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Tag: microsoft

The more things change

The more they stay the same. Microsoft has changed their tack, from casting people who hate Internet Explorer as internet trolls (rather learning from the reaction from basically every person who has ever tried to build a cross-browser website for themselves or a client) to casting it as a new browser.
Of course its a product of the same old Microsoft and a quick comparison on caniuse shows it; Shadow DOM? Nope. Server sent events? Nope. WebRTC? Nope.

Everything looks the same:

People are still writing shims to bring IE up to speed with the rest of the web.

IE is still adopting standards as slowly as possible, trying stave off the inevitable moment where web apps compete directly with desktop apps and the OS ceases to mean anything.

ie_vs_the_internet

I’m curious about the direction IE will take once Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella has been around long enough to make his mark. Releasing Office of iPad in his first appearance as CEO is definitely a statement, as is rechristening “Windows Azure” to “Microsoft Azure” (since its aimed a more than just Windows…). We’ll have to wait to see what this more collaborative attitude means for IE. For the moment, the “new” IE, in spite of its rapid release cycle looks a lot like the old IE when you compare it to Firefox and Chromium.

Why Not Just Make Better Products?

“Thorstein Veblen wrote that it is the essential task of the business executive to ever-advance sharp practice into the territory previously understood as crime.”

Wired writer David Mamet’s pithy summary seems to nicely capture whats going on in the executive suites of Microsoft lately. The company is becoming an increasingly problematic player in the tech industry, turning number of practices like patent trolling and astroturfing into actual lines of business while its product line flounders.

In 2011 US hardware and software companies were forced to spend $29.2 billion in 2011 to defend themselves from patent trolls, a cost that is, of course, simply passed on to the consumer. As Bloomberg points out Microsoft is using these “patent privateers” to attack Google and Apple:

To harry other nations without attacking them, monarchs like England’s Elizabeth I commissioned ship captains to plunder merchant vessels, creating a type of pirate known as a privateer.

The term is used today to describe businesses that obtain patents from technology companies and then file infringement lawsuits against the sellers’ competitors.

Tech companies use privateers to distract their adversaries or collect royalties on the patents without provoking retaliatory litigation, said Ron Laurie, managing director of Inflexion Point Strategy LLC in Palo Alto, California.

Nokia Oyj (NOK), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Alcatel-Lucent are among companies connected with these licensing firms.

In addition, attacking rivals via patent trolls, Microsoft has taken to trolling directly, approaching Android handset manufacturers and threatening them with endless litigation unless they pay up. The similarity between patent trolling and business model of the mafia is hard not to notice and its one that was actually pioneered by Microsoft’s former CTO.
Now we have Microsoft itself engaging in it more and more. As noted in the Bloomberg article “Five years ago, any connections with patent-assertion companies reflected poorly, now that’s kind of history and everyone’s singing ‘How can I get in on this action?’”

Microsoft now makes more off of Android phones that it does off of Windows phones. This strange situation pretty much ensures that things will get worse as they look for ways of increasing that revenue stream.

When they are not feeding the patent trolls, or being one themselves, Microsoft seems to be spending millions astroturfing, trying to bait the government into suing Google. As Readwrite.com’s Dan Lyon puts it:

For years Microsoft has devoted massive resources and energy to waging a sneaky shadow war against Google, fielding an army of lobbyists and front groups that exist almost completely to spread anti-Google propaganda, including ICOMP.org, the Association for Competitive Technology, FairSearch and SafeGov.

They call themselves “industry groups,” and they have lots of members, but they’re basically Microsoft fronts devoted to hating on Google.

That article is a pretty eye-opening even if you were already aware of Microsoft past shady business practices. It also mentions that Mark Penn, the man behind the Facebook’s Google smear campaign and who is bringing political attack ads to the tech world (and who reports directly to Steve Ballmer) “has been going around Washington trying to recruit consultants, telling them that Microsoft has armed him with a $50 million budget to go after Google”.

Shockingly, none of this is shocking for those who follow the company closely. Asked about Microsoft’s new advertising efforts, Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT’s Sloan School of Management who has been writing about Microsoft since the 90s simply said “Nothing is below Microsoft. They have been playing dirty for a long time”.

So as good as Dan Lyon’s article is, its “Why Not Just Make Better Products?” conclusion sounds pretty naive. Gaming the system is increasingly common as a mainstream business strategy regardless of which industry you look at (look into “regulatory capture“). It’s how people get paid. The only apparent solution is to make the system harder to game.

