Microsoft and Mozilla: Lennon had it right
I often tell people that the concept of financial health covers everything that touches the financial part of a person's life, which, since most every aspect of a person's life has a financial component to it, is virtually everything in their lives.
Today we put that notion to the test by looking at software.
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On the front page of today's SF Chron business section, above the fold, they have a wonderful juxtaposition of articles.
One article said that Microsoft was settling a law suit brought against it by Novell, by paying to Novell -- the once-dominant networking company that, woe-be-to-it, ended up smack dab in the middle of Bill Gates's competitive sights -- some half a billion dollars of Microsoft's $60 billion cash horde (since the Chron's article is not available on line as far as I can tell, see the NYT article here. )
The other article said that Mozilla was releasing a new version of Firefox (see the article here).
Now, the fact that Mozilla was on the front page of the business section of today's SF Chronicle must have given pause to the folks at Microsoft (which we'll refer to in here by its stock ticker symbol, MSFT), because for MSFT's competing product, the ubiquitous Internet Explorer (which we'll call IE in here), is something over which MSFT has waged the software equivalent of a holy crusade in the past.
That happened in the mid-1990s when Bill I'm an Innovator, not a Dominator Gates failed to understand the mass commercialization of the Internet in a timely fashion, and found himself playing big-time catch-up with Netscape's Navigator browser. So Bill was following rather than leading (which many argue is his favorite way of doing things) and, finding himself way way behind on the hugest shift in personal computing since personal computing became widespread, started doing everything in his essentially unlimited power to squash Netscape like a bug under a shoe heel, including, as one federal court found, breaking the law in oh-so-many different ways.
As in MSFT = lawbreaker. .
Lawbreaking or not, it undeniably worked. Now everyone and his or her aunt and uncle, minus a few outliers here and there (which we'll discuss below) uses IE to browse the Internet.
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Getting IE into its dominant position put MSFT into the hottest legal water it's ever been in. That hot water was the federal government's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a suit in which the federal government, assisted in its efforts by David Boies, roundly defeated MSFT.
If you remember the video of Bill Gates's deposition where he rocked back and forth like a differently-abled child and professed to know nothing, then you are remembering one of the more visually memorable aspects of the trial coverage in the press.
That was by far the most near-death experience the company ever had: the verdict from that suit required MSFT to be split into two. But that verdict was overruled once Bush took over the presidency and Ashcroft took over the attorney general's office, which meant that Boies was out and in came people who thought it was just plain ol' wrong to get in the way of MSFT. So MSFT got a slap on the wrist and was forced to promise in writing that it would stop breaking the law (wouldn't it be something if crooks got off with merely a promise to not do criminal things anymore?).
Since then MSFT has been settling anti-trust lawsuits at a pretty regular pace, beginning with the suit involving the most venomous of all its detractors, Sun Microsystems and its CEO Scott McNeely, thereby signaling to all the world that Bill and Steve Balmer were in a negotiating frame of mind.
They just wanted to all get along. That was new.
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And that brings us back to where we started: MSFT settling a case with Novell by paying it half a billion dollars.
So who is Novell?
Throughout much of the mid-1990s, Novell, a Utah company, was dominant in networking software. So if you worked in a small office, the odds were that the computers you used were hooked together using Novell's software. People mostly liked the software; it tended to work and it tended to stay way out of one's consciousness as it went about doing its business. And that's a good thing for software to do: leave you alone as you go about doing your business.
But the way people felt towards Novell's software was nothing compared to the way people felt towards another Utah software-maker's software, a software-maker that Novell ended up owning for a while, called WordPerfect.
WordPerfect was the first, and perhaps last, word processing software that people tended to adore. So if you were using a word processor in the late-1980s, then you were probably using WP5.1 for DOS, a product in the pre-Windows-world that just got out of the way and let you write.
WordStar, which had come before it, was good for it's time but hard to learn. Microsoft's Word, which came later and killed off WordPerfect lock stock and barrel, was good for some things but not easy to learn and terrible in the way other MSFT software for the consumer market is terrible: it crashed, it made easy tasks hard and hard tasks even harder, and it evinced no overall approach to doing things, so that every time you needed to learn something new you were starting anew.
In that regard WP5.1 was different. It was easy to learn. And once you knew your way around in it, it was usually pretty easy to learn other features in it -- even the high powered fancy features -- because it had an overall approach to how things were done.
But most of all what WP5.1 had going for it was that the people who wrote it had an ability to evoke a feeling in its customers that the folks at WordPerfect truly cared about their customers, and saw their customers' wellbeing and satisfaction as something worth working for, in and of itself, separate from profitability. At least that's the way it felt to some folks..
That approach, when confronted with a competitor using the opposite approach, fails fairly often, in the same way that people with machine guns tend to prevail over people doing yoga.
So WordPerfect, when confronted by Gates & Co., ate it, and ate it fast. And that happened when MSFT, after rolling out its umpty-umpth version of Windows attempts, finally came up with a version of Windows that people could use (most people think of this as happening with the release of Windows 95, but some people actually managed to warm up to Windows 3.1, which came immediately before it).
Once Windows caught on, no caring and no excellence could save WordPerfect's day because there was no way the folks at WordPerfect could write software for Bill's Windows platform anywhere near as well as they could write a program for DOS, which was much more open to all comers. So Bill's monopoly was taking hold in a new way, and MSFT's Office products -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- were going to ride that monopoly to a monopoly of their own.
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So today we are all beholding to MSFT. There is no way around it.
And the result of that is that, other than a few smatterings here and there (e.g., Apple, Palm and Nokia), in the face of that situation people creating beautiful software for the masses has been relegated to the background.
Now, admittedly, it is really nice to be able to send a Word or Excel file to someone and not worry about whether they can use it. But unfortunately, with that uniformity has come a computing environment that is nowhere near as good as it could be,
That means that IE, like most all MSFT products for retail customers, is terribly defective in some ways, such as security, ease of use and the like.
How often has Windows or Word or Excel made you cry, or at least made you want to cry? How often have you been inside there and thought to yourself, these guys don't care. If they did care, they would put some of their cash horde into help screens that are helpful, auto-save functions that auto-save, footers that consistently footer, and simply make this stuff work better?
Add your favorite MSFT aggravation here: _________________
And how may times have you asked yourself, How much of my time have these defective products wasted? How many times have I lost a file to a crash or a lock-up, and seen that I just wasted a major chunk of time because the results of my efforts had vanished?
And then maybe you've gone further, by saying to yourself, It doesn't have to be this way.
And maybe you;ve found yourself thinking to yourself, Instead of using products made by people who stop at barely good enough is way good enough so long as we have a monopoly, why not use products made by people who start at, how can I make this product beautiful, and in doing so make the world a better, happier place, while still putting a very nice amount of food on my family's table?