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2 ways of looking at Microsoft
April 25, 2006
Want a good case of whiplash? First read Robert Scoble's blog entry about curing Microsoft of its corporate "angst." Then read John Dvorak's new PC Magazine column about the company.
Scoble's long post, built around a bizarro riff on Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, lays out a five-point plan for " tun[ing] up Microsoft's economic engine and get[ting] ready for the 2010's." One of his five recommendations is that the company should buy every employee a top-of-the-line Dell box with two or three screens (one of which could be used to play Second Life). The others are somewhat less silly.
Dvorak provides a terse, contrarian view. He says that Microsoft's angst isn't a symptom of a problem; it is the problem:
It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up!
Microsoft's seemingly permanent state of fear about its impending doom, argues Dvorak, leads it to reflexively pursue defensive projects that end up backfiring. His main example: the seemingly successful launch of Internet Explorer in response to Mark Andreessen's trash-talking about how Netscape was going to take over the world. By bundling the free browser with Windows, Dvorak says, Microsoft opened the door to endless legal hassles, security nightmares, and PR imbroglios: "If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column - billions."
His radical prescription for the company:
It needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.
Of this I can assure you. People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be.
I'm not completely convinced by Dvorak's argument, but there's definitely something to what he's saying. His article forces you to think about Microsoft and its strategy in new ways. And, more broadly, it forces you to reconsider the truism that corporate paranoia is always a good thing. Too much paranoia can, it seems, be as dangerous as too little.
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Comments
Now, now, I have to defend the gist of Scoble's point there. The snark seems to have obscured it. More screens for programmers is an excellent idea (disclaimer: I'm a programmer). He took the way he put it a bit far, but still in the realm of funny-humor rather than outright silly.
I'll rephrase it - "Let's give every programmer two screens - one for code, one for output. Heck, three screens - code, output, and goofing-off".
Which is a good joke, of the sort it's-funny-cause-it's-true.
Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at April 25, 2006 11:00 AM
Said it once, I'll say it again, I take Scoble with a grain of salt, and I don't like using salt.
Dvorak is probably closer to the mark then Scoble.
Posted by: Wayne at April 25, 2006 11:08 AM
Yes, corporate paranoia is ridiculous. I wonder how many technologies have been delayed or crushed because of a perceived threat? More often, corporations are the beneficiaries of new technologies because it creates an ecosystem around their already ubiquitous offerings.
Their constant need of complete control is stifling ecommerce.
Posted by: ordaj at April 25, 2006 11:50 AM
I hear Neelie Kroes' Second Life avatar is really hot!
Posted by: Mr Snarky at April 25, 2006 12:38 PM
Dvorak doesn't seem to know or care that the IE on Vista is going to drive tons of traffic to (1) Live.com, and (2) .NET 2.0/WPF/XAML, Microsoft's next API land grab, which may just succeed where ActiveX and Java Applets failed.
Posted by: Brad ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 25, 2006 05:50 PM
Dvorak -- for once -- makes an excellent point!
Posted by: Sam Hiser at April 25, 2006 05:58 PM
Seth, check out this 3 header
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/th2go/tech_brief.cfm
now quit goofing off!
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani at April 25, 2006 06:47 PM
Of course, Seth has a fourth monitor, just for porn.
Posted by: Nick Carr at April 25, 2006 06:59 PM
Nick, why stop at 4 - surround yourself and find what whoever coined the term circle jerk meant!
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani at April 25, 2006 09:27 PM
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