Microsoft's worst emails of all time

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has collected and ranked the all-time worst (read: most incriminating) Microsoft emails of all time, and a dandy list it is, too. For heavy email users like me, it's also a reminder that some things are better left unsaid...or at least unwritten.

Perhaps my favorite of the bunch is Jim Allchin's 2004 blast against Windows...and in favor of the Mac:

I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate onto great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

But then there's also the internal acknowledgements of the rising threat (and validity) of open-source software:

OSS [open-source software] systems are considered credible because the source code is available from potentially millions of places and individuals. The likelihood that Apache will cease to exist is orders of magnitudes lower than the likelihood that WordPerfect, for example, will disappear. The disappearance of Apache is not tied to the disappearance of binaries (which are affected by purchasing shifts, etc.) but rather to the disappearance of source code and the knowledge base....

The project must be cool enough that the intellectual reward adequately compensates for the time invested by developers. The Linux OS [operating system] excels in this respect....

[On attacking Linux.] Linux's homebase is currently commodity network and server infrastructure. By folding extended functionality (e.g. Storage+ in file systems, DAV/POD for networking) into today's commodity services, we raise the bar & change the rules of the game.

There's much more. I encourage you to read them all. They illustrate that Microsoft has long been one of the most forward-thinking and self-aware companies in the business...but also one of the most threatened (and threatening).

Microsoft was first to spot the open-source threat. It's unfortunate that it didn't also recognize the open-source opportunity.

[RamboTribble]

Microsoft's paranoia stems from the fact that Gates and crew didn't engineer their initial success. That was a gift to them from those who successfully reverse-engineered the IBM PC's ROM-BIOS. Without the PC clones Gates would never have become the richest man on the planet and he knows it. His monopolistic thuggery has stemmed from a sense of not being in control, from the beginning. As a consequence, Open Source constitutes the ultimate personal threat; it simply cannot be controlled by monopolistic tactics.

[evilbastard9]

I seem to remember a story about Mr. Gates, as a yute, reselling a traffic control system as if it was his own design.

[TimBowden]

Matt,
The problem for MS in not just that it spotted the threat but not the opportunity, but the nature of both the threat and opportunity. The FOSS threat to MS I think is well documented. I'd like to focus on the FOSS opportunity for MS and why they missed it, and why it's so hard for them to make something of that opportunity.

It's often said that open source is disruptive. If we look at why it's disruptive, we come to understand why taking advantage of FOSS is so hard for MS. Open source changes the ground rules for just about every aspect of doing IT business; Development, packaging, marketing, sales etc. If you've got a healthy revenue stream from your existing proprietary model, converting to an open source business requires cannibalizing your existing business. You destroy your existing business before you've had a chance to build new revenue streams with a new model. The business analysts will slaughter you, closely followed by your shareholders.

You've spent years educating your customers to use a value model that's incompatible to open source. What do you tell them? You lied? You changed your mind? You're taking someone else's lead? Not a pretty scenario. Your internal structures are build around delivering value using a proprietary model. To change to an open source model, you've got to re-engineer your business internally and externally. How disruptive is that? The bigger and more established you are, the more internal power structures you're going to waste. How much internal and external kickback can you deal with?

All that's particularly destructive, so you delay making the change as long as you can. Trouble is, the longer you delay, the more opportunity you give your competition. Eventually you get to the point where you're forced to change by a market that's changed around you. You've become an also ran that nobody listens to. All this makes it much harder for a company like MS to identify the opportunities open source offers.

To understand the opportunities, you need to have an understanding of open source as philosophy, development model, business model and community (ok, so I'm paraphrasing what you obviously understand well, but bear with me). MS is well known for being stuck on open source as a philosophy. An alternate approach is to start with open source as a dev model, move onto business model, wrap that in community and they you'll understand and value open source (or free software) as a philosophy.

MS could do much worse than adopt the open source dev model internally, as opposed to trying to be an open source company from the outside. Imagine if the windows source tree was freely available internally. Perhaps if developers were given 20% of their time to work on whatever part of the source tree they wanted. Imagine if MS were able to turn out a new (more or less stable) version of the windows kernel every three months or so. Imagine if they were able to release a new version of windows every 12 months (and I don't just mean new eye candy and bug patches). That's the sort of productivity benefit that's been demonstrated by the linux kernel project. Just that alone would make MS a fearsome competitor again, and let's face it, taking on MS is no longer the death wish it once was. Just ask Google.

Now let's speculate on the consequences of MS did adopting an open source dev model internally. Along with the productivity improvements, there would be significant changes in the internal power structure. It would be painful, without a doubt (there's the disruptive nature of open source raising its head), but the new power structure that would emerge would align with the dev model. In other words, they'd have an internal open source business model.

In the process, they'd also discover they had developed internal open source communities centered on their dev and business models. At that point, open source as philosophy would become valued, not for its egalitarian principles, but for what it returns to the business. Even if they never took the next step of externalizing what they had built internally (open source wise), they would be revitalized and invigorated like they haven't been in years.

I'm sure it doesn't take much to imagine how hard it would be for Linux companies to compete with such a renewed MS. The enormous chasm separating what Linux represents and offers and what MS would have become would be narrowed to a manageable and marketable difference. MS would again be in a position to take advantage of its enormous market incumbency. For now, that incumbency is more like a mill stone around customers necks, and functions only to slow the rate of movement away from MS's solutions. Let's face it, the growth rates of Linux and Windows favour Linux, with nothing on the horizon offering to alter that.

All this supposes that MS does indeed want to change to face the threat that open source represents. That's not a given though. There is no requirement that MS change. After all, their survival is not mandatory.