Breaking Windows

With Open Source software projects, understanding why certain features are developed while others aren't, or even why entire projects split apart into contending factions, is often as simple as reading mailing list archives and web sites where the involved parties hash out (or at least air) their differences. Within a large corporation, it's a lot harder. Slashdot reader (and "former Microsoftie") Adam Barr contributes this review of Breaking Windows, which he describes as an imperfect but revealing look into the internal politics of Microsoft, and how clashing groups within the company have struggled to get their vision of Windows on the desktop -- sometimes a messy process.

Breaking Windows
author	David Bank
pages	288
publisher	Free Press
rating	8
reviewer	Adam Barr
ISBN	0743203151
summary	Tells the story of the battle that raged within Microsoft from 1997 to 2000, between those advocating sticking with the Windows strategy and those wanting a full-fledged shift to the Internet.

The Scoop

This is one of the best-written books about Microsoft that I have read, and as a former employee I have read most of them. Focusing on the internal battles gives a new perspective on the company. It hopefully shatters, once and for all, the myth that Microsoft is a hive community marching in line behind Bill Gates. Executives and regular employees are shown battling over issues large and small, with a consistent public story emerging only at the end, if at all. Bank also shows how Microsoft's legal strategy in the Justice Department case was affected by the political and technical battles that were simultaneously going on within the company.

What's To Like

The book does a great job of telling its story efficiently and clearly. Bank quotes from internal emails, but doesn't overuse them, preserving the value of these rare glimpses into the Microsoft decision-making process. He gives just the right amount of history, and avoids ill-fitting analogies to describe the various pieces of software (in most cases he simply gives a minimal explanation, which might confuse a computing novice but is perfect for a typical Slashdot reader). He also describes the right reasons for Microsoft's success: not marketing as many people say, but its strategy of defining a small number of software platforms and evangelizing them to other developers.

The battle being fought here is between the "Windows hawks," led by Microsoft Vice President Jim Allchin, and the "Internet doves," led by another Vice President, Brad Silverberg. Allchin was in charge of Windows NT; Silverberg shipped Windows 95 and early versions of Internet Explorer. The book has some great insight into how this battle proceeded and why the participants acted as they did.

For example, the book discusses Jim Allchin's famous email in early 1997, in which he discussed competing with Netscape and wrote, "I do not feel we are going to win on our current path -- I am convinced we have to use Windows, this is the one thing they don't have -- We need something with more Windows integration." This email was brought up in the Justice trial to show that Microsoft used browser integration to unfairly attack Netscape, but the book shows that Allchin at the time was trying to counteract feelings within Microsoft that the browser was all that mattered, and was therefore concerned not so much that non-integration would hurt the browser as he was concerned that non-integration would hurt Windows.

Or consider the following sentence from the book: "In the same way that Gates began to view Microsoft's Internet team as the internal representation of Netscape, he came to see Microsoft's Java team as the internal agents of Sun Microsystems." This is an extraordinarily perceptive statement, and the fact that a reader can appreciate its meaning 74 pages into the book is a tribute to the explanatory powers of Bank's writing.

What's To Consider

If the terms "Internet doves" and "Windows hawks" didn't tip you off, Bank is trying to show that the "fumble" of the subtitle occurred in 1997, when Bill Gates decided against supporting a Microsoft project known as Megaserver. This would have been a platform for Internet development: a set of back-end services, tied in to the browser.

Bank also discusses another, more well-known "fumble," the mismanagement of the Justice Department lawsuit. His writing here is still excellent, but this topic has been covered elsewhere so the information is not as surprising.

In the Justice lawsuit, he does a good job of showing how Gates was the main force behind two of Microsoft's poorest showings in the case: Gates'evasive videotaped deposition, and the response to the judge's order to allow computer manufacturer to ship Windows 95 without Internet Explorer (which involved allowing them to either ship a two-year-old version of Windows 95, or one that did not work at all).

In fact Bank spends much more time talking about the legal foibles than talking about his first argument, that Gates blew his role as technical leader of Microsoft by not endorsing Megaserver in 1997. But this really needs to be the core of his argument: saying that Gates' main mistake was made in the legal arena, in which he was a novice, is not nearly as compelling as claiming that Gates, the ultimate geek, botched the kind of technical decision that should have been his strength.

Megaserver was a Brad Silverberg project, and Jim Allchin was the main opposition. In Bank's mythology, Silverberg is the hero, pushing for the Internet. Allchin is the villain, sticking with Windows. But what really went on here?

