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The More Things Change, The More Microsoft Stays The Same
By Trevor Bauknight (c) 2005

In the last few weeks, I've been watching a sleeping giant stir
to life and wondering aloud (http://www.cafeid.com/art-newms.shtml)
what it would do when it awoke to find a dedicated army of the
normal-sized working feverishly to lash it to the ground. Would
Microsoft dedicate itself anew to genuine competition, relying
on the merits of its products, or would it throw its considerable
weight around and ensure for another generation that "good
enough" remains the standard? The answer is becoming clearer,
and while Microsoft has been hinting at the former with a few
recent announcements, it looks as if the software giant is ready
to start grinding bones instead.

The second part of a two-part BBC report on Microsoft
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4516269.stm) outlines
the company's strategy to deal with the increasing level of
competition it's facing on a number of fronts. Probably as a
direct result of its own ability to keep the price of desktop
PC software more or less constant while the price of the
hardware side has plummeted, the free, open-source software
(FOSS) community has emerged as Microsoft's chief competition.
That community worked silently for years, building a remarkable
distributed development and collaboration infrastructure that
is now bearing such sweet fruit as the Firefox browser, the
excellent OpenOffice.org productivity suite and, of course,
Linux, the OS kernel of the People. We make heavy use of all
those products here at CafeID (http://www.cafeid.com) and
couldn't be more pleased with them.

The Beeb reports that Microsoft intends to confront these
challenges in a disturbingly familiar way. Twelve billion
dollars can buy a lot of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

What Is FUD And Why Should You Care?

The fifth of the five key battles, according to the BBC article,
is over "serious software" and the competition Microsoft faces
from the Open Source community, described above. The company has
only recently begun to even acknowledge this threat, for fear,
no doubt, of legitimizing it. But Chairman Gates is rolling out
the same tired arguments against OSS that he's rolled out before.
He warns of "interoperability" issues as if some other company
is responsible for the tendency Microsoft has to intentionally
break interoperability in order to remain exclusive. There are
standards for interoperability, and the Open Source community
embraces standards. Microsoft can take its file formats and go
home, obviously; but any attempt to portray "interoperability"
as a lack of quality, dedication or competence on the part of
OSS developers is absurd.

Gates also refers to the supposed advantage Microsoft has in
terms of total cost of ownership (TCO), at least "if you look
at the entire software stack." It's true enough that Microsoft
enjoys a certain level of inertia that keeps it moving forward
in the absence of innovation and quality. The cost for a large
enterprise to execute a switch, even to a free software platform,
outweighs the cost of simply upgrading its Windows installations.
It's also true that the few companies providing the level of
support, training, warranties and indemnification that businesses
need charge a premium. But for smaller organizations without a
large existing investment in Microsoft technology, switching or
starting out with Linux and other OSS alternatives makes perfect
sense from a financial standpoint.

Alistair Baker of Microsoft UK chimed in with more FUD, asking
"do you really want to have your security issues discussed by
the Linux developer community on a public bulletin board?" I
suppose most businesses would say "no," but how attractive is
the alternative -- having them ignored for years only to be
finally offered a security solution on a subscription basis?
Gates and Co. have long held up OSS development as insecure
because vulnerabilities are exposed to the public; but, by the
same token, vulnerabilities are more readily discovered and
fixed and the fixes distributed than in the closed world of
proprietary commercial software, which isn't exactly a paragon
of security.

The arguments that Microsoft makes to scare people away from its
rivals are insidious; but it's the ability the company has to
stifle competitive development in new markets, combined with the
bait-and-switch tactics it uses to gain customers, that is more
worrisome. I'll call it the "Wal-Mart Effect." For example: You
know Wal-Mart is building a big-box down the street, so your own
business options, if you deal in a product that Wal-Mart carries
(and who doesn't, really?), are severely curtailed. The store
opens, people flock there for the low, low prices until the
places they used to buy groceries, hardware, clothes and toys
all shutter their doors. At that point, Wal-Mart switches its
customers to a new pricing model and they have little recourse.

A New Pricing Model for Microsoft?

In the software world, the "Wal-Mart Effect" might take the
following form: Microsoft buys the premier maker of anti-spyware
protection software and gives the product away free. Customers
find the product valuable (never mind that the inherent
insecurity of Windows made the product necessary in the first
place) and they use it, even rejoicing when Microsoft announces
that the product will remain free to legitimate Windows users.
Microsoft then announces that it will enter the highly-competitive
anti-virus market and will deploy its AV product on a subscription
basis. Or maybe it just rolls both of these security enhancements
directly into Windows, calls it "Windows OneCare" and there you
are, a Microsoft "subscriber" with attendant disincentives to
switching to non-MS products.

It may sound a little bit far-fetched, but the company-wide
trial of Windows OneCare starts next week, and Microsoft plans
to offer it as a commercial service next year, using an annual
subscription model. Some are speculating
(http://www.theregister.com/2005/05/15/microsoft_anti-spyware/)
that the subscription model would be extended to cover all of
Windows or possibly all Microsoft software. MS already uses such
a model in its high-dollar Enterprise Agreements with large
installations, so the idea that it would like to move to
subscriptions for all its software at all levels is not
unreasonable.

One might argue that the current situation, in which OS upgrades
are a practical necessity, is already a subscription model, and
I'd agree. The problem seems to be that Microsoft is having
trouble meeting its end of the bargain, as the woeful tardiness
of the next update to Windows, code-named "Longhorn",
illustrates. It's increasingly apparent that Microsoft will have
to ship some of Longhorn's features (like IE7) in an interim
release of Windows XP that will actually provide at least some
kind of upgrade to those "subscribers" who bought the XP upgrade
rights.

So Is This Good Or Bad?

There have been positive developments in recent weeks. Among
them was the announcement that IE7 would finally be fixing some
of its longstanding problems with regard to standards-compliance
so that we can all get back to concentrating on our content and
design without having to worry about the browser choices of the
target audience. Whether this is in response to the success of
the open-source Firefox browser or out of respect to the World
Wide Web Consortium doesn't really matter. What matters is that
it could have been step in the right direction for Microsoft.

Unfortunately, however, it appears that Microsoft is trying to
talk interoperability and standards while the company walks the
other way. Money can't buy what the Open Source community has
built, and with the explosion of interest in Linux and other
open-source alternatives, including interest among national
governments in China, Brazil and Germany in moving away from
reliance on a single American company, the subscription model
may not make much difference anyway.

Microsoft's tendency to turn first to the spread of fear,
uncertainty and doubt is growing weaker and weaker by the day,
as open-source alternatives gather momentum. It would seem that
a company with tens of thousands of talented employees, billions
of dollars of cash in the bank and access to virtually every
personal computer on the planet could do better; but,
unfortunately, it's not clear after all these years that
Microsoft can.

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Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years
of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation
and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can
be reached at trevor@tryid.com. Stop by http://www.cafeid.com
for a free tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and
check out our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hosting
solutions, complete with live support.
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