TechView: Advice To Reno: Follow The Servers

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May 18, 1998

TechView:
Advice To Reno: Follow The Servers

h, boy, here we go again. As Windows 98 approaches its release date, there are rumblings of an injunction by the Department of Justice to prevent its shipment--and Microsoft is trying to cut Justice off at the pass with a motion to preempt such an injunction. Microsoft is calling Justice's attention a "political" attack.

Meanwhile, according to some reports, Windows NT 5.0 is starting to draw Justice's attention as well . Apparently, somebody in Janet Reno's office just figured out where the truly anticompetitive piece of Microsoft's strategy is--on the server. It took them long enough.

The Windows 95 dispute is almost a moot point now that Netscape is giving away its browser. All the real money is in the server components of Internet and intranet technology-directory services, Web servers, messaging servers, and the like. Coincidentally, more of those server components are being integrated into the Windows NT operating system--at least, Microsoft versions of the technology are.

Take, for example, Internet Information Server. It's been available free for Windows NT Server since version 3.51, and ostensibly offers similar levels of functionality to those provided by other Web server products for NT. But when competitors attempted to build products that competed with IIS on the less expensive NT Workstation platform, Microsoft changed the connection licensing for Workstation to close the door on them. Sure, N etscape FastTrack Server still runs on NT Workstation, but with a 10-concurrent-user limit, what's the point?

Then there's directory services. Microsoft will include Active Directory Service as part of the NT 5.0 operating system. And while other companies, including Novell, have brought their directory services to NT, Microsoft has continually spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about them--at one point suggesting that NDS for NT wouldn't be supported by NT 5.0.

This sort of strategy has always been part of Microsoft's operating system business--each time someone has discovered a profitable piece of add-on functionality for the operating system du jour, Microsoft has either bought the technology or copied it for its next operating system release. Remember Stac Electronics' compression software? Remember how Microsoft essentially stole it for DOS 6? Remember the lawsuit?

But the strategy is particularly effective--and insidious--on the NT Server platform. By integrating IIS and ADS (and their APIs) into NT, Microsoft creates a built-in market for the products that integrate with them-like BackOffice. Eliminating competitors' ability to compete on an equal footing with NT is truly anticompetitive behavior.

Forget the browsers, Janet. It's the server, stupid.