Google has taken a step in that direction by creating a “prior art search tool”. StackExchange has also made a site to crowdsource the search for prior art. Both of these efforts aim to give patent examiners better tools in hopes that this will reduce the number of bad technology patents that are currently streaming out of the USPTO.

The astroturfing problem is a largely hidden epidemic and will probably need a browser functionality similar to Google’s Safe Browsing Techonology to even raise that issue into the public consciousness.

Fundamentally, the answer to the question “Why Not Just Make Better Products?” is because getting good products into peoples hands is hard. Sadly the current business environment makes it easier and potentially more profitable to focus on other strategies. Microsoft’s clearly chosen to spend their time and resources increase the risk of using competing products (via patent litigation and threats), expense involved in creating competing products (via Internet Explorer, patent licencing) and complexity (UEFI) of everything else so their own products (however risky, expensive and complex) seem like a bargain. They are doing this because it makes them money.

Until the incentives change we can expect Microsoft to keep advancing into territory previously understood as crime.

Lean Startups and the Microsoft BizSpark fat bomb.

There is a lot of talk in tech circles about running a “lean” startup. Eric Ries, Paul Graham from the Ycombinator and many others investing in technology are all pushing this model of launching a company. There are quite a few definitions out there but they all centre on having a low burn rate. Eric Ries sums up the advice on achieving this:

“by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.

I suspect it is exactly that advice that prompted Microsoft to launch their BizSpark program. When the ad “Microsoft BizSpark – Programs for software start-ups. 3 years for just US$100!” showed up in my Gmail a while back I couldn’t resist reading the terms to find out what happens at the three year mark.

Having priced out some Microsoft Sharepoint based websites in my previous career, I had a pretty good idea what the punchline might be. On their site they explain:

“In addition to responsibility for the USD$100 program offering fee, Startups can continue to use the development tools they previously obtained through the program. If Startups wish to continue to receive updates to development tools, Startups can renew their MSDN subscription at usual rates and terms. To continue to use the production licenses, Startups may choose to take advantage of a licensing program like Microsoft’s Services Provider License Agreement program (or other Microsoft licensing programs that may be available at the time), but are in no way obligated to do so.”

http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/BIZSPARK/Pages/FAQ.aspx#q9

While this sounds “lean”, to me, this is a fat bomb, waiting to go off. We all need to keep our software up to date for security reasons if nothing else, so its not as though its a real option to run without updates for very long. They know you are going to have to pony up sooner or later. After three years of writing Microsoft code and immersing yourself in their ecosystem, the likelihood you will have both the skill set and the motivation to start again on another platform is low.

While I thought that at the time, just today I read about the exception that proves the rule. The smart and obviously multi-talented duo behind Tekpub had some interesting thoughts on BizSpark they shared in an interview about their recent switch from .Net MVC to the open source Ruby on Rails framework:

RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture?

RC: Money. We were enrolled in Microsoft BizSpark Program and it was great for getting off the ground, but projecting into the future we realized that everything – from our database down to our development environment would have to be paid for after 3 years. We also figured that we’d probably need a separate server to run videos properly (for streaming) to Silverlight (using Streaming Media) which would be another license cost – and, in addition, we’d need to buy Media Encoder in order to encode the video for Smooth Streaming.

This might not be an issue for a large company, but when we sat down to assess what the bills would be – well let’s just say that it was about 5 figures. We put our business hats on and tried to justify that cost – and we couldn’t.

JA: As Rob mentioned cost was one of the factors, BizSpark is great but it is basically a ticking time bomb.

The emphasis is mine, but the sentiments are theirs.The five figures number they mention, agrees with the numbers I came up with in my pricing exercise a few years ago. Working with a Microsoft Licensing specialist, I ended up somewhere a little shy of $150,000, for the server alone.

