Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft

Author: David Bank List Price: $25.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0743203151 Publisher: Free Press (13 August, 2001) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 66,441 Average Customer Rating: 4.33 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

I love the people who say that Microsoft will take care of all its bugs. There are bugs because there is no formidable compitition! Microsoft can take it's sweet old time because there is no one out there to give people a real choice.

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.

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