Consider a story Bank relates from a Microsoft developer named Ben Slivka, one of the most strident of the Internet doves:

Slivka recounted the experience of one Windows developer who presented Allchin with his ideas for a simply, reliable operating system suitable for home users. Instead of saying "Great idea, go do it," Allchin had insisted that the new operating system be based on Windows NT. The developer objected that the huge NT operating system wasn't suitable for the drop-dead simple appliance he had envisioned. Allchin challenged him to list the parts of Windows NT he would strip out.

To me this looks like Allchin is doing his job. What would happen if he authorized everyone who so desired to go off and write their own operating system? I/ll tell you what would happen: Windows CE. Enough said.

Allchin also had little patience for Microsoft employees who were advocating a move towards Java and free software:

I don't want to be remembered as the guy who destroyed one of the most amazing business in history. We could have done it [meaning we could have destroyed the business] with engineers who didn't understand and didn't have any responsibility for the financial aspects of the company at all. Who live in this paradise where the stock goes up, revenues keep going up, earnings keep doing up. And all they have to do is crank software. Somehow it gets into packages and makes money. Well, it doesn't work that way.

Sounds reasonable to me. The notions of first-mover advantage and trading profits for users have been discredited in the dot-com meltdown. But the quote doesn't fit into Bank's view of Allchin as the bad guy, so he simply throws it out there, with no discussion.

History is often written by the winners, but in some ways the middle of this book is history written by the losers. The path not taken is discussed, but since it exists only as a perfect creation in the minds of its inventors (who obviously had Bank's ear when he was doing his research), it is depicted as flawless. Statements claiming that the new goal "was not to get thousands of developers to adopt your arcane PC programming interfaces but rather to get tens of millions of users to use your services every day=94 are accepted as holy truth.

Bank is convinced that Megaserver would have somehow "expanded the commons" of software development, that any Internet platform would have been an open platform. But consider what the Megaserver would have been as proposed back in 1997: A set of Microsoft servers with Microsoft data, talking to a browser that was customized to talk to those servers.

In short, it would have been a clone of AOL. Furthermore, this would have been architected by the team that brought you Windows 95. Would this have been a good thing? Does integrating your browser with your Web servers produce a more open environment than integrating it with your operating system?

Thus, it is hard to fault Gates for not supporting Megaserver in 1997. In fact, Microsoft is now pushing heavily towards .Net, which is the 2001 version of Megaserver. Why support it now? As Bank himself writes, about Microsoft executive Paul Maritz, "He had long known the problem was bigger than Win32, Maritz said. But now he could articulate the message. The difference, he later said, was XML." It was not so much that Microsoft did not recognize the need to move beyond the Win32 API; it was that in 1997 it didn't have the technology to do so.

Bank makes the claim that Gates was forced out as CEO because of his "fumbles." This is arguably the big revelation in the book, but it is hard to prove this conclusively: The trial missteps certainly did happen, Microsoft was drifting from a technology perspective, and Gates stepped down. Did he fall or was he pushed? The timing of events supports either conclusion. In any event, I found the behind-the-scenes descriptions much more interesting than this particular allegation.

Furthermore, Bank points out that Gates allowed an employee to set up a hands-off incubator within Microsoft that eventually led to the company-wide adoption of XML and .NET, and was the only top executive who really understood the .NET protocols. Thus it is hard to fault him for not supporting an Internet platform in 1997, when he planted the seeds for an Internet platform in 2001.

If the middle of the book is imperfect but still fascinating, the last chapter gets really strange. After playing Brad Silverberg up as the hero, Bank suddenly cuts him down. Earlier in the book, the decision to adopt Active Desktop in Windows 98 is mentioned, but with mysterious silence on who made the final call; it merely states that after seeing Netscape demonstrate a similar product called Constellation, "the browser team was given the additional job of creating a shell for all of Windows." That shell was Active Desktop, and this particular decision got Microsoft in antitrust trouble both because it increased the amount of browser integration that Microsoft had to defend in court, and because Microsoft started leaning on computer manufacturers in an effort to freeze out Netscape's product. Furthermore, the battle was basically for naught since Channels, the big Active Desktop feature, went nowhere. Gates himself said later, "That's a case where the browser guys, they had the Internet religion, but they pushed it too far in terms of what was a practical user experience."

So who decided to go with Active Desktop? You figure it had to be Silverberg, but Bank doesn't say that. In the final chapter, however, he slips a bit, pointing out that Silverberg's team was responsible for the tying of the browser, the semi-exclusive contracts with content and access providers, and the war against Java -- the main issues that the Justice department sued over. Furthermore, if the Megaserver strategy had been pursued, Microsoft might have been in even more legal trouble.

