svlug-book_review_breaking_windows

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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."


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