Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Embrace the Reality and Logic of Choice
Another neo-colonialist press release from Microsoft's CompTIA lobbying arm, this time inveighing against South Africa's adoption of ODF as a national standard. One way to point out the absurdity of their logic is to replace the reference to ODF with references to any other useful standard that a government might adopt, like electrical standards.
When we do this, we end up with the following.
South Africa’s recent adoption of the 230V/50Hz residential electrical standard represents a tact that will blunt innovation, much needed for their developing economy. The policy choice – which actually reduces electrical current choice – runs contrary to worldwide policy trends, where multiple electrical standards rule, thus threatening to separate South Africa from the wealth creating abilities of the global electrical industry.
For MonPrevAss, the Monopoly Preservation Association, the overall concern for the global electrical industry is to ensure that lawmakers adopt flexible policies and set policy targets rather than deciding on fixed rules, technologies and different national standards to achieve these targets. Such rigid approaches pull the global electrical market apart rather than getting markets to work together and boost innovation for consumers and taxpayers. “The adoption sends a negative signal to a highly innovative sector” says I.M. Atool, MonPrevAss's Group Director, Public Policy EMEA.
The “South African Bureau of Standards” (SABS) approved the 230V/50Hz residential electrical standard on Friday 18 April as an official national standard. This adoption, if implemented, will reduce choice, decrease the benefits of open competition and thwart innovation. The irony here is that South Africa is moving in a direction which stands in stark relief to the reality of the highly dynamic market, with some 40 different electrical current conventions available today.
“Multiple co-existing electrical standards as opposed to only one standard should be favoured in the interest of users. The markets are the most efficient in creating electrical standards and it should stay within the exclusive hands of the market”, I.M. Atool explains.
In light of the recent ISO/IEC adoption of the Microsoft 240V/55Hz electrical standard, the South African decision will not lead to improvements in the electrical sector. MonPrevAss urges Governments to allow consumers and users to decide which electrical standards are best. We fear that the choice of just one electrical standard runs the risk of being outdated before it is even implemented, as well as being prohibitively costly to public budgets and taxpayers.
Governments should not restrict themselves to working with one electrical standard, and should urge legislators to refrain from any kind of mandatory regulation and discriminatory interventions in the market. The global electrical industry recommends Governments to embrace the reality and logic of choice and to devote their energies to ensuring interoperability through this choice.
Of course, this is just a rehash of an old logical fallacy, related to the old "Broken Windows" fallacy. It is like saying heart disease is a good thing because you have such a wide choice of therapies to treat it. We would all agree that it is far preferable to be healthy and have a wide choice of activities that you want to do, rather than a wide choice of solutions to a problem that you never asked for and don't want.
Consumers don't want a bag of adapters to convert between different formats and protocols. That is giving consumers a choice in a solution to a interoperability problem they didn't ask for and they don't want. Consumers want a choice of goods and services.
Observe the recent standards war with Blu-ray and HD DVD. Ask yourself:
How many spreadsheet formats does Microsoft use internally for running their business on? Why should governments be denied choice in the same field that Microsoft itself exerts its right to chose?
When we do this, we end up with the following.
South Africa Electrical Current Adoption Outdated
South Africa’s recent adoption of the 230V/50Hz residential electrical standard represents a tact that will blunt innovation, much needed for their developing economy. The policy choice – which actually reduces electrical current choice – runs contrary to worldwide policy trends, where multiple electrical standards rule, thus threatening to separate South Africa from the wealth creating abilities of the global electrical industry.
For MonPrevAss, the Monopoly Preservation Association, the overall concern for the global electrical industry is to ensure that lawmakers adopt flexible policies and set policy targets rather than deciding on fixed rules, technologies and different national standards to achieve these targets. Such rigid approaches pull the global electrical market apart rather than getting markets to work together and boost innovation for consumers and taxpayers. “The adoption sends a negative signal to a highly innovative sector” says I.M. Atool, MonPrevAss's Group Director, Public Policy EMEA.
The “South African Bureau of Standards” (SABS) approved the 230V/50Hz residential electrical standard on Friday 18 April as an official national standard. This adoption, if implemented, will reduce choice, decrease the benefits of open competition and thwart innovation. The irony here is that South Africa is moving in a direction which stands in stark relief to the reality of the highly dynamic market, with some 40 different electrical current conventions available today.
