HAS MICROSOFT FINALLY SEEN ERROR MESSAGE OF ITS WAYS?

Date: Saturday, October 1, 2005

I don't use Windows on my laptop, having been warned off both by my son Peter (who's a Unix wizard) and by the irritating frequency of "this program not responding" messages on the Windows machine I use at work.

But is it possible that the evil Microsoft tyranny might mend its ways? (If you're around Unix/Linux people a lot, they all talk like that and it tends to be catching, especially if you've just had to reboot your Windows computer for the third time that morning, as was happening around here for several days recently.)

On Thursday, blogger R.G. Combs (at http://rgcombs.blog-city.com) linked to an online magazine out of Australia at smartofficenews.com.au (search the site for Allchin). Its article, based on one from The Wall Street Journal, tells about how Microsoft scrapped years of development on what was supposed to be its new operating system, Longhorn, because it was so complicated it would never work properly.

Microsoft Vice President Jim Allchin, who is a co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division, was the one who broke the bad news to Bill Gates last year.

He faced initial resistance, because Microsoft has done pretty well for itself doing what it always has -- having lots of people writing software that is then patched together. And patched is the word, too, because every time someone finds a hole in the code, and that happens a lot, the company issues a patch. But because all the separate pieces of the original code interact in ways nobody planned and nobody fully understands, the patches often create new holes elsewhere.

"The mass of patches and agglomerations that made up Windows turned it into an easy target for viruses and other Web-based attacks," the magazine says. Allchin "had to divert top engineers into the effort to fix security problems in existing versions of Windows. 'The ship was just crashing to the ground,' Mr. All- chin says."

Allchin wanted more than just a quick fix; he wanted a complete change in the culture.

"In 2001 Microsoft made a documentary film celebrating the creation of Windows XP, which remains the latest full update of Windows," the magazine says. "When Mr. Allchin previewed the film, it confirmed some of his misgivings about the Windows culture. He saw the eleventh-hour heroics needed to finish the product and get it to customers. Mr. Allchin ordered the film to be burned."

Among the people Allchin called on to help make his case was Amitabh Srivastava, who "had his team draw up a map of how Windows' pieces fit together. It was 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide and looked like a haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other."

So the new version of Longhorn, now called Vista, was built the way other operating systems are; with a solid and well-tested core, and lots of modular blocks designed to plug into it. The beta-test version was sent out for testing in July, and the number of complaints that came back was a fraction of what it had been for earlier software releases.

My son Peter is still skeptical. "I think I agree with the theory that in principle it's a good thing," he said by e-mail. "But consider that the kinds of techniques Microsoft is adopting now are approximations of engineering methodology everyone else has had for decades.

"In the end, I think Microsoft is an exceptionally well-run business, with poor engineering, and genuinely evil intent. They make a good villain, but the opportunity cost of their successes is incredible.

"If anyone else had won the desktop battle, we would get about 5 percent as much spam as we do, viruses as understood today would be essentially unheard of, and IT departments would need about a third as many staff to get their jobs done. Those are back-of-the- envelope estimates, but they seem pretty well supported at this point."

In his blog post about the article, Combs quotes Virginia Postrel, who wrote in 1998, "This is not a company that thinks like a monopoly. It is always running scared. There's always the possibility that something new could come along and destroy its franchise."

And Combs concludes, "Microsoft is still running scared in 2005. In the 1990s, it was scared of Apple and Netscape. Today, it's the Linux/open-source community and Google. Worthy competitors with fine products in each case. But as long as Microsoft continues to run scared and not act like a monopolist, I like its chances. And I suspect I'll like Windows Vista."

Well, maybe better than the Windows I suffer from now. But when my current laptop dies, I think I'll get a Macintosh instead.