Customer Reviews

Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

David Bank used to cover Microsoft for the Wall Street Journal. In this book he describes the period 1997-2000 at Microsoft as it coped with the success of Windows and Office and the threat of the Internet to the continuation of Microsoft's dominance. From e-mail snippets and interviews with many current and former Microsoft employees, he presents the "protect Windows" perspective of Bill Gates and Jim Allchin and contrasts that with the "do the new internet thing" perspective of people like Brad Silverberg and myself and others. Obviously Bill Gates prevailed and so a lot of people left. Overall I think a very balanced presentation -- you at least understand why Bill did what he did, even if you don't agree with his decision. Several juicy quotes from me. :-)

While reading "Breaking Windows", I felt as if I was holding a stick of dynamite, because this gripping book completely blows the lid off of the "official" Microsoft history of the last few years. David Bank has told a story seldom reported in the mainstream media, which is that the real battle for the internet was fought not between Microsoft and Netscape, or even between Microsoft and Sun. Ground zero in the battle for control of the internet was fought between various factions within Microsoft. Senior management, which viewed the internet as a threat to the Windows franchise, tried to contain the "disruptive innovations" advocated by company strategists seeking to wholly embrace the concept of internet computing.

The dilemma facing Microsoft in the new millennium is that their blockbuster franchises, Windows and Office, are "feature driven" businesses. Users continually upgrade to the newest version in order to get more power and features. This value proposition was the growth engine of the computing industry until the mid 1990s, when the internet burst onto the scene. In the internet model, power and features matter less than connectivity. What creates value in a network environment is the number of people or applications that connect to the network. The Windows upgrade strategy becomes vulnerable, because with each attempt to upgrade the installed base, the upgrade version starts out initially with zero users. How can Microsoft simultaneously leverage the network effects of the internet, and further the Windows and Office franchises? Should these goals be part of a unified strategy?

Anyone who wishes to understand today's current "infection point" in software and computing architecture should read this book. It is a superb account of the internal crisis at Microsoft in 1999-2000, as the company confronted its transformation from insurgent innovator to defender of the status quo. The issues raised in this book continue to confront the company today, as Microsoft attempts to regain leading-edge industry leadership with the .NET platform, while at the same time protecting Windows from becoming a mere hardware abstraction layer. The book sets a "de-facto standard" in framing some of the issues surrounding Microsoft and the Internet.

This book provides a very detailed look at the inner workings of Microsoft. It describes the battles within the company to determine how to change in the face of the internet revolution. The author provides tremendous detail, much of which is taken from email correspondence made public by the antri-trust case. Some of the detail may be a little dull for some. My major problem with the book is with the author's premise that Gates has "broken" the company by not adapting to the internet quickly enough and instead focused on protecting and extending the windows dynasty. Nobody has really figured out how to make money off the internet, so why blame Microsoft? Gates did protect the Microsoft cash cow (windows). The internet has not made windows extinct, at least not yet. I think a little time is required to see if Gates' strategy was the right one or not. However, still a very worthwhile read for any interested in Microsoft and the PC industry.

Books about Microsoft a dime a dozen and often obsolete by the time they hit the bookshelves- especially this year's books looking back at the anti-trust trial. This book is different in focusing on internal conflicts inside Microsoft the past year or two. The main question is how to move past the mature Windows product family into the InterNet world. Here the book depicts battles between window-centric "conservatives" and net-centric "radicals". Also are reasons for the vigorous thrust into the entertainment market that will be important in late 2001.

Bank claims Bill Gates was pushed out of power by those who thought he was leading MicroSoft down the wrong business track. Thought the book is not about the anti-trust trial per se, it draws much of its material from the volumous email evidence exposed at the trial.

I personally was comforted by the fact that high-and-might Microsoft has the same internal infra-structure battles as the software company I work for. And a few misteps here and there won't necessarily kill a company.

David Banks does a masterful job of telling the story of the internal battle between Windows and Internet Explorer. It is insightful story over the struggle for strategy. Written in the tradition of the Wall Street Journal Bank's paints colorful vignettes of the key personalities and imbues the struggle between these two groups with drama.

However one of the interesting ironies of the business press is that journalists confuse themselves with their subjects. (I know of very few who went from covering a beat to running a company.) Unfortunately the more famous the publication you write for, the less you seem to remember that. This book simply fails when Banks puts on this business analyst hat. Luckily when you hear the scraping of the soapbox those pages are few and can be easily skimmed.

If you're interested in an internal history of Microsoft during the browser wars, buy this book.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is that the first half, based largely on emails produced during the antitrust trial, is a riveting and fascinating look at the internal Microsoft battles, while the last half is a poor analysis of a "missed" opportunity.

For the last half to be even readable you have to accept a few premises that simply were not supported by the text nor borne out by subsequent history. As an example, Gates is portrayed almost as an incompetent fool, eased aside into near-irrelevance by his board and Balmer. Further, the future of Microsoft's very existence is keyed upon abandoning (even giving away) Windows and starting from scratch, competing always on the last best effort with no clinging to any competitive advantage won so far, and that customers always value interoperability over utility, and so on.

While many of these would be highly desirable for competitors, the book repeatedly claims but never sufficiently makes the case for the theory that for its own sake Microsoft should discard its durable competitive advantage at every turn. I consider that to be an exceptional claim which demands exceptional proof, and which is never provided.

In the second half of the 90's Microsoft got caught in the now classical "Innovator's Dilemma", described by Clayton Christiansen in his book of the same name. The essence of it is that highly successful companies often become victims of their own legacy - not because of bad management or even obsolete technology, but because the inertia of their successful product improvements creates appearance that they are still on top of the game, better than any competition. But now these improvements do not matter any more, because new, emerging technological challengers do not strive to beat the entrenched leader on the same field, but instead compete with them on different criteria, which become more and more important to consumers while being cheaper and simpler than the established product, and eventually overcome the latter.