“Multiple co-existing electrical standards as opposed to only one standard should be favoured in the interest of users. The markets are the most efficient in creating electrical standards and it should stay within the exclusive hands of the market”, I.M. Atool explains.
In light of the recent ISO/IEC adoption of the Microsoft 240V/55Hz electrical standard, the South African decision will not lead to improvements in the electrical sector. MonPrevAss urges Governments to allow consumers and users to decide which electrical standards are best. We fear that the choice of just one electrical standard runs the risk of being outdated before it is even implemented, as well as being prohibitively costly to public budgets and taxpayers.
Governments should not restrict themselves to working with one electrical standard, and should urge legislators to refrain from any kind of mandatory regulation and discriminatory interventions in the market. The global electrical industry recommends Governments to embrace the reality and logic of choice and to devote their energies to ensuring interoperability through this choice.
Of course, this is just a rehash of an old logical fallacy, related to the old "Broken Windows" fallacy. It is like saying heart disease is a good thing because you have such a wide choice of therapies to treat it. We would all agree that it is far preferable to be healthy and have a wide choice of activities that you want to do, rather than a wide choice of solutions to a problem that you never asked for and don't want.
Consumers don't want a bag of adapters to convert between different formats and protocols. That is giving consumers a choice in a solution to a interoperability problem they didn't ask for and they don't want. Consumers want a choice of goods and services.
Observe the recent standards war with Blu-ray and HD DVD. Ask yourself:
- Did consumers want a choice in formats, or did they want a wider choice in players and high definition movies?
- Did movie studios want a choice in formats and either the uncertainty over choosing the winner, or the expense of supporting both formats? Or did they really just want a single format that would allow them to reach all consumers?
- Did the uncertainty around the existence of two competing high definition formats help or hurt the adoption of high definition technologies in general?
- Did consumers who make the early choice to go with HD DVD, say Microsoft XBox owners, benefit from having this choice?
How many spreadsheet formats does Microsoft use internally for running their business on? Why should governments be denied choice in the same field that Microsoft itself exerts its right to chose?
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# posted by Rob : 4/30/2008 11:14:00 AM 10 comments (policy) links to this post
Monday, April 23, 2007
Sometimes I need to remind myself
Tim Anderson has an interesting article up on his ITWriting blog, “Microsoft’s Jean Paoli on the XML document debate”. Of course, I treat anything Jean Paoli says on XML with such attention as I usually reserve for listening to the isorhythmic motets of Philippe de Vitry. Like de Vitry, Paoli can be understood on several different levels: What is he saying? And what is he really saying. As a student of Empson's “Seven Types of Ambiguity”
, I hope that I am up to the task.
There is, of course, the familiar canard, that IBM is the source of all of their problems:
A Google search on the words ecma ibm sole vote returns an embarrassingly large number of hits. Microsoft has certainly been having fun with this line. Let's take a little look at this question and see if we can better define this conspiracy that Paoli is alluding to.
I'm now going to rant a little. You may want to stand back.
Yes, IBM was the only voting member in Ecma who cast a voted against OOXML. But guess what, we're probably the only company who actually had someone perform the due diligence of reading the specification. The others voted on OOXML without reading the spec. So please give their “Yes” votes all the weight they deserve, but not more.
It seems to me that Ecma has become a standards factory, a place where you go for clean, efficient, no-guilt, fast-track service. Don't want to publish your public comments? Fuggetaboutit. Don't want to publish your meeting minutes? Fuggetaboutit. Worried about rushing through a 6,000 page specification in less than a year, with 20x less scrutiny than average? Fuggetaboutit. Want to have a unanimous vote, along with with a souvenir photograph of your face when the vote occurs? Yes sir, we guarantee it.
However, for the privilege of this elite service, you must cough up the dough. You will not find Ecma's rate card on their website, but I'm told that voting membership will set you back $57,000. This is not exactly the club to join if you are a small (or medium) business, non-profit, public sector agency, or anything but one of the big boys. A list of the privileged twenty voting members of Ecma can be found here.
