A friend blogged yesterday about Microsoft finally releasing the specifications for the binary Office formats recently – I welcome that Microsoft is finally opening up on these formats, even if it’s largely irrelevant from a technical perspective now all the reverse-engineering has mostly been done, the patent protection for reimplementations is a major boon. It kinda made me think that maybe, just maybe Microsoft are starting to realise that opening all standards related to critical business data is what customers really want. I don’t for a second believe they’re doing in ultimately in anyone’s interests but their own, but nevertheless the result is a positive one.
However, I came across an article on Groklaw today which reminded me why we have to always try to look behind the actions themselves, and look for the ultimate motivations. It’s evidence from a court case which involved the publishing of an internal Microsoft technical evangelism manual – admittedly from 1997, but the fundamentals are unlikely to be much different today. A lot of it is fairly obvious stuff, but it does reveal Microsoft’s aspirations to complete and total customer lock-in in a brutally raw fashion. Summed up, it comes down to: ‘use whatever techniques you can that make Microsoft platforms the single de-facto standard’. I quote:
So, We’re Just Here to Help Developers, Right?
We’re here to help MICROSOFT®!
* MICROSOFT pays our wages
* MICROSOFT provides our stock options
* MICROSOFT pays our expenses
* We’re here to help MICROSOFT
o By helping those developers …
o …That can best help MICROSOFT …
o …Achieve MICROSOFT’s objectives
* Did anyone miss the point, here?
For anyone who thinks along the lines of ‘Microsoft is great because they help us developers’, it’s worth always bearing that in mind that Microsoft, indeed any supplier, are ultimately only interested in their own goals. That strategy may trickle down to positive actions at the production end, and that’s all well and good while your interests happen to be aligned, but don’t for a second assume that you’ll necessarily be getting the best deal, and don’t forget that in the supplier’s eyes you’re a tool in a greater game. From Microsoft’s evangelism document again:
The Role of ISVs
- Pawns in the Struggle
- Can’t let ‘em feel like pawns
- Treat them with respect (as you use them)
Now, let’s be clear – this is a commercial organisation, and a large, aggressive American one at that – so such attitudes are to be expected. That’s capitalism after all, and nothing in the document suggests doing things that are blatantly wrong (it specifically rules out lying although it doesn’t rule out bribery of analysts). Attitudes may have softened in certain areas of the company since 1997, although I doubt they have at the top, they’re likely just learning to put a softer face on it (as every company is doing – let’s not pretend this is an attitude solely related to Microsoft). But I do think that it’s sometimes easy for people to forget their position in the food chain, and be lulled into an impression of ‘Big Company X is my friend’ – reading documents like this should be a bit of a wake-up call.
You should never trust any supplier to do what’s best for you, particularly if they’re big – they will eat you alive if it suits their interests. Despite the rhetoric, they only have their own interests at heart at the end of the day, and it pays to never forget that. If you care at all about the longevity of your own business, it’s a good idea to retain as much control as you can over your own operations (ie avoid lock-in), and to seek partners of roughly equal size to yourself to avoid being horrendously outgunned in any problem situations. Always look at the motivations underlying actions rather than just the actions in themselves – it’s common practice for suppliers to put out an attractive looking ‘honey pot’ to pull you in, and once you’re stuck, to milk you for all they’re worth. It’s smart to always look beyond the obvious, beyond immediate gratification, and to see whether you’re really doing what’s best for you or your customer, or whether you’re just taking the easy route that’s been laid out with the express intention of binding you permanently to a larger supplier.
I do still think the opening of the Office standards is a wholely positive thing though – this article just served to remind me not assume they’ve gone all soft 
February 19th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I don’t know, I think MS probably has probably changed quite a bit over the last decade.
You are right though – doesn’t matter which supplier you choose Apple, MS, Sony, Sun – the decision you make should always be as well informed as possible – never fueled just by religious-like hatrid or love for a particular company.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Leaked Microsoft memos: Always good for a dark, cynical chuckle.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Ultimately a public company answers to investors and customers are copper-tops. Balmer and his minions have been more blunt about it than others and MS has had to soften the edges a bit thanks to poor public relations, lawsuits and the effects of opensource on the global marketplace. But, in the end, we’re all pawns. It’s just how much we can swallow being told we are or not. Google does a nice job flowering it up with their opensource and free beta bouquets, but in the end we’re all just hamsters on the ad mill for them too.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Sorry, had to sneak this one in – Microsoft Accidentally Shows Off the Red Ring of Death at GDC: http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/xbox/microsoft-accidentally-shows-off-dead-xbox-360-238897
Kudos to the BBC for catching it.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
@Paul: I think at the sharp end, the developer end, attitudes aren’t like this, but not wanting to sound offensive, they’re a long way down the ultimate decision making chain. Right now it doesn’t matter – it suits the corporate need to keep external developers sweet and developing software on MS platforms – so the wish to create great .Net software is aligned with the corporate need to tie people to Microsoft platforms, so everyone’s happy. The .Net developers may not think of it as binding people to a platform, or they may not even care, but even with the very best intentions they’re decorating a jail cell – a cell with great furnishings and cable TV might be super-comfortable, but the door stays locked all the same
What’s sad is that many of the captives don’t even realise it’s an unhealthy position to be in.
