Why Microsoft Fears The Internet
Author: David Lane
Date: February 16th, 2005

Apparently deep inside Langley, oops! Did I say Langley? Of course I mean, deep inside Redmond, there have been many meetings dealing with how the software giant can protect itself from the internet and XML. It is hard to know exactly what was said but I imagine one of them went something like this:

Senior Talking Head: “Ok, it looks like we have stayed ahead of the curve by internet enabling everything.” 

Junior TH 1: “Yes, that was good thinking. We nearly bought the farm with that. The whole thing almost got away from us.” 

Senior TH: “Okay, that’s enough of that talk. We do still have a problem. We can’t use the same approach that we did with java as we can’t bring our own version of the internet into being.” 

Junior TH2: “Are you sure about that Sir?” 

Senior TH: “What have I told you about calling me Sir? Remember we have to cultivate an air of informality. Can you imagine what the mud dwelling geeks would do if they fully understood the machine? There would be open rebellion. And while a cull may be periodically useful, we don’t have time for that right now.” 

Junior TH2, clearing his throat: “erm… sorry about that…. Steve” 

Senior TH: “Our plan here has to be a ‘back to basics’ approach. We need to leverage our control of the desktop into the internet. The way we do this is by making it possible for one company that uses our desktop and server products to be able to seamlessly connect via our internet protocols to our desktop and server products in other companies.” 

Junior TH1, shaking his head: “But that means we need to get all the pond scum…” 

Senior TH: “Hey, we no longer call third party developers that. They are our helpers. They spread our message. What are they?” 

Junior TH1 & TH2 in unison: “They are our helpers.” 

Senior TH: “That’s better.” 

Junior TH1 “So how are we going to get our helpers to adopt our coding protocols when using the internet for application integration between companies?” 

Senior TH, smiling magnanimously: “It couldn’t be easier. We will give them an open XML standard for encapsulating data between applications that will work for anyone’s products even though it is targeted for our applications. Then, when they have adopted it, we will just use our knowledge and control of the office applications to make sure that ours work better with those protocols than anyone else’s.” 

Junior TH1: “Right, just like we used our knowledge of Windows to give our Office Suite the advantage over our competitors, we will do the same to make sure our server apps work better through the net that any of theirs?” 

Senior TH: “Bright boy, you’re learning.”  

You see what most people do not realise is that amongst all the mouseover effects and tooltips resides a Borglike mentality that takes seriously the injunction to “Assimilate, assimilate.”  

Here is the pattern: Microsoft takes an open standard developed by someone else and then adds their own non-standard features to it. This delivers a double whammy of diluting the standard by making it inconsistent across platforms and advertising Microsoft’s own feature set. In the background MS are developing their own version of the standard so that at the appropriate moment they can reveal “the cake they baked earlier” and try to dominate that aspect of the market the open standard was trying to address. 

There are many examples that follow a variation of this tactic but to take just two: Unix was re-engineered to become NT; and Java was thwarted and stalled until ASP had become dominant and they were ready to unleash C#. 

But it does not stop there. You see Microsoft are all for open standards as long as they sufficiently dominate the market for that standard. This can be shown by the fact that in November 2004, Microsoft finally agreed to publish their XML document standards. In addition they committed to making sure that their documents would in future all be based around XML. This is important because the use of XML documents removes ownership of the data from the software that created it to the person who created the document. The problem for Microsoft is that it means you will not need Microsoft Word to open a document created by Microsoft Word. The same goes for Excel, Powerpoint and the rest. XML documents encourage interoperability between different packages. Microsoft presumably felt comfortable enough doing this as they basically own the word-processing and spreadsheet market and so can afford to open this little chink in their armour. It will be fun to see how fast they lock up shop if a true challenger does appear on the scene. 

Back on the internet front, the standards that they are currently hocking, having moved on from DNA, are web services and SOAP – the Simple Object Access Protocol that allows applications and specifically Microsoft applications to talk to each other through the Internet. Now this sounds good because it is good, in principal.  The idea that different companies will be able to check each others stock and process orders regardless of the actual location of components sounds like a boon to customers. Personally I am not so sure that it will be because technically an international bank transfer should take a few minutes and cost pennies but in reality still takes three days and 30 dollars – so go figure.  But yes, I can see the streamlining benefits for different companies working better with each other. I can certainly see the benefit to Microsoft who hopes to extend its desktop domination of the bigger companies into a global domination of ….. well, everything. 

The danger to them comes from third party developers and open source / freeware software.  When it comes to their direct competitors, MS uses its massive team of programmers and almost unlimited funds to out-feature them – “Anything you can do, we can do too.” The third party developers, however, are just too many to be dealt with in this way. A more subtle approach is required: 

On this last one, I do not mean their competitors like IBM and Sun who are, of course, each trying out their own version of world domination, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” 

The real alternatives are Linux and open source. “Oh, that old chestnut,” I hear you say. Well, if it is not true that Microsoft fears the combination of open source, the internet and XML, then why did Steve Ballmer (the Microsoft CEO and a different Steve to the one mentioned above) indicate earlier this year that the problem with Linux was that it violated more than 200 software patents? Why did he come out pitching for SUN in its dispute with Linux if he did not see it as the greater threat?  

The author of the study Mr. Ballmer cites, Dan Ravicher - executive director of PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation) – clarifies how the information in his report was misrepresented: 

"Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does……There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system." 

Maybe by now, your thinking, “Ok, I can see the argument but they are not doing anything illegal and there does not seem to be any way to avoid living in the Microsoft world.” 

But there is. 

Start by reading about some of the alternatives. 

http://www.openoffice.org/

http://www.linux.org/

Or simply type “Open Source software” into a search engine.  It quickly becomes apparent that the open source world already has the necessary platforms and packages to cater for almost any business requirement. In fact Microsoft’s product catalogue palls in comparison. Combine this with the low cost distribution network that is the web and the open flexible communication protocols of XML, and you have all the ingredients you need to avoid the Richmond boys. 

So maybe Microsoft has good reason to fear the internet.”