As you can imagine, one does not become a voting member of Ecma without a good reason. This is a business expense, not a charitable contribution. For $57K, one expects $57K of service. To justify that membership fee, you expect your technology to be blessed with an Ecma standards imprimatur without hassles. So the “unwritten rule” is that everyone votes in favor of everyone else's proposal. It is considered rude to vote against something that another elite member has paid so much for. So, IBM gets get a lot of grief for casting a single "No" vote at a single Ecma General Assembly. We broke the club rules. I'm proud to work for such a company.
My question is this: How many “No” votes have been cast in Ecma in the past 5 years? When before did another Ecma member ever vote “No” on a standard? If no one can remember even a single previous “No” vote, or (sacre bleu!) a defeated standard, then that speaks volumes. In a healthy standards body, a single “No” vote should not be a newsworthy event, and should certainly not be something that Microsoft is still complaining about 6 months later.
To put this in perspective, the base category of OASIS voting memberships (Contributor) starts at $1,100. OASIS has something like 330 organizational members eligible to vote, including all categories of companies, government agencies, non-profits, etc.
I should also note, just coming from the annual OASIS Symposium held last week, that the OASIS Board of Directors is looking at changing the OASIS voting rules to make it more difficult for OASIS standards to be approved. Yup, we're raising the bar.
When I see this I need to try extra hard to remind myself that IBM is just interfering with Microsoft's good-faith attempt to humbly submit for our consideration their well-written, detailed, high-quality, interoperable open standard.
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 recently had its annual plenary. This is the same group of ISO National Body (NB) members who voted in favor of ODF last year, and over the next few months many of them will be recommending positions on Microsoft's OOXML to their national standards bodies. I was on the delegates list for attending this meeting, as a representative of the US NB, but had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. When I saw the attendance list, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had sent five people, this to a meeting of only 37 people. They practically darkened the skies with their employees. And what about the conspiratorial army that is hounding them at every corner? Zero people from IBM. Zero as well for Google, Sun, RedHat, Adobe, Oracle and Novell.
When I read this I need to remind myself that I'm part of a vast global conspiracy to deny Microsoft a fair hearing within ISO. The fact that no one in this vast global conspiracy managed to show up at the meeting was simply a ploy to make Microsoft feel overconfident.
In the US NB, we have a committee called INCITS V1. It is the mirror committee to JTC1/SC34. I serve on it, the only member from IBM. Imagine my surprise, when at our last call, Microsoft shows up with 3 employees and a business partner as new members. Four people against little ol' me? Come on guys, that is just sad.
At times like this I need to remind myself that Microsoft is the underdog and IBM and its allies are ganging up them. But our guys are invisible at meetings and although they cannot vote, they do have ninja powers and, in matters of external affairs, the delegated plenipotentiary prerogatives of Klingon Ambassadors. “choSuvchugh 'oy'lIj Daghur neH”.
Microsoft bloggers, fed and spreading like mushrooms, recently popped up and simultaneously announced a new pro-OOXML petition, self-published, self-hosted and self-reported by Microsoft. You couldn't find anyone to even pretend to support you? You had to host your own petition? This is like throwing a birthday party and having only your mother show up. Very sad. Where are your friends, Microsoft? How come we hear no one else speaking approvingly about OOXML? Where are the other companies lining up? Where are the endorsements? The testimonials? All we hear is that Microsoft thinks OOXML is great. But that is just Mom cheering on your performance. Don't you have any real support?
Btw, this is what a real petition looks like. It is hosted by a reputable party (the Prime Minister) and gives a open, public listing and tally of those who signed the petition.
At times like this I need to remind myself that the ODF supports are the outsiders in this debate, using unconventional and covert tactics to fight a well-respected and well-loved mainstream technology generously provided by Microsoft.
I see that Microsoft likes to throw around names like the British Library and Library of Congress, as if the mere mention of their holy names brings sacramental blessings. But please show me a public statement where either of these bodies has endorsed, adopted, recommended adoption or recommended approval of OOXML. The mere mention in passing of well-known and popular institutions lends no credibility to your argument, and credible arguments are important, as is well-known to anyone familiar with Walt Disney World, the Louvre, NASA , the Boston Red Sox, or the Department of Really Important Stuff .
