Fighting The Enemy Within

By Stuart J. Johnston

Who is Microsoft's biggest enemy? The U.S. Department of Justice? The nine states that are investigating the company's business practices? The European Union or the Japanese government? The mysterious alliance of CEOs of top competitors who reportedly meet regularly to plot Microsoft's downfall? Ralph Nader? NetAction? All of the above?

To my mind, the company's biggest enemy is none of the above. Instead, I think the company's worst enemy is itself. Or in the words of th e old Pogo cartoon, "We have met the enemy and they is us."

Why? First, let's look at the current federal case. When the Federal Trade Commission began its investigation back in 1989, it got to be a standard joke when discussing Microsoft's situation: a jury of whose peers? Bill Gates'? No way.

The technical issues in litigating questions in computer law would preclude most of them from ever being fully and fairly examined in court. After all, how are you going to seat a jury with enough technical knowledge to make an informed decision as to what constitutes illegal coding?

Many of us covering the company's contretemps with the FTC and later the Department of Justice assumed that such complexities worked in favor of Microsoft in the court system. But last month, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson may have proved otherwise. His definition of removing Internet Explorer from Windows 95, after all, is the one that matters -- not necessarily a definition shrewdly concocted to technically obey the judge's or der while not providing any choice.

Ordered to immediately remove IE from PC vendors' versions of Windows 95, Microsoft came up with three options -- the offending version or two others that would be unacceptable to both PC vendors and consumers. It reminded me of the kid who gets caught kicking the family cat and, when yelled at, kicks the cat one more time just to show that he can.

What hubris!

There are logical arguments for Microsoft's response, of course. The company is really in one of those "damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't" situations. Deleting all of the files used by IE fulfills the letter but not the spirit of the judge's temporary injunction -- since that would cause the system not to function properly.

But simply deleting the IE icon and the main executable file for IE, while meeting the spirit of Judge Jackson's ruling, only removes about 3% of IE's files. The rest of the files continue to eat up massive amounts of precious hard-disk space, leaving Microsoft open to attac ks by competitors that merely occupying that much space would preclude manufacturers from installing Netscape Navigator.

But it was Microsoft's readily apparent arrogance in the face of the court order that sent so many people into paroxysms. If Microsoft wanted to blunt the force of public anger, why didn't they offer both sets of options instead of their "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude?

After all, if Microsoft and many magazine reviewers actually believe that IE is the technically superior browser, then what are Gates and company afraid of? Just giving it away helps to draw new users to IE and to maintain its market share.

And many people, particularly consumers, feel safe with Microsoft software, so there hardly seems to be any reason for all the fear that if they agree to ship two versions of Windows 95 (and Windows 98) -- one with the browser and one without -- that IE will lose much momentum.

Perhaps it is Microsoft's institutionalized paranoia -- the fundamental belief that everything co uld come toppling down tomorrow. Certainly, in this industry that could happen. But that is not very likely and it is not how most of the giants of yesterday fell. Mostly they lost sight of their primary customers, or stumbled, or became too big to change fast enough.

And while dwelling constantly on the uncertainty of the future is useful in keeping developers and marketers focused on the fierce competition in the marketplace, it can also produce backlash when those same people begin to display arrogance. Additionally, the idea of winning at any cost can become such an all-encompassing fixation that companies lose track of the most important part of the equation -- the users.

After all, even if the judge fined Microsoft $1 million a day for every day since the first version of IE shipped in Windows 95, it still would only make a small dent in Microsoft's more than $9 billion in cash.

But remember three years ago, when Intel admitted that Pentium processors had a bug that produced math errors unde r certain, very specific, though rare, circumstances? Intel showed little interest in fixing the problem, saying reports of the problem were overblown, and that it would replace processors for users who could prove they had a problem. Users were incensed, and the ensuing melee produced more bad public relations for Intel than any competitor could possibly have paid for in attack ads.

What Intel had disregarded at its own risk was the public's perception of the problem. It was probably true that the bug only affected a minuscule number of users. But its apparently cavalier attitude toward users' concerns hurt its image.

I recall one frantic call from a user at the time, afraid his machine had the bug. When I asked him what his hardware was, he read the sticker on the front of the machine: "486/66." (Another caller turned out to have a Mac.)

Likewise, this past Christmas Eve, after running out of gift wrap at the last minute, I walked over to a nearby chain drugstore to buy another roll as well as a few other items. When I got to the checkout, however, the clerk informed me that the store's computer system had been up and down all day and she had to have a stock boy check the price on every item in my basket, one at a time, as the line behind me burgeoned with other last-minute customers.

Looking at the line, the clerk muttered that she didn't care how rich Bill Gates is, "His software is really terrible." Looking quickly over the system, I ventured that it was really unlikely that the store's cash registers and inventory system were running on Microsoft software. "Don't defend them," she snapped.

It suddenly became obvious that Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?" ads had become combined in the clerk's mind with all the news reports over the antitrust suit to produce a completely unintended effect. When you become a household name and then commit such hubris so publicly, it can really backfire. You can't buy a public relations image that bad. And you can't pay to have it go away, either . Especially when the head of your company is the richest guy on earth -- a guy who makes international news when he gets out of a speeding ticket under unusual circumstances.

Ironically, all of this may be distracting Microsoft from obeying its own mantra: give the users what they want. An exclusive InformationWeek survey of 100 IT managers conducted in late October found that only 25% want the browser to be integrated into Windows' user interface. There is no hard information as to why 75% would prefer the browser to remain separate, but I'll venture three strong possibilities.

First, IT professionals like stability. And browsers -- partly because of the competitive demands to ship new versions twice or more each year -- are notoriously unstable. When the browser becomes part of the user interface for the users' primary desktop, system crashes quickly become critical and costly problems.

Second, some IT managers have told me that it is confusing to users to view files on their own hard disks as if they were locations on the Web. Additionally, IT managers do not universally grant Web access to all users.

Third, people want to choose for themselves what browser they will use.

Fighting off attacks that the company views as unnecessary meddling in software design, on its face, seems like a laudable enough goal. But when the impact of so much bad publicity is beginning to register emotionally on users, continuing Microsoft's "in-your-face" tactics while disregarding the apparent desires of such a large percentage of its IT customers seems foolish and possibly costly.

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Rich Levin: Run Time Rich fills you in on all of the latest products, issues, and trends in application development.		Stuart J. Johnston: Redmond Watch As our eyes and ears in Redmond, Stuart gives his perspective on the latest events at Microsoft.		Charles Pelton: Eye On IT Charles explores IT management issues and strategies that business and technology managers face.

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