Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft
David Bank’s Breaking Windows offers a scathing inside look at the past few tumultuous years at the Microsoft Corporation. Bank, who covers the company for The Wall Street Journal, bases this well-written tale on interviews he has conducted with most major players (including Bill Gates) along with boxes of e-mails and other documents that “provided an unprecedented glimpse into strategic databases and internal decision-making processes of a company that had long restricted outside access to its
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Fights over the future of the internet,
This book isn’t really about Bill Gates. It’s about the internal struggles within Microsoft for control over the direction of the company during a critical time at the end of the 90’s. The internal email evidence released during the Microsoft trial, often quite inflammatory in tone, is used to devastating effect to reinforce the argument that there was a major schism within Microsoft at a time when it was seen as a monolithic dinosaur. A break between those who wanted embrace and extend the paradigm shift of internet services and those (Gates included) who remained transfixed by the revenue and possibilities for expansion of the Windows monopoly into Pocket PC’s or servers.
Despite the efforts within the Internet industry to keep communication standards open (with XML, SOAP and XML-RPC), the worry voiced in this book, and elsewhere round the Net, is that Microsoft will use its dominance on the desktop to entice a critical mass of developers under the .NET umbrella, before wielding its power over that arena to extract payments for each transaction made over the network. Interestingly for those who find this a little too close to a Kafkaesque/Wineresque nightmare, there are extensive quotes within the book from key figures within Microsoft like Allchin and Ballmer which reinforce the impression that this is exactly the strategy behind .NET, and indeed, they see no reason to hide this. The focus at the company is and always has been foremost on revenue and growth, and the internal perception of the anti-trust action is presented as one of disbelief and outrage.
However, to its credit, this isn’t a hatchet job, it’s a carefully balanced view of Microsoft at a time when a lot of its competitors used the anti-trust trial as a stick to beat concessions from Redmond, and companies like Sun are not spared from criticism. The text is technically quite savvy, including jargon only when necessary, but you won’t learn more in detail about technical issues from reading it. It’s more about the personal disputes over fiefdoms and strategies within Microsoft from the initial u-turn over the Internet in the mid-90’s to the struggles for control over the browser team/code between the operating system units and the Internet ‘doves’ within the company. Then on to the synthesis in 2000 of two diametrically opposed forces, the Internet and Desktop Windows, in .NET.
If only more tech Journalism ‘got it’ the way this book does. As Banks says late on in the book ‘Forget Browsers’. The real issues have moved on since the anti-trust trial started years ago, and the mainstream internet is the new battleground.
With the launch of Windows XP, Breaking Windows could not be more relevant to anyone who uses computers, whether or not they use Windows on the desktop. As evidenced by Redmond’s aggressive colonisation of areas as diverse as streaming video, smart tags and instant messaging in Windows XP, the will of the software giant is far from broken.
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|Good stuff!,
Very interesting book to read. The writer has been writing a long time about Microsoft so he seems to know the top management and has been able to interview them. In addition to this, he had the material from Microsoft’s leagal battles (public documents) – including emails exchanged between Microsoft employees.
In my opinion this book gives very good insight on Microsoft’s business strategy and their management practises. For technical people familiar with Microsoft technologies (like .NET) it is interesting to see how these basic principles show in Microsoft’s current efforts.
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