For the Microsoft the dilemma was the following: Windows was a gigantic cash cow for the company, its most profitable product, together with MSOffice firmly tied to the Windows platform. But the sudden explosion of the Internet, World Wide Web, and emerging Java technology by 1995 threatened to sweep away existing status quo, and totally reshape the landscape of computer industry, threatening Microsoft dominance in desktop computing. Should Microsoft stick defensively with Windows or should it reinvent itself around Internet and promising new technologies?

The author describes the intense internal debates and doubts within Microsoft campus about this very real and credible challenge of the Internet, that occurred in 1995-97.

Microsoft finally decided to stick with creaky old Windows. The author decries this course of events - arguing that the company squandered its chance for renewal. Yet, at least on the on the surface, it was a sound decision. Threat of the Internet largely passed, Microsoft is still dominant and profitable as never before. Was it right to stick with the old? Perhaps yes, from its monopoly position. It is (probably temporary) advantage to the Microsoft, but this ossification of monopolistic power is inevitably a huge loss to the whole computer industry and even science.

Supporters of Microsoft often claim it as an example of relentless innovation and technical brilliance. This is hardly credible in recent years. The rate of innovation in Microsoft products themselves was absolutely dismal in the last decade. Consider just one example. In the five years of intense competition from 1981 to 1986, before the Microsoft dominance, enormous strides were made in the user interface - one the most important aspect of personal computer technology. It evolved from primitive, barely legible screens of a dozen lines of greenish letters, where user had to precisely type some obscure, hard-to-remember commands, to the very usable system of windows and icons (first commercially implemented in Apple's Macintosh) which everybody could still recognize and use today. Compare this to the five-year period from 1995 to 2000. The operating system progressed from Windows 95 (not very innovative in itself) to ... (yawn) some barely distinguishable to an ordinary user messy bunch of obscure acronyms (Windows 98, 2000, ME, XP, whatever), united perhaps by a common feature that they are usually not worth many hours spend to install or upgrade them, until Microsoft policy on compatibility makes it absolutely necessary.

In fact every significant innovation in computers in recent years was in the areas outside the Microsoft monopoly power. Its domination most likely stifled progress not only inside the company, but almost everywhere in the computer industry. Contrary to widespread boosterism associated with go-go years of Internet boom, the decade of 90's was NOT a time of revolutionary developments in computer science. Research associated with new operation systems stagnated - a direct consequence of the Microsoft overwhelming dominance. No breakthrough comparable in importance, for example, to the Object-Oriented Programming in early 80's, occurred in software engineering. There was a lot of noisy activity but in fact only incremental progress in such areas as parallel computing, storage, databases. Computer graphics mainly followed developments invented earlier, in 70's and 80's (polygon graphics with increasingly sophisticated shadings, ray-tracing), only with vastly increasing hardware power.

Most of the compression algorithms (LZW, JPEG, MPEG, wavelets etc.) were also developed during previous two decades. So are all basic principles of modern cryptography and security. In this area the 90's were the years of commercialization and incremental, often glacial, improvements. In terms of new ideas this decade was not even remotely comparable to the fundamental revolutionary advances made in 70's. The only significant developments were in those areas outside of the Microsoft dominance - mostly in the Internet area (such as caching, distributed processing and storage), or the invention of the "virtual machine" used in Java technology.

Instead of being dynamic innovators, boldly leading computer industry towards the new horizons, thousands of Microsoft clever programmers long ago became an oppressive praetorian guard defending the palace of the current ruler.

Often cited as a sign of Microsoft technical prowess is the sheer volume of code contained in the Windows or Office programs (reaching some 30 million lines of code or more). This is preposterous. Millions of lines of code built in Windows are no more signs of innovativeness and vitality than ever increasing millions of tons of steel production were the evidence of economic strength of the later-era Soviet Union. True innovation is not proportional to the volume of code crammed into a package of software.

Christiansen's "Innovator Dilemma" and the ways to overcome it was conceptualized with application to companies which have comfortably leading position in their fields, but not all-encompassing monopolies, who can squash emerging competitors at the early stage. Microsoft is clearly (and legally) a monopoly - one of the most powerful in history. It is possible that one day it will be driven by pure market and business forces to reinvent itself and become again an innovative, entrepreneurial company. But for now, and in the immediate future, it continues to buck and stifle innovations in computing.

"Breaking Windows" is a must read for anyone interested in learning how the nut and bolts Microsoft's intellectual assets really function. This book gives great insight in to how Microsoft reacted to it's two most recent crises, the Internet and the DOJ. David Bank does a great job in explaining the many divisions, which exist at Microsoft but don't show up on the company's organizational chart. Themes such as "Windows Hawks" vs. "Internet Doves" and "Bill guys" vs. "Steve Guys" to name a few. Personally, this book has given me a clear vision on how it will deal with it's next big crisis, the Open Source Revolution.

I found this to be an interesting perspective of higher up Microserfs (Microbarons?), Java, DOJ, Windows, Office and the "threat" of the Internet. You get an insight into Microsoft's battle for control over "the one API".

The author brings us two conclusions I think:
* Even in one of the biggest technologically based companies what was picked was not based on merit but on politics.
* The most credible threat to wrest control over programmers hearts and minds seemed to come from Microsoft divisions first and everyone else second (like Netscape).

I read this at the same time as "Renegades of the Empire" which is another "expose" into Microsoft life but more from the trenches.

I couldn't put this wonderfully written book down. As an occasional Microsoft insider I can attest to the fact that Banks has done his homework and produced a comprehensive discussion of the technical & political wars at Redmond. We've all heard soundbites from the antitrust trail, this book gives the full story and more.