At a presentation for software developers and IT managers in Sydney last week, local Microsoft development evangelist Charles Sterling stood up and remarked: "At Microsoft, we never, ever cut features based on development resources."
Such assertions are typical of Microsoft's public comments: loud, confident and forward-looking. They're also, as it happens, incorrect.
Just last month, Microsoft officials admitted that a lack of development resources had stymied the addition of XML-based features to the forthcoming Office 2003 version of PowerPoint. "It was just a development decision," Bobby Moore, Office product manager, told ZDNet Australia. "The PowerPoint team needed to do some other things." To be fair to Sterling, his previous exposure to Microsoft's development teams was within the Windows group, rather than the Office division. Yet internal communication within that segment has also suffered a few meltdowns in recent months.
In August, ZDNet Australia reported on the conflicting internal visions regarding the future of Outlook Express, which resulted in the company being forced to issue an embarrassing retraction about its plans for the mail client. In the space of just two days, the company's official public stance shifted from "there will be no further active development of Outlook Express" to "we remain committed to enhancing Outlook Express". Company officials blamed the confusion on a lack of communication between staff.
Windows is Microsoft's biggest cash cow after the Office suite, so it remains critical to the company's future. Yet as the Outlook Express incident demonstrates particularly clearly, the Windows team sometimes has trouble communicating its strategies internally. That in turn makes it hard for customers to be clear on future product directions.
Part of the problem is that Microsoft's market dominance has allowed it to change its plans whenever it deems it necessary, while expecting customers, partners and even other divisions to follow suit.
As well, working on Windows development is one of the most coveted jobs at Microsoft, which can lead to arrogance amongst some developers. "Ask anybody at Microsoft and they'll tell you that the Windows group are the creme de la creme," says Cliff Reeves, general manager for .Net platform strategy at the company.
People who deal regularly with the company say that it is often easier to simply adjust to Microsoft's approach rather than expect the Redmond-based software giant to change its stance. "Once you understand where they're coming from, life's pretty easy," says Brian Walshe, national Microsoft practice manager for Dimension Data. Walshe says that the certainty and breadth of the company's vision actually makes them easier to work with than some other partners.
However often it shifts, the role of Windows certainly won't get any smaller in the future. In May, Microsoft revealed that it was not planning any further independent releases of the Internet Explorer browser, reverting instead to its familiar strategy of integrating everything into the base operating system.
Despite incidents such as the Outlook confusion, that strategy is unlikely to change. "An operating system isn't very useful unless it represents a very tightly integrated and broad set of functions," says Reeves.
As well as the potential for miscommunication, another risk with that approach is that it can make systems more vulnerable to security problems.
"If you think about Windows itself, it's 20 million odd lines of code, written over a decade or so," says Forrester Research analyst Lauren Koetzle. "Anything that complicated, just law of averages wise, is going to have plenty of vulnerabilities in it. As you build more stuff into the platform, you run the risk of combinatorial problems."
That doesn't mean the security issue is insurmountable. "The problem that Microsoft has got that they're the most pervasive platform," says Walshe. "But you shouldn't confuse the attractiveness of that footprint and the actual level of security."
"Microsoft has recently started to do a better job of security, and the reason they started to do a better job is that it has started to be a commercial liability," says Koetzle. "They're doing a better job than they used to, and they're doing a better job than they get credit for."
Nonetheless, the job is far from over, a point that Microsoft itself concedes. "I would say we've come about halfway towards realising the vision of what software can do," Microsoft CEO Bill Gates told a gathering of US business executives last month. "It's not yet easy, enough. It's not yet reliable enough."