Gates, meanwhile, gets rehabilitated in the last chapter. His tactics in 1998 and 1999 are now described as a strategic stall, waiting for the right technology to appear for Microsoft's Internet platform: "The power to control the pace of innovation is a competitive advantage at least as crucial as the ability to innovate itself." Gates is portrayed as a leader once again, planning strategy ten years out, and the book ends with a prediction (for no reason other than the author's gut feeling) that Gates will do the right thing and usher in a new age of innovation, whatever that consists of.

I'm not sure what to make of this flip-flop. I assume this book was originally proposed to a publisher in 1999, written in 2000, and polished up in early 2001. In 1999 a book about the demise of Microsoft seemed a plausible undertaking, but two years later it turned out that the story wasn't over, and Microsoft appeared to be bouncing back. So Bank had time to equivocate, modifying his original thesis and explaining how perhaps Microsoft had a future after all.

Describing this latest turn of events, however, Bank doesn't have reams of email released during a trial, or sympathetic former Microsofties to interpret it for him. As a result, he can fire off sentences like, "The infrastructure for the digital age will be based on competition on the merits and a common code of open interfaces," with apparent complete sincerity. He believes that Microsoft asking AOL to open its Instant Messaging protocol is a harbinger of this golden future, and that Microsoft's Shared Source program shows it is moving towards open source. In short, he is buying the current Microsoft PR story, hook line and sinker.

Well, let this former Microsoftie (and former Windows hawk who worked in Allchin's group) explain a few things. Statements like "Interoperability, not lock-in, has become the winning strategy" are patently false. Right now there are two Internets: The AOL one, with its own client, servers, content, email, messaging, authentication, billing, security, and all the rest; and the plain old Internet. Microsoft wants to create a third Internet, the .NET Internet, with all the stuff that the AOL Internet has. Then it will pursue a lock-in like the world has never seen before.

Summary and Table of Contents

But hey, enough quibbling. Bank may be wrong about the future of Microsoft, but he does a fantastic job covering the past. I spent some time discussing what I disagreed with, but there is so much more that I agree with. I knew about a lot of the events that are described in the book, but I still learned an incredible amount. If you want to know what things are like inside Microsoft, buy this book.

Table of Contents

• Prologue: The E-mail Trail

1. Track the Inevitable
2. Hawks and Doves.
3. The Path Not Taken
4. Citizen Gates
5. Vicious Cycle
6. Monopolist's Dilemma
7. Loosely Coupled

• Key Dates
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index

---

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Who needs a book

when you can get the video [ntk.net]?

Its interesting that Internal...

...strife has not produced more spinoff groups from MS. Is working for MS that good that nobody wants to leave to start a new business? I can't see that from this book. It looks like there are very clearly defined groups. If one of these groups becomes angry/upset/etc.. enough, will they break out to become some competition? Can they?
---------------

.NET aimed at AOL?

It's interesting that he casts .NET as an M$ strategy to compete with AOL. I hadn't thought of that before, but it makes sense now. I think the reason I hadn't seen that is because I've never used AOL. Ever. I've seen it being used over the shoulder of a couple different people, but for the past 11 years I've used what he describes as the plain old Internet.

I plan to continue that course: I'll avoid .NET just like I avoid AOL.

I imagine it's going to be difficult to avoid without completely avoiding XP and future M$ OSes; I currently have 3 machines, a Mac, a Linux x86 box, and a Win98 box (mostly for gaming). I think Apple and the Powers That Be in the Linux world need to get the word out that if you value personal privacy and want to see an Internet in the future that isn't locked up by M$ (and M$'s henchmen), then people should consider using an alternative OS.

How to beat Microsoft: The Plain Truth

To those more interested in winning than in stroking their ego, turn off your flame throwers and listen:

(1) The world consists of secretaries, suits, and engineers. Suits employ engineers to make their secretaries happy. Secretaries do all the real (read: boring) work. Therefore: engineers are less important than secretaries. Internalize this.

(2) Software is capable of having "sizzle". Sizzle goes beyond mere functionality and correct operation (read: massive uptimes and high scalability). Sizzle is the attribute that makes you go "that's fucking cool." Do not forget to provide sizzle to all groups mentioned in (1).

(3) In mathematics, all constants can be redefined as 1. An algorithm can be O(n) + C. The principle of 4GL software is that we can have what we previously thought of as the god awful biggest C that is unworkable, but in reality as n grows large enough C is effectively equivalent to 1. Read: You can make money with a O(n) + C algorithm, and a large C provides sizzle. Don't sweat the size of C.

That's it.

Title...

I really like the title of this book. :)

Some other books

If you are interested in "inside microsoft" type stuff.. some other books you might want to read:

Microserfs, Douglas Coupland -- about the geeks inside microsoft -- funny and light reading.

