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| date | 2001-04-24:09:19 |
| Reading |
Charles Fergeson's High Stakes, No Prisoners is a really frightening book. Fergeson is the founder of Vermeer, the short-lived company that created what is now Microsoft FrontPage. Fergeson's background as a consultant--he has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT--puts him in an excellent position to provide a strategic analysis of the internet software industry as it developed in the 1990's. It isn't a pretty picture, particularly where Microsoft is concerned, and it has left me, for one, wondering if I'm a dinosaur that is already extinct, but whose head hasn't noticed yet that his body has been run over by a herd of wooly mamoths. Fergeson is extremely blunt in his assessment of individuals. He says he started Vermeer in part because he was fed up with pulling his punches as a consultant, which is something you have to do to stay employed. Right there we can see something badly wrong with the world--what kind of idiot would hire an expensive consultant with the expectation that the consultant is going to tell them anything less than the unvarnished truth. It's like only going to a doctor if she agrees to not tell you if you have something really bad wrong with you. Refreshingly, Fergeson is almost as hard on himself as others, although he always has the benefit of knowing why he made dumb moves, and often has to infer other's reasons. Furthermore, his mistakes tended to be tactical rather than strategic, which makes a lot of sense given where his head is. The story of Vermeer takes up the first eight chapters of the book, and is full of insight and excitement. The last three chapters deal with increasingly large questions about the nature of the software industry in the U.S. and the role of Microsoft. There are a couple of astonishingly chilling statements buried in the analysis. One is that VCs (venture capitalists) will no longer fund startups developing a wide range of desktop applications for Windows. There isn't any point, because if they are successful--or even if they appear that they might be successful--Microsoft will wipe them out. Although this happened to Vermeer via acquisition, in most cases--think Borland, FTP, WordPerfect, SyBase, Corel and at the moment RealNetworks--they will either license or clone the technology and then use their marketing leaverage to obliterate the competitive threat. Microsoft has $20 billion in the bank--they can afford to buy or bludgeon everyone and everything they need to get their way. More chilling is Fergeson's view of what Microsoft is doing on the Web. They won the browser war. Now they're going after the server market with NT and Win2000, and they're making steady progress. What I've heard about Win2000 is that it is much more stable than NT4, amongst other things. Given Microsoft's marketing power, the low cost of Intel hardware and the continual improvement of Microsoft's server products, it's pretty clear that in a few years we could be facing a situation where the vast majority of clients are running IE as their browser and a significant majority of web servers are running IIS on Win2000 or its successor. This would give Microsoft effective control over a vast chunk of the Web. With FrontPage as an already ubiquitous authoring tool, Microsoft would be in a position of extending the Office suite to the Web--Bill Gate's early "The Memo" on the internet commented that he was unable to find any Microsoft document formats on the Web. That won't be true for much longer--we will start to see an integration of Microsoft file formats with Web file formats. We already are seeing this if you grant that what Word generates as HTML is really some misbegotten semi-XML not-quite-HTML proprietary document format. At some point Word will start using something XML-like as its document format. It won't actually be an XML language, because it won't parse with anyone's parser but Microsoft's, just like Microsoft's Java isn't Java (the J++ parser produces object code from syntax errors!) At the same time, IE will become "XML compliant", meaning "MS-XML compliant." At that point, you'll be able to point IE at a .doc file and view it, and assimilation will be complete. If the medium is the message, what will this be telling us? |