A Malaysian standards committee was moving forward to approve ODF as a national standard in Malaysia. This is called “transposing” an International Standard, and is commonly done when a relevant International Standard is approved. Microsoft has made every attempt possible to prevent this committee from making progress with their review of ODF, for almost a year now. This progress recently came to a halt, the committee's decisions nullified and the committee suspended.
When standards committees are disbanded when they get too close to approving ODF, then I must pinch myself and remind myself once again that IBM is the one orchestrating international campaigns against Microsoft, and not the other way around.
I've heard similar complaints from other NB's. Why bother reviewing OOXML? Why waste the effort reading it and suggesting improvements? Microsoft has ignored every suggestion given it so far by NB's. And if you vote no, Microsoft will just escalate and try to get some mid-level government bureaucrat to set aside the recommendation of your country's technical experts. What waste the next 4 months reviewing a 6,000 page specification? It happened in Malaysia. It happened in the US. The INCITS Executive Board was about to send a contradiction submission against OOXML, saying that it possibly contradicted ODF. But before the committee could reconvene the next morning, enough members had received urgent phone calls to cause them to change their vote and abstain. We saw this in the Netherlands as well, where it was even reported in the papers that they would vote against OOXML. But that vote was changed at the last minute with the cryptic message to the JTC1 Secretariat: “The Netherlands Standardization institute votes ‘abstain’. Please change our vote accordingly and please confirm receipt of this vote to me...” What happened there is still unclear. In India it was even worse, when the committee that was supposed to get the ballot did not receive it. Evidently it was misplaced. The intervention of the leader of a major national political party was required to straighten it out. I also received a note saying that the committee was being told that the deadline for responding to the ballot was two weeks later than it really was, a delay that would have invalidated their vote if they had fallen into that trap.
When I see stuff like this happening, I need to remind myself, really, really hard, that IBM is the bad guy in this debate and that we're the one interfering with an orderly ISO process.
When an amendment to a Florida State Senate bill was offered that called for a “business case analysis” for the use of open standard document formats (no particular format was called out) Microsoft's lobbyists, the three Men in Black, Will McKinley of Dutko Poole McKinley, Jim Daughton, Jr. and Geoffrey Becker both of Metz, Hauser, Husband & Daughton, swarmed down and zapped it. As one legislative aide put it, “By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one”. Perhaps a document, left by the lobbyists, filled with lies about ODF, had something to do with it? We should be fortunate that Microsoft sent only three lobbyists to handle this, rather than all nine lobbyists who are registered in Florida alone to support Microsoft's legislative activities.
When expressing our technical opinion defines interference, and the outrages that Microsoft is getting away with become the norms of behavior, then we're all doomed to a future of technical subservience. We all need to remind ourselves of that.
Microsoft likes to complain, and they are evidently becoming quite adept at it. If decibels and dollars could win arguments then they would surely be the winners. But I think their protestations are mis-directed. Microsoft is like an out-of-condition middle-aged man (somewhat like myself) out for a rare jog. They can curse to the high heavens the pain they feel, but don't blame it on others. It is called competition. Deal with it. If it hurts so much it is because you are so out of practice. You should try having competition more often. It is good for you.
, I hope that I am up to the task.There is, of course, the familiar canard, that IBM is the source of all of their problems:
It is clear though that Paoli is upset by what he sees as an international campaign against OOXML orchestrated by IBM, the sole naysayer in the ECMA voting. “There are IBM employees going to ISO, and saying a lot of technically incorrect things. When ODF went to ISO Microsoft did not interfere. IBM is betting on ODF, to have governments preferentially buying IBM software. It is OK to compete, but using this kind of argument around is it an open format or not … it’s widely known now, Office Open XML is an open format, even the EU says it is.”
A Google search on the words ecma ibm sole vote returns an embarrassingly large number of hits. Microsoft has certainly been having fun with this line. Let's take a little look at this question and see if we can better define this conspiracy that Paoli is alluding to.
I'm now going to rant a little. You may want to stand back.