Renegades of the Empire, Michael Drummond -- a more positive view of the inside of Microsoft.

Hard Drive, James Wallace -- about Bill Gates and the beginning of Microsoft -- a little more impartial.

Great review!

It's allways good to get the inside scoop like this. Working in IT for a large corp. myself, I can tell you that looking in from the outside you don't allways get the full view. Speaking of life on the inside of MS go here http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/dancemonkeyboy.mpg It's balmer at his finest during a internal MS meeting/pep rally! (Yes I ripped the link from K5). Funny stuff!

MS World Domination: 2002 Edition

Right now there are two Internets: The AOL one, with its own client, servers, content, email, messaging, authentication, billing, security, and all the rest; and the plain old Internet. Microsoft wants to create a third Internet, the .NET Internet, with all the stuff that the AOL Internet has. Then it will pursue a lock-in like the world has never seen before.

Sums it up for me.

I would not mind a three or four way break up of MS:

Office and related; Windows/desktops; Browser/email/related clients; Backend Servers and database apps (includes .NET); Dev tools

okay a five way breakup

;-)

Warning: Does not compute

Warning! Warning! Warning!

The above does not fit my convenient ./ worldview. Therefore, I return this thread to regular slashdot blather:

MS is Borg / MS is Borg / MS is Borg. Information must be free, so buy t-shirts and stuffed animals to support our site! I listen to ESR for dating advice! Micro$oft, Microshaft, Mickeysoft, Microcrap, Mickeyshank ..zzzz. Some idiot managed to install a Commodore 64 in his hat!

Engaging writing for a crucial story.

I stayed up until 4am one morning finishing the book. Whatever you think of the author's conclusion's (I for the most part agree), it's a good read, and a story worth knowing if you're reading this on a computer screen. You are, aren't you?

See Barr's own book, too

Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters [proudlyserving.com] is Barr's account of his own ten years at Microsoft. The company's internal culture is much more complicated than the typical portrayal of Gates and his devoted minions. At the same time, the whole Allchin/Silberberg split on Windows vs Internet strategy portrayed in Breaking Windows is definitely the key to understanding why the company makes the decisions it does.

Paul Boutin | professional journalist [paulboutin.com], amateur search engine optimization [hotwired.com] consultant

Speaking of AIM and MSN Messenger...

"He believes that Microsoft asking AOL to open its Instant Messaging protocol is a harbinger of this golden future, and that Microsoft's Shared Source program shows it is moving towards open source."

The fact that I'm having trouble logging into my MSN Messenger account through Everybuddy but doing fine with my AIM account makes this seem awfully sinister...

Um, what the reviewer said ....

History is often written by the winners, but in some ways the middle of this book is history written by the losers.

I work in PR (don't throw stones, it's higher education) and I can't help but come to the early conclusion that this book offers an extremely jaded view of what happens at Microsoft. Sure, I bet some of the horror stories are true enough -- people are territorial by nature and it helps to wonder how it would feel if that was your projects/ideas/etc. being scrutinized/killed/etc. But this is the real world folks -- let's not forget that we could all be worrying about other things: food, shelter, mating, etc. Even education and non-profits are run like for-profit megacorps -- organizations can not exist if they fail to balance the books and stay on track (hence the spawn of many nearly worthless mission statements ;-).

So, how am I on target here? Here's how: everyone is always debating how money can be made on Linux. What's the difference between some of the Linux business-related horror stories I've read about on /. and the horror stories in this book? Work with me here -- I'm not trolling, I work in higher education PR and normally ask the "So ... why is this news worthy?" kind of questions, and I'm starting a thread on an otherwise dead page. Is there anything that the Linux community can learn from this book (things to avoid, things to do religiously, situations and incidents that offer a specific insight, reasons why middle management should or should not exist in a Linux-based company, how/why the democratic nature of Linux can or can not prevail over these situations/incidents, etc.)?

In other news, I'd wet my britches if I could pimp Linux to the popular media. Enquiring minds want to know!

Re:Um, what the reviewer said ....

Even education and non-profits are run like for-profit megacorps -- organizations can not exist if they fail to balance the books and stay on track (hence the spawn of many nearly worthless mission statements ;-).

There's a big difference between failing to exist, and failing to expand. Megacorps have to expand so they can meet their shareholders demands for more profits. For nonprofits, expansion can allow them to do more good work in some cases, but it's not always pursued, and it doesn't have to be.

Great Review

Wonderful review, but can Timothy please spare us the irrelevant bullshit the next time around?

