Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

To some of you, this may sound ludicrous or heretical; to others, it's old news. People have been praising and bashing Microsoft for about as long as the company's been around -- not only for its products, but also for its corporate practices, attitude and demeanor. Some have labeled Microsoft arrogant, while others see the company as merely confident and self-assured. Regardless, Microsoft's basic character hasn't changed much over time. It has always been passionately aggressive and, despite occasional lukewarm gestures at cross-platform dabbling (anybody remember "COM on Unix?"), it has always clearly stated in words or actions its ultimate goal: "Windows Everywhere," from your desktop to your toaster.

For the first time, however, it looks to me like the company just may get there. I leave it to pundits and the Justice Department to make moral and legal judgements about Microsoft's business conduct. What I am more interested in here is what effect Microsoft's increasing market dominance in an increasing number of areas has on me as a developer and consumer of technology. Frankly, I'm not sure I like what I see.

Microsoft has essentially killed the competition in desktop OS and office-automation products and dealt a telling blow to what once looked like the greatest single threat to OS-centric/Windows-based client/server apps: the browser. Netscape isn't dead yet, but barring an unforeseen miracle (especially after the Netscape 6 debacle) the company seems to be on its way down the slope to increased marginalization. I've seen a tremendous increase in the release of Internet Explorer-only Web apps in the last six months. Unfortunately, people don't seem to realize that once you tie yourself to any one specific browser, you've largely negated the great advantage of browser-based/thin-client systems over traditional client/server apps.

But Microsoft knows this very well: Since IE4, it has done a very effective job of making IE the path of least resistance as well as, in most opinions, the best browser on the market. Further, since Microsoft took pains to tie the browser to its Windows operating systems, almost everybody has it. For those relative few using alternate desktop operating systems -- say, Mac OS -- Microsoft has arranged it so that IE comes bundled with the OS and is automatically set up for you as the default browser. Of course, for anybody who, for some strange reason, doesn't already have the browser, it's just a free download away. For Web developers, Microsoft has guaranteed the availability of easy-to-use tools that can quickly add enhanced functionality to Web apps with a few clicks -- and that, incidentally, also make the apps IE-only.

So where's the incentive for anyone else to build a better browser? How would they ever afford to do the marketing to build more than a tiny amount of market share if they did? Browser alternatives -- some of which are quite good -- are out there, but the reality, short of clearly faltering Netscape, is Microsoft basically has this critical market sewn up.

Embrace, Extend, Envelop and Digest

Windows 2000, despite various technical soft spots, is increasingly seen in the corporate world as a credible contender for all but the largest enterprise uses. From its core in desktops and the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) market, Microsoft has consistently -- and with each new release -- expanded its server OS market share. The company continues to diversify into a truly huge number of markets (too many to list here), and for each muddled failure or laughable first-generation product, there's usually an eventual success somewhere along the line (the famous "version 3 factor").

The number of significant blunders Microsoft has made along the way, as well as some of the awful or technologically weak products which it has released, might have killed or at least discouraged a lesser company -- or at least one with less long-term dedication to dominate its markets. But the combination of Microsoft's aggressive business tactics and its ability to pour money into target markets from its perpetual cash cows (OS sales and office automation applications) has resulted in a growing portfolio of industry-leading products and the relegation of competitors in many of those markets to either oblivion or niche roles.

Microsoft's products and technologies have been consistently supported by such well-practiced strategies of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) as strong-arm marketing tactics, competitor buy outs, preemptive vaporware announcements, "embrace/extend/make incompatible" and linking everything to everything else (particularly the OS), to name a few. All of these tactics by design encourage developers and end users to use, and ultimately lock themselves into, Microsoft products, platforms and technologies. Although none of these tactics is unique to Microsoft, the company has been incredibly successful with them, leveraging dominance in one area into a foothold in the next.

All vendors play hardball. Microsoft has just been better than most at the game and at exploiting its OS dominance. All of the tactics that we've grown to know and love -- or hate -- in the IT industry, depending on your perspective, have undeniably paid off, big-time. The existence of Linux, Mac OS X, StarOffice and so on, only point out by comparison just how dominant Microsoft/Wintel really has become in many, if not most, of the markets each has pursued.

Look at the market segments: desktop OS, word processor, spreadsheet, project management, browser and so on. In agricultural terms, each of these areas has become, for all practical purposes, a monoculture -- a single crop extending as far as the eye can see. It's Microsoft and some niche players, and if any of the players get too big or a new one pops up, chances are Microsoft will buy them or drive them out of business. Embrace, extend, envelop and digest.

