Alioth's Journal: Return to Castle Microsoft: Enemy Territory

I had to do a mission behind enemy lines this week. That's right, $ORK insisted I go to Microsoft (near Reading in England) to see their 'proof of concept' for work our sort-of-corporate owner (although, hopefully, they won't be for much longer). The proof of concept was to consolidate a bunch of our systems (all, naturally on Microsoft software, with a Microsoft datacentre).

On day one, I discovered why $UBER_PHB is so keen on Microsoft products. Turns out he's buddies with a Microsoft UK director. Hmmm.

The jollity starts off with checking into the hotel (the meeting's in the morning, so we had to fly over the day before). Then off to the pub. There was good beer in that pub - Gale's ESB and HSB (you can stand a spoon up in HSB). The pub also did proper Mexican food. Some Microsoft sales-droids accompany us. The head of $WE_POWER_YOU's IT department was trying to egg on the MS sales people by trying to sell them bandwidth :-) I threw in the counterpoint that we'd invite Linus Torvalds along if they didn't agree...

Surprisingly, the next day I didn't have a hangover. A sign of good beer.

So off we go to Microsoft. We entered the business park where it is (along with 'Orrible, PeopleSoft and a few others). It was a dull day, with leaden skies. And then...behold! Mordor itself!

Actually, all it lacked was the frozen black lava and exploding mountain. The buildings are an extremely dull grey colour, made to look even more forbidding and grey by the dull weather.

We get to see their dog and pony show. I was pleased to see $UBER_PHB expressing scepticism - I was expecting gushing about how wonderful it all was. The demo room itself was interesting. Imagine a life-size walk-in version of Microsoft Bob. Yes, it was that tacky (fake windows with video screens showing appropriate images of the oudoor world from our particular locale, the windows looking cartooney even though they were made out of physical wood). They showed us their technology centre too. Their racking was very tidy - you never see racking that tidy in the real world :-)

The rest of the day was meetings and Q&A and rather dull. We expressed our concern that the RA must be done extremely carefully or it's doomed to fail like $PROJECT[$CURRENT - 1].

So, after my trip 'behind enemy lines' (since I'm a Linux fanboy...I didn't reveal that to MS, I used the trip to observe and listen), what did I think?

The non-Microsoft world has a BIG uphill struggle. Microsoft are *not* resting on their laurels like most monopolists - they are fighting hard to compete. They aren't going away any time soon if at all. It's a good job that IBM is on our side or we would have been crushed - MS are working hard to offer good products. Perhaps as Linus Torvalds says, the fact that Microsoft is working so hard is evidence that we are winning - Microsoft aren't being allowed to rest on their laurels.

Microsoft aren't trying to crush us through legislation, or by funding SCO or anything like that. Microsoft are using their considerable resources to crush us with *better products* - and unfortunately, they are ahead of us at the moment.