@Dan: yep, agreed. This is why open source can be such a refreshing alternative. It’s all about control really – I don’t like being controlled, penned in, guided – no matter who it is. No-one has your best interests at heart except you – assume every company is trying to screw you, and you’ll probably be close to the mark
February 19th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
@Dan: lol @ RoR. Stuff like this always happens when you’re doing demos, so I actually feel sorry for them!
February 20th, 2008 at 2:48 am
Since we’re sort of on the MS and OSS topic again, and I just happened across this video recently, I thought I’d share: Miguel De Icaza, Mono founder, gives a decent interview on Microsoft’s Channel 9 about OSS, Mono, etc: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=383939
He seems to be encouraging MS to embrace the idea of open sourcing more of it’s technology and this “mix” of proprietary and OSS solutions. Hmm, is there a job offer at MS somewhere in his future?
He offered a good example of how the OSX kernel is OSS, but much of the rest of OSX is propiertary. A fact of which I was unaware.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:14 am
He makes the excellent point that releasing source code to ‘view’ is not good enough as regards the control & freedom that open source gives you.
I respect Miguel a lot, but I do think that Mono is ultimately a good PR tool for MS without actually addressing the issue of MS lock-in, because the ‘official’ .Net is always different. Mono as a platform is great, but while it has differences from .Net it’s not going to be a serious competitor for MS’s core customer base. It’ll be fine at the fringes, but the core business base will have no choice but to stick with MS or end up with something that isn’t implemented yet or doesn’t work quite right. It’s the very best case for MS – it looks like a competitor, but actually isn’t, at least for the majority of people who gravitate to .Net, like businesses.
It would be great if ALL the infrastructure was completely portable, and MS differentiated themselves just on tools and great implementations of a common standard. But that’s not what’s happened and to be honest I would be amazed if it ever happened – that’s just not how MS have ever worked. MS can’t survive like Apple, their models are entirely different – MS has to sell bucketloads of software via a cascading value chain – you like Office, that leads you to buy Exchange, Windows Servers, etc because they’re the only things that work together in that arena properly (because MS control all the standards and change them whenever they like). Apple has to sell hardware, differentiated by some user-facing software. It’s very different – and it also works very well for consumer software, where lock-in is less of an issue – for business software, Apple would be just as bad in terms of lock-in. I don’t think even if MS’s attitude changes, it can never change fundamentally enough for it to be a true competitive landscape. It’s just not in their interests. And that in itself is not in the customer interest, at the end of the day – so there’s an inherent conflict there. There is always a conflict of interest when a supplier wants / needs to lock customers in to their set of platforms/software/whatever – no matter what supplier it is, that conflict is there. Luckily for customers, there are more options now – business platforms that are implemented the same way on multiple platforms and from multiple vendors. This is a very good thing and levels the playing field considerably, if you’re willing to take advantage of it. Suppliers like MS take advantage of short-sighted strategies that say ‘well, this tool is nice right now, I’ll use it’ to get people dependent on their systems – all suppliers try it too, albeit not as successfully. It’s really up to the savvy customer to stay alert about exactly what situation they’re getting themselves into and to control their own environments, and to resist giving away control of their own destiny in return for a nice front-end.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Not sure if this will appease or anger…
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/interoperability/default.mspx“>http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/interoperability/default.mspx
As for implementing standards, I’d argue that even they are getting better at doing that, VC++ for instance is a pretty standards compliant compiler, IE is getting there, the .Net framework allows use of several security standards for identity both closed and open standards. I’m sure they’re is good counter arguments for all of those, but there is a slow momentum building for more openess.
February 21st, 2008 at 4:46 pm
It smacks of turkeys voting for Christmas
I’ll believe it when the customer of MS products does have a genuine choice to run non-MS products without finding the standard wasn’t the whole story. At my most cynical, I’d say that MS have claimed to support open standards in the past, and there’s always been a catch somewhere along the line – ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ is the common pattern of course.
But, I’ll wait and see – it’s not impossible that they will eventually move to genuinely supporting open standards, in spirit rather than as a marketing bullet point. It’s just extremely unlikely.
I’ll be looking for the small print.