This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: 28 Oct 2001 05:28:30 -0000 From: John Conover <conover@rahul.net> To: svlug@svlug.org Subject: [svlug] Breaking Windows There is a good book, (I just picked it up at Borders in Los Gatos,) on Microsoft, and how it kind of botched its strategy of the last 7 years: "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft", David Bank, The Free Press, New York, New York, 2001, ISBN 0-7432-0315-1. Mentions Linux, and doesn't paint a picture of competence of the internal management of Microsoft-taken from internal MS e-mail obtained during the AT case. A really good book, IMHO, on the strategy, mechanics and managment of the software industry. John BTW, Bank is a staff reporter for the WSJ, and lives in Berkeley. Interestingly, Win95-98 were interim product offerings because MS couldn't move Win2K into production, (finally it was cut from 69 MLOCs to 29, and shipped,) and it needed the upgrade income, (unlike OSS, Microsoft's customers are the shareholders, not the folks paying for Microsoft software-the dominant theme of MS management); MS had become a bloated organization, strangled by internal politics, lack of strategy, and micro management. Interestingly, during, roughly, the same period, the Linux community beat MS to the marketplace with an equivalent product offering. Both have about the same number of MLOCs compiled on the distribution CDs. Bank does not treat Netscape kindly, either-and mentions some strategic management mistakes they made. MS botched IE*, too, bouncing its development around from organization to organization trying to figure out what it was supposed to be, and do, and where it fit. Bottom line, the book paints a picture that MS is not a juggernaut but had become a sheep in wolf's clothing-which it had to be since there was nothing there; management had lost confidence in the company's ability to define, execute, and deliver product since there was no strategy where it was going. The rank-and-file had lost confidence in management, too. (By 1995, the executives-excepting B. Gates-knew that the concept of a monolithic Windows software system was a legacy; and they couldn't figure out what was next, nor how to get to it, without dumping their Windows franchise.) Cute quote from Marc Andreessen was that Windows is a "partially debugged set of device drivers."