Yes, IBM was the only voting member in Ecma who cast a voted against OOXML. But guess what, we're probably the only company who actually had someone perform the due diligence of reading the specification. The others voted on OOXML without reading the spec. So please give their “Yes” votes all the weight they deserve, but not more.
It seems to me that Ecma has become a standards factory, a place where you go for clean, efficient, no-guilt, fast-track service. Don't want to publish your public comments? Fuggetaboutit. Don't want to publish your meeting minutes? Fuggetaboutit. Worried about rushing through a 6,000 page specification in less than a year, with 20x less scrutiny than average? Fuggetaboutit. Want to have a unanimous vote, along with with a souvenir photograph of your face when the vote occurs? Yes sir, we guarantee it.
However, for the privilege of this elite service, you must cough up the dough. You will not find Ecma's rate card on their website, but I'm told that voting membership will set you back $57,000. This is not exactly the club to join if you are a small (or medium) business, non-profit, public sector agency, or anything but one of the big boys. A list of the privileged twenty voting members of Ecma can be found here.
As you can imagine, one does not become a voting member of Ecma without a good reason. This is a business expense, not a charitable contribution. For $57K, one expects $57K of service. To justify that membership fee, you expect your technology to be blessed with an Ecma standards imprimatur without hassles. So the “unwritten rule” is that everyone votes in favor of everyone else's proposal. It is considered rude to vote against something that another elite member has paid so much for. So, IBM gets get a lot of grief for casting a single "No" vote at a single Ecma General Assembly. We broke the club rules. I'm proud to work for such a company.
My question is this: How many “No” votes have been cast in Ecma in the past 5 years? When before did another Ecma member ever vote “No” on a standard? If no one can remember even a single previous “No” vote, or (sacre bleu!) a defeated standard, then that speaks volumes. In a healthy standards body, a single “No” vote should not be a newsworthy event, and should certainly not be something that Microsoft is still complaining about 6 months later.
To put this in perspective, the base category of OASIS voting memberships (Contributor) starts at $1,100. OASIS has something like 330 organizational members eligible to vote, including all categories of companies, government agencies, non-profits, etc.
I should also note, just coming from the annual OASIS Symposium held last week, that the OASIS Board of Directors is looking at changing the OASIS voting rules to make it more difficult for OASIS standards to be approved. Yup, we're raising the bar.
When I see this I need to try extra hard to remind myself that IBM is just interfering with Microsoft's good-faith attempt to humbly submit for our consideration their well-written, detailed, high-quality, interoperable open standard.
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 recently had its annual plenary. This is the same group of ISO National Body (NB) members who voted in favor of ODF last year, and over the next few months many of them will be recommending positions on Microsoft's OOXML to their national standards bodies. I was on the delegates list for attending this meeting, as a representative of the US NB, but had to cancel at the last minute because of a family emergency. When I saw the attendance list, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had sent five people, this to a meeting of only 37 people. They practically darkened the skies with their employees. And what about the conspiratorial army that is hounding them at every corner? Zero people from IBM. Zero as well for Google, Sun, RedHat, Adobe, Oracle and Novell.
When I read this I need to remind myself that I'm part of a vast global conspiracy to deny Microsoft a fair hearing within ISO. The fact that no one in this vast global conspiracy managed to show up at the meeting was simply a ploy to make Microsoft feel overconfident.
In the US NB, we have a committee called INCITS V1. It is the mirror committee to JTC1/SC34. I serve on it, the only member from IBM. Imagine my surprise, when at our last call, Microsoft shows up with 3 employees and a business partner as new members. Four people against little ol' me? Come on guys, that is just sad.
At times like this I need to remind myself that Microsoft is the underdog and IBM and its allies are ganging up them. But our guys are invisible at meetings and although they cannot vote, they do have ninja powers and, in matters of external affairs, the delegated plenipotentiary prerogatives of Klingon Ambassadors. “choSuvchugh 'oy'lIj Daghur neH”.