That gave me a pretty serious case of sticker shock at the time and still blows me away when I think of the implications of it for the organisation as a whole. While the market sets the highest price a company can sell its product/service for, it seems that for a lot of companies the lowest price is being set in Redmond. While I have to accept the former, the latter, fortunately, is optional.
Now I am not an economist, but the view from here is that the costs for a “lean” startup, look something like:

coffee + people + place

While for a Microsoft-based company or a BizSpark company on year 4 it is:

coffee + people + place + licence costs

If both those companies have to spring for developers and all the usual stuff, then when prices are high the lean company would have a higher profit margin and when things get competitive they can drop their prices lower. A BizSpark business will be able to behave like a lean startup for the first few years, but will moving up a few weight classes while others in the field stay lean. Effectively the lowest price you can sell your product for is suddenly being determined in Redmond rather than in your office. For those tackling tough markets, or dealing with big organisations where you can easily run out of money waiting for a sale to come through the pipeline, this should be a terrifying prospect. With recession talk and belt tightening all around, why would anyone think running lean is less important on year four than it is in year three?

Update – Feb 2014: It seems like even success can’t protect you. Having exited the Bizspark program somewhere around 2011, and seemingly having coasted as long as possible on their exising licences, Stackoverflow  co-founder and Bizspark alumnus Joel Splosky is now balking at the licencing costs for Microsoft’s SQLserver.

He took to Twitter asking about porting a large database to Postgres. When prodded for more detail he added:

If you read the full exchange you can see that the suggested remedy ends up being to use Stackoverflow’s “posterboy” status as a Microsoft success story to work a deal with Microsoft for some reduced rates, which brings in Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman:

The thread ends rather suddenly as the whole thing goes offline as the Bizspark posterboy is presumably offered whatever deal is required to keep their success story looking like a success. Illusion of financial viability maintained. +1 Microsoft.

Let’s also ignore the face that Stackoverflow’s other co-founder Jeff Atwood decided to use Ruby on Rails, Postgres and Javascript for his new project; discourse.

How would you design the browser ballot?

“Microsoft’s tying of Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system harms competition between web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”

I recently stumbled across an old post by Mitchell Baker of Mozilla. The post is essentially an offer to the EC to advise on what steps might be appropriate to implement a remedy for Microsoft’s illegal behaviour. As he says “There are separate questions of whether there is a good remedy, and what that remedy might be”. It’s one of those scenarios in which it’s interesting to imagine what you would do if the responsibility for a judgement suddenly (inexplicably) ended up in your lap.

The problem in need of a remedy he nicely sums up as Microsoft “promoted IE through activities that the US Department of Justice and the U.S. Courts determined to be illegal. As result, Internet Explorer ended up with well over 90% market share.”

Its interesting to think through what one might expect from such a remedy. When a wealthy drug dealer is busted their assets are seized and sold since they are the proceeds of crime. The proceeds of crime in this case would be Internet Explorer’s market share. In my head any remedy should be aimed at ensuring the perpetrator does not benefit from their crime, otherwise the incentive is there to commit another crime. The difficulty is that you can’t just confiscate market share.

The remedy that was eventually decided upon was the browser ballot. There were a lot of different ways it could have been implemented but in the end a web page was created that would display the major browsers to the user in random(ish) order. The user would decide what to install from there.

While think I might have offered a similar solution myself in my hypothetical world, I don’t think I agree with the implementation. Displaying a randomly ordered list of browsers gives them all an equal opportunity to be seen but the other browsers a starting at a deficit; to the user the are looking at a list, that has the program they have been using (possibly for years), or a bunch of stuff they have never heard of. An equal chance a being first on the list is not likely to overcome that.

It is a fact that for many users Internet Explorer IS the internet. For many more, even if they are aware of difference between the browser and the website displayed within it, Internet Explorer is the only browser they have ever used. The familiarity that comes with that is also the proceeds of the crime. While the browser ballot is definitely the way it should be, the problem lies in the fact that its the way it ALWAYS should have been.

With Microsoft’s illegal actions creating a bias in the mind of the user, I would be very curious to know what the actual outcome of the browser ballot is. Thinking about it leaves me with more questions than answers:

At what rate are users installing other browsers?

Is this rate sufficient to deprive Microsoft of the “proceeds of the crime”?

If it isn’t, should the ballot favour the other browsers and how much?

If it is, on what timeline?

Is that timeline short enough to feel like an ethical solution to people who have to live with the consequences of this illegal action?

Is this rate high enough to feel like a punishment rather than a market fluctuation?

If the goal is shifting market share, what is the ideal we are shifting it towards? How would you know when to stop?

While there are probably no “right” answers to most of these, just better answers and worse ones. For me the browser ballot falls somewhere in the middle.

What would your remedy look like?