So what's wrong with a monoculture? Isn't standardization good? As any biologist will tell you, much of the strength of an ecosystem lies in its diversity, and almost any economist will note that real competition is largely good for both industries and consumers. A monoculture tends to be fragile because of its sameness. Perhaps more importantly, however, a monoculture is by nature slow to adapt, change and innovate -- particularly in the case of the computer industry. What incentive is there to really innovate when your only competitor is yourself? All you need to do is make slow, incremental changes just often enough to assure a steady supply of upgrade revenue. The pace of genuine change slows to a crawl, and opportunities for dramatic quantum leaps in technology disappear.

It's like a world where the only restaurant is Chili's: Nothing is really wrong with the food, and it's certainly convenient, consistent and affordable. However, it's probably not the best the culinary industry has to offer, and the selection will always be within a fairly narrow range of options. The chance of anything startling or groundbreaking happening is vanishingly small, and in fact, there's a very strong vested interest in not rocking the slow, comfortable boat. By controlling many of the commodity areas of the industry, particularly operating systems, office-automation applications and browsers, Microsoft assures us a limited, consistent range of "food." Ideally, the company should be providing the plates and the utensils, not cooking the food that goes on those plates and certainly not trying to dictate that only Microsoft-flavored food can be eaten with its utensils.

Finally Good Enough

In the last six months I've seen a number of companies decide that Exchange, Windows 2000, SQL Server and the like, are finally "good enough" to warrant tossing out everything not made by Microsoft -- all in the name of standardization and TCO (total cost of ownership) reduction. At some point, an increasing number of these businesses will decide that the costs involved in supporting anything other than Microsoft operating systems and products is no longer "worth it."

Microsoft encourages this decision by creating products just proprietary enough -- with "sufficiently extended supporting standards" -- to often make cross-platform integration significantly more difficult, thereby encouraging (or forcing) users to adopt such products (Active Directory, anybody?). I've seen a lot of vendors get burned or sunk trying to play the compatibility game with Microsoft. In many areas, the full cost of development burdens necessary to achieve and maintain cross-platform compatibility is now largely on Microsoft's competitors -- another advantage for the company.

Granted, it hasn't been all roses for Microsoft. Palm OS units still outsell Pocket PCs, the latest and greatest incarnation of the Microsoft OS-based PDA (personal digital assistant) by 10 to 1, although the gap may be narrowing somewhat, at least in the targeted enterprise market. Sun's J2EE Java platform -- despite Microsoft's efforts -- is still a widely used, effective and highly successful cross-platform development language, and it is an increasingly dominant choice for enterprise middleware. Although technically well designed, C# -- Microsoft's "Java-killer" -- has been largely met by developers with a big yawn. Despite Oracle's recent unwise changes in licensing schemes, the company still is the database of choice for most truly mission-critical, large-scale systems. Sun servers running the Solaris OS provide much of the high-capacity Internet infrastructure, and Apache still whomps IIS's butt in overall Web server market share.

Genuine areas of competition are still out there. But as a lot of worthy Microsoft competitors have discovered, you only have to seriously stumble once and it's all over. You can arguably be best-of-breed and still lose. All Microsoft has to do is get close enough to be in the ballpark and then, via lowball (or free) pricing, carefully placed ties to the OS and other Microsoft products, marketing muscle and so on, it provides the path of least resistance.

Time is an incredibly valuable asset in this Internet-speed world, and one most companies don't have the luxury to spend -- as so many of the dot-bombs with "really, we'll be profitable some day" business plans have discovered. Microsoft can afford to spend time and make mistakes, and that's an incredible advantage for them. Because of its dominant position, Microsoft also holds the advantage of being perceived in IT management as the "safe choice." As was once said of IBM, "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft." I've seen that truism proven false, but certainly the perception is that it is true.

The World According to Microsoft

Nothing is new about Microsoft's strategies and tactics; they have remained fundamentally unchanged for a long time. In my first planned cross-product review as a "Network Computing" editor, Microsoft was one of the companies I really wanted to include. I was talking with the company's PR agency, Waggener Edstrom, and the reps wanted to discuss my review criteria before deciding whether or not to participate.