Microsoft bloggers, fed and spreading like mushrooms, recently popped up and simultaneously announced a new pro-OOXML petition, self-published, self-hosted and self-reported by Microsoft. You couldn't find anyone to even pretend to support you? You had to host your own petition? This is like throwing a birthday party and having only your mother show up. Very sad. Where are your friends, Microsoft? How come we hear no one else speaking approvingly about OOXML? Where are the other companies lining up? Where are the endorsements? The testimonials? All we hear is that Microsoft thinks OOXML is great. But that is just Mom cheering on your performance. Don't you have any real support?
Btw, this is what a real petition looks like. It is hosted by a reputable party (the Prime Minister) and gives a open, public listing and tally of those who signed the petition.
At times like this I need to remind myself that the ODF supports are the outsiders in this debate, using unconventional and covert tactics to fight a well-respected and well-loved mainstream technology generously provided by Microsoft.
I see that Microsoft likes to throw around names like the British Library and Library of Congress, as if the mere mention of their holy names brings sacramental blessings. But please show me a public statement where either of these bodies has endorsed, adopted, recommended adoption or recommended approval of OOXML. The mere mention in passing of well-known and popular institutions lends no credibility to your argument, and credible arguments are important, as is well-known to anyone familiar with Walt Disney World, the Louvre, NASA , the Boston Red Sox, or the Department of Really Important Stuff .
A Malaysian standards committee was moving forward to approve ODF as a national standard in Malaysia. This is called “transposing” an International Standard, and is commonly done when a relevant International Standard is approved. Microsoft has made every attempt possible to prevent this committee from making progress with their review of ODF, for almost a year now. This progress recently came to a halt, the committee's decisions nullified and the committee suspended.
When standards committees are disbanded when they get too close to approving ODF, then I must pinch myself and remind myself once again that IBM is the one orchestrating international campaigns against Microsoft, and not the other way around.
I've heard similar complaints from other NB's. Why bother reviewing OOXML? Why waste the effort reading it and suggesting improvements? Microsoft has ignored every suggestion given it so far by NB's. And if you vote no, Microsoft will just escalate and try to get some mid-level government bureaucrat to set aside the recommendation of your country's technical experts. What waste the next 4 months reviewing a 6,000 page specification? It happened in Malaysia. It happened in the US. The INCITS Executive Board was about to send a contradiction submission against OOXML, saying that it possibly contradicted ODF. But before the committee could reconvene the next morning, enough members had received urgent phone calls to cause them to change their vote and abstain. We saw this in the Netherlands as well, where it was even reported in the papers that they would vote against OOXML. But that vote was changed at the last minute with the cryptic message to the JTC1 Secretariat: “The Netherlands Standardization institute votes ‘abstain’. Please change our vote accordingly and please confirm receipt of this vote to me...” What happened there is still unclear. In India it was even worse, when the committee that was supposed to get the ballot did not receive it. Evidently it was misplaced. The intervention of the leader of a major national political party was required to straighten it out. I also received a note saying that the committee was being told that the deadline for responding to the ballot was two weeks later than it really was, a delay that would have invalidated their vote if they had fallen into that trap.
When I see stuff like this happening, I need to remind myself, really, really hard, that IBM is the bad guy in this debate and that we're the one interfering with an orderly ISO process.
When an amendment to a Florida State Senate bill was offered that called for a “business case analysis” for the use of open standard document formats (no particular format was called out) Microsoft's lobbyists, the three Men in Black, Will McKinley of Dutko Poole McKinley, Jim Daughton, Jr. and Geoffrey Becker both of Metz, Hauser, Husband & Daughton, swarmed down and zapped it. As one legislative aide put it, “By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one”. Perhaps a document, left by the lobbyists, filled with lies about ODF, had something to do with it? We should be fortunate that Microsoft sent only three lobbyists to handle this, rather than all nine lobbyists who are registered in Florida alone to support Microsoft's legislative activities.
When expressing our technical opinion defines interference, and the outrages that Microsoft is getting away with become the norms of behavior, then we're all doomed to a future of technical subservience. We all need to remind ourselves of that.
Microsoft likes to complain, and they are evidently becoming quite adept at it. If decibels and dollars could win arguments then they would surely be the winners. But I think their protestations are mis-directed. Microsoft is like an out-of-condition middle-aged man (somewhat like myself) out for a rare jog. They can curse to the high heavens the pain they feel, but don't blame it on others. It is called competition. Deal with it. If it hurts so much it is because you are so out of practice. You should try having competition more often. It is good for you.
