True Confession/Rant of Ex Microsoft User! (Score 2)

I'm currently helping a client to switch their internal applications from NT/IIS/ASP/COM to a JVM/JSP-centric solution. In the client's current scenario, NT, IIS, and COM - all Microsoft-specific, proprietary, closed technologies - are required components to support ASP. With JSP, this changes to a scenario in which the JVM and JSP can be deployed on any mainstream operating system and web server, providing a solution which can be sourced by multiple vendors, and for which published standards and source code is usually available. This reduces dependency on a single vendor and makes it possible to solve problems oneself, without being forced to rely on underqualified tech support personnel and a company which has little interest in actually fixing the bugs in their products, as opposed to forcing upgrades to the next entirely new and untested version.

This perspective is based on multiple experiences in which serious bugs in MS products - like memory leaks in IIS/ASP - were never addressed. Being a highly competent developer, it is not acceptable to me to be at the mercy of a company that does not even do a good job of pretending to have my interests as a customer at heart.

Much the same feeling applies to the operating system and OS-level tools. I know experienced Microsoft systems integrators who have had endless problems with Microsoft's tools, Proxy Server being a prominent example. Problems with Exchange are legion and legendary; System Management Server is a spectacular failure; and their DNS server is little more than a joke. MS Service Packs and hotfixes are as likely to break major functionality as to fix bugs - the original Service Pack 6, and the more recent Exchange hotfix are cases in point.

From my perspective, Microsoft peaked at around the time NT 4.0 came out and has been wandering directionless since then, changing acronyms (DNA anyone?) on a regular basis to attempt to hide the lack of any significant innovation.

Two technologies originally led me to be pro-Microsoft: NT itself, and COM. NT was a good product, for its time, when the betas of NT 3.1 came out in 1992 or so. NT 4 made the catastrophic mistake of importing the Windows 95 user interface, and then turning the ever-buggy Internet Explorer into the GUI shell. Since then stability has only deteriorated, and almost no fundamental progress has been made in making NT/2000/XP support some of the more powerful capabilities and configurability long provided by Unix - proper remote administration capabilities not least amongst those.

It seems that any overall vision that had existed at the time NT or COM were conceived have since deteriorated into a mad rush to maintain control in a changing market, driven by the Internet, which is something Microsoft is still trying to control rather than "get". Factions within Microsoft with backgrounds in things like mainframe transaction server systems argue at cross-purposes with advocates of academically pure object-oriented systems. If there's someone with a global vision at Microsoft, I don't know who it is: Nathan Myrhvold left long ago, and Bill Gates has spent too much of his career making billions to be a competent software architect today.

Microsoft has also never quite gotten the hang of TCP/IP - with the possible exception of the core of IIS, its Internet-oriented tools uniformly suck. I've already mentioned Proxy Server and DNS. In Win2K, Microsoft finally gave up the battle in some areas and fell back on pure BSD tools, such as the telnet implementation. The Wall Street Journal's recent story on Microsoft's reliance on open source software gives more examples of this admission of defeat.

But even while they're resorting to open source code, Microsoft seems to completely miss the power of simplicity and interoperability evident in Unix/Internet tools; or this may be a deliberate strategic policy. If tools are too simple, extensible, interoperable, or open, customers will have too much ability to control their own destiny, and thus won't be as easy to suck into a recurring-revenue future in which Microsoft bills its customers annually and provides arbitrarily chosen upgrades in return ("this new dancing paperclip is better than the old one, honest!")

In addition, Microsoft's own insistence on reinventing everything works against it: sucky initial implementations of Winsock led to applications which didn't get the concept of asynchronous communication. You still see this in products like Outlook today: they can lock up for extended periods while doing network access, something that should be completely transparent and in the background. [I'll say one thing positive here though: I/O completion ports are pretty sweet, and I've used them to good effect in some server applications. They've also helped IIS be an excellent performer. But one good API feature isn't enough, especially when the application developers don't understand how to use it.]

It isn't as difficult as one might imagine to convince hard-nosed business-oriented customers of the perspective I'm outlining: Microsoft's threatening lawyer's letters about license compliance, sent blunderbuss-style to all customers regardless of any evidence of lack of compliance, don't win friends amongst IT staff and CxOs. The threat of rental models, browsers which modify the web sites of other companies, and critical coverage of these things from quarters such as the Wall Street Journal, all combine to make you wonder: is Microsoft aware that it will ultimately need to rely on more than its current desktop monopoly, and instead convince customers to buy its products based on their merits, and the quality of service it provides?

There's no long-term strategy there, just an attempt to keep the excessive revenue flowing until the next set of CxOs can take over and inherit the mess. As a profit generator, Microsoft represents an incredible and possibly unprecedented feat, which I can respect from a certain perspective; but that doesn't mean I want to number myself amongst the cattle slaughtered to feed its unholy appetites.

Server software has become a commodity, and Microsoft is desperately trying to tie unrelated components together and avoid standards, so that customers have no option but to accept the entire package, and pay serious money for that which has become freely available elsewhere. This is done at every level of its software offerings, so that in the application area I'm talking about, for example, the operating system is tied to the web server is tied to the transaction server is tied to the template language is tied to the virtual machine is tied to... did I mention the operating system?

Yet you can go and download the source code to systems that do much the same thing - e.g. the Enhydra or Resin application servers - and, as alluded to above, these systems will run on almost any operating system and web server, with no secrets (you have the source), and no lifetime commitment to a development model espoused by exactly one company. And this applies double to commodity products such as file servers, proxy servers, web servers, DNS, email, and the like: the free products are actually significant improvements in terms of functionality and reliablity, over Microsoft's equivalent offerings.

Microsoft has grown too far, too fast, and become way too voracious and greedy. I rode with it to the peak of its wave; that wave has begun crashing, but instead of crashing onto a nice, wide open beach, it's crashing into an inescapable little Microsoft sandbox. I am jumping off to a different wave in which the currents don't work against me as much. I'm don't argue that .NET has no technical merits whatsoever; but the cost of chaining oneself to it is too high.