of software developers and IT companies to them and these did the good work of selling and distributing Microsoft-software based solutions to the world. Together they acted as a huge force multiplier for Microsoft because they owed their livelihood to Microsoft. Microsoft certified them, sent business leads to them, and invited them to conferences.

As a member of that community I got invited to the Dutch launch event of Windows 95 and that was quite easily the slickest show I had ever been to.

Of course for all of their impressive tech work and smart marketing, Microsoft also deployed some incredibly aggressive business practices which were responsible for the demise of many competitors and which landed them in hot water with the US federal government. But in my book that just comes with being big and wanting to stay successful; it’s not like today’s tech giants are the peace-loving hippies that Microsoft never claimed they were…

Microsoft has definitely had some problems coming to terms with the Internet and the open source world but they have reinvented themselves magnificently. Their latest and greatest offering, Azure, might not be the best cloud around, but they are (again) successfully leveraging their existing channels into (large) customers to ensure the success of their offerings. And whereas you would once never be fired for buying IBM, you have for a few decades now been able to sleep soundly after selecting Microsoft.

So there it is kids, you always have to be afraid of Microsoft. Even I (of Living Without Windows fame :-) started using Bing on a regular basis, though to be honest only for creating the images that support my articles and presentations.