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# posted by Rob : 4/23/2007 08:30:00 PM 22 comments (policy) links to this post
Monday, January 29, 2007
Microsoft on Standards
There are many delicious morsels in the many exhibits in the Iowa Comes v. Microsoft case. Maybe that is why the official website containing the exhibits was taken down within hours of the case being settled? Luckily websites like Slated Antitrust filled the void and host backup copies of these candid insights into Microsoft's internal strategies.
Let's take a look inside.
First, here is the opening "Evangelism is War" section of a report called Effective Evangelism.
Then we have this email from Bill Gates:
And here is a excerpt from an email from then Microsoft GM Aaron Contorer to Bill Gates:
Patrick Ferell, at the time head of MSN tools and applications, worried about the internet's open standards and protocols:
Are there any other good Microsoft quotes out there regarding formats or standards? Post as a comment and I'll add the best ones to the main post.
Change Log:
02/11/2007 — added Embrace & Extend quote sent in from reader
02/14/2007 — note on the links to the exhibits being broken
02/03/2008 — added MSN strategy quote
Let's take a look inside.
First, here is the opening "Evangelism is War" section of a report called Effective Evangelism.
Our mission is to establish Microsoft's platforms as the de facto standards throughout the computer industry. Our enemies are the vendors of platforms that compete with ours: Netscape, Sun, IBM, Oracle, Lotus, etc. The field of battle is the software industry. Success is measured in shipping applications. Every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat. Total victory, for DRG [Developer Relations Group], is the universal adoption of our standards by developers, as this is an important step towards total victory for Microsoft itself: 'A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.'
Then we have this email from Bill Gates:
One thing we have got to change is our strategy — allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.
And here is a excerpt from an email from then Microsoft GM Aaron Contorer to Bill Gates:
Switching Costs
In economics there is a well-understood concept called switching costs - how much it costs for a trading partner to change partners. Our philosophy on switching costs is very clear: we want low swiching costs for customers who want to start using our platform, and we want to provide so much unique value that there are in effect high costs of deciding to move to a different platform. There is a name for this: it is called Embrace and Extend.
Embrace means we are compatible with what's out there, so you can switch to our platform without a lot of obstacles and rework. You can switch from someone else's Java compiler to ours; from someone else's web server to ours; etc. Customers love when we do this (as long as we don't spend our energy embracing extra standards no one really cares about); our competitors are not sure they like it because they prefer us to screw up.
Extend means we provide tremendous value that nobody else does, so (A) you really want to switch to our software, and (B) once you try our software you would never want to go back to some inferior junk from our competitors. Customers usually like when we do this, since by definition it's only an extension if it adds value. Competitors hate when we do this, because by adding new value we make our products much harder to clone - this is the difference between innovation and being just a commodity like corn where suppliers compete on price alone. Nobody builds or sustains a business as successful as Microsoft by producing trivial products that are easy to clone - that would be a strategy for failure.
If we fail to embrace, we can lose because there are big barriers to buying our products. But if we fail to extend, or do only humble work that is easy to clone or to surpass, we automatically lose because our competitors will spend literally billions of dollars to clone our work and replace us.
Patrick Ferell, at the time head of MSN tools and applications, worried about the internet's open standards and protocols:
Looking out from the inside the current MSN strategy some things that concern me about the Internet and the Web are:
1) The Internet is about as open as it gets. This means that an ISV can go and buy a C compiler and a server, rent a wire and create a new service or create an extension to an existing one. The tools are still a little crude but there are very few bottlenecks in this process.
2) The Internet defines formats and architectures that MS has no control over and very little say in. MIME and the WWW helper architectures are crude but quite extensible.
Are there any other good Microsoft quotes out there regarding formats or standards? Post as a comment and I'll add the best ones to the main post.
Change Log:
02/11/2007 — added Embrace & Extend quote sent in from reader
02/14/2007 — note on the links to the exhibits being broken
02/03/2008 — added MSN strategy quote
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# posted by Rob : 1/29/2007 06:16:00 PM 10 comments (policy) links to this post