The primary argument was that one of my planned criteria, "cross-platform compatibility," which is frequently used in our report cards, was "irrelevant," and WaggEd attempted to persuade me to drop that element from my review. The reps stated in a earnest, straightforward way that Microsoft believed its customers were uninterested in cross-platform capability. All customers really needed or wanted was "interoperability," that is, the ability to integrate Windows-based systems and products with data on old "legacy" (non-Windows) systems. That's the Microsoft world in a nutshell.

Recent attempts to make Windows 2000 a more interoperable platform fit in completely with Microsoft's overall goal of providing connectivity to "legacy" platforms until the enterprise can be convinced to migrate those platforms to a Windows OS. Looking ahead I can see one possible, plausible future where "cross-platform" really does mean -- as I used to hear Microsoft engineers and management contend -- supporting more than one flavor of Windows. The ASP (Application Service Provider) portions of the .NET model are in part, I suspect, Microsoft's forward-looking attempt to create and maintain a perpetual revenue stream for itself once it has pretty much sewn up the markets it's in.

Not everyone in the industry sees Microsoft's increasing dominance as bad news. Certainly the company's partners are quite happy with its increasing domination and market share. One such vendor I recently met with was celebrating the Sun/Microsoft Java lawsuit settlement as basically the end of Java as a serious contender for enterprise development on Windows platforms. The reason given: "Microsoft would no longer be supporting Java."

As a Java developer, I personally think that's hogwash. The point is, however, that this vendor saw the possibility of developers and customers being even more closely tied to Microsoft-specific technologies, platforms and tools as a purely good thing for its business. And many will argue that Microsoft has brought increased standardization, decreased prices, better ease of use, cleaner system administration and decreased development time to the market. I've seen all of these points argued vigorously on both sides, but in the end, they're largely irrelevant to the point I'm making here -- the politics of product choice.

The World According to Me and You

When making purchases, I recently have found myself looking favorably at Microsoft competitors, almost as much for their mere existence as for their technical excellence. I want real competition in the marketplace, because that's the only way we're going to have true innovation and to avoid the stagnation of a world where the only choice is whatever a single source (or its captive partners) wants to give us. I find I'm inclined to resist the path of least resistance because I think I can see where it leads, and it's not a good place for the industry or for me personally. Microsoft, and by extension its customers, is potentially the victim of its own overwhelming success.

I'm not saying, "don't buy Microsoft." Plenty of knee-jerk anti-Microsoft zealots are out there and, honestly, I'm not one of them. Microsoft is not the Evil Empire. In a way, this column is a compliment to the company's unbelievable success. I am intimately familiar with a large number of Microsoft's products, a fair proportion of which are very solid offerings; some are genuinely excellent. As a reviewer, I have and will continue to award top marks to those of Microsoft's products that are technically superior to their competitors. The company has managed to accomplish some incredible things in the computer industry, and it has done much that has been of value. To paint Microsoft as some sort of destructive, malicious entity is both melodramatic and clearly inaccurate.

Nevertheless, as I look around I recognize that, from the point of view of consumers and enterprise customers, there is such a thing as too much success. Microsoft has grown too big and too dominant in too many critical areas, for our good and, ultimately, for its own. The vision Microsoft has always espoused, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, of a largely Microsoft-centric IT world, is one possible future. And it may be the one, as an industry, we follow. Certainly, that looks like an increasingly likely possibility.

What I'm suggesting is that IT professionals at every level need to open their eyes and consciously decide what kind of world they want to create with their dollars. In the capitalistic world money is power, and potential energy, and we vote with our individual and collective choices on where our money is spent. The sum total of the choices we make about where to apply our money-energy largely creates the world in which we live.

I think it's crucial to note that the choices we make now may well have a fundamental impact on the choices we have (or don't have) later. Personally, I think preserving competition and genuine choice is important, and so on a personal level, I'll do what I can to support a diversity of choices: buying competitive products and encouraging the use and acceptance -- by Microsoft and others -- of genuinely open, cross-platform technologies and standards. I'm no fool, though. I'm not about to buy some half-baked solution simply because it's Open Source, runs on Linux or is made by a Microsoft competitor. Technology choices must be backed by solid business justification.

Both Microsoft and its competitors will certainly continue to try to make their products the best, or at least the easiest, choice. But when choosing where to spend my money, if there are several products in the same ballpark, I will at least consider the politics of the situation and the long-term benefit of avoiding an IT monoculture. Oftentimes, the path of least resistance eventually leads to disaster. Nevertheless, it's a very tempting and easy path to walk down, especially when it's deliberately engineered to be so.