It's all about perception of invincibility

We all know that Microsoft is king of marketing, but even more important than marketing your product to consumers is marketing your image (an image of invincibility) to your competitors.

To pick an inappropriate example, look at the former Soviet Union. They suffered numerous political, economic, and technological setbacks, but how many did we hear about in the west? In 1960, no one in the US knew that almost a hundred people died on the pad of a failed R-16 ICBM launch (the Nedelin Disaster [russianspaceweb.com]). Half the arms buildup during the 1980s stemmed from a misconception about Russia's actual military capability. Frankly, they did a great job of marketing their image towards us.

If Microsoft appears suitably invincible, then all sorts of things just fall into their laps instead of requiring effort on their part to obtain. Competitors are more likely to get out of their way when a vaporware product is announced. Even lawenforcement is likely to give a good hard second look before diving headfirst into a prolonged legal battle. There is no downside.

Does it surprise me that any of this internal strife has occurred? Hardly. Does it surprise me that it's rarely come toight. Again, hardly. That's just the way these things go.

Allchin == Devil

When comes right down to it, the reason I left Microsoft was because of rise of Jim Allchin. Now I generally don't agree with the "evil MS" view of the world I do all attribute all the evils at MS to Allchin. This guy is the epitome of the Evil Corporate Executive bent on World Domination. His methods are unethical, his goals nefarious. Bill Gates, at heart, wants to do good. Brad Silverberg and Ben Slivka were the souls of MS, warts and all. Now all MS has at its core are..well...Evil People.

Oh, let's give 'em a hug....

Some of the Allchin insights where he's chastising the MS geeks "money doesn't grow on trees yadayadayada" is the very heart of the difference between corporate and open software. The open software allows much more freedom of exploration. Something that's cool and good will first pick up a small cult following, then get bigger based solely on its merits. Look at Python. I don't really know if using Python alone will revolutionize computing, but not having to worry about profit, instead technology, has given a great language solid legs. Profit is a harsh, blind master. Somebody has to lay down the cash in exchange for something that will in turn do them right on their own profit hunt. But the greater reality is different. I download/investigate a lot of stuff that looks cool, eventually I sort through it and get going in maybe one or two directions. For example, right now I'm looking at Lisp and Python and wondering if doing functional programming in Python offers any advantages. What got me on this path was a /. link to Paul Graham and a series of articles at IBM by David Mertz. This is a much more natural way to handle the evolution of computing and IT. No stampedes, no hype, no sweat. The open source world will progress in a far more natural way, while the corporate world will lurch from one lock-in/safe-bet monopoly technology-for-dummies to the next. The more I hear about super-big IT firms, the more obvious it is that their precarious "skunkworks" nooks and crannies are pale shadows of the greater open source world. Why worry about secretive, proprietary nervous skunkworks-ware just days from the accountants' axes? Microsoft and their ilk will always be a murky world for good technology to ever thrive in. Open source will triumph because their proponents are free people.

Re:Well..

It's really not that difficult to understand. The "free source movement", at the grassroots level, is not an organization with well-defined goals, rather it is a cultural phenomenom driven as much by entertainment and education as by economics. There exists "100000 mp3 frontends written in perl" on freshmeat.net because 1)it is more fun to run your own applications than somebody else's, 2)coding as an activity is intrinsically rewarding, 3)writing your own code is the most effective way to acquire programming skills, and 4)many people are inspired by the idealism inherent in the free source philosophy. Any theory that attempts to explain the free source movement purely in terms of economics or contractual frameworks is sadly incomplete.

Re:controlling the internet

I don't think we should give a damn about what a Microserfer has to say about why, when, or how M$ got into its current perception mode. I'll use a quote from a former IBM manager of mine: perception is everything; the truth is of little importance. I'm laughing as I look at the Borgy-Bill at the top of the slashdot page now...A Borg by any other name is still a Borg!! M$ must reap what it has sown, including its Borg-like perception. I will admit that words like vindication, absolution, etc., crossed by mind as personal driving motives for such a book. Read it and know thy enemy (better)? Maybe a page or two wouldn't hurt.

two quotes from the book

"Gates was an introvert who liked people mainly for the intellectual simulation they provided...Ballmer was an extrovert who enjoyed the pleasures of socializing for his own sake."

"Ballmer's easy bonhomie and meat-and-potatoes approach to the business seemed to be just what Microsoft needed, the perfect antidote to Gates's enigmatic aloofness."

So I'm sure Bank would say (and I say), "Go Steve!" He does get the employees fired up...and it's nice to see a guy worth $25 billion (or whatever) who is running a $30 billion company but still doesn't take himself all that seriously.

- adam