C
Chad Harris
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/14/t...r=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&pagewanted=print
October 14, 2006
Saturday Interview
Is Windows Near End of Its Run?
By STEVE LOHR
Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The
next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to
arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust
rules in Europe.
Mr. Ballmer, 50, has been deeply involved in the discussions with the
European competition authorities.
Windows Vista and Office 2007, according to industry analysts, may be the
last time Microsoft can really cash in on these lucrative personal computer
products, as software is increasingly distributed, developed and used on the
Internet.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Vista would be shipped in late January
and expressed confidence that it would pass regulatory scrutiny. [Page C3.]
In fast-growing consumer markets, Microsoft is playing catch-up. It trails
well behind Google in Internet search. Next month, Microsoft will introduce
its Zune music player, in an uphill effort to take on the Apple iPod.
At Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer must adjust to being alone at the top, as his
friend and longtime partner, Bill Gates, eases out of his company duties to
work full time on philanthropy.
In a meeting this week with editors and reporters of The New York Times, Mr.
Ballmer answered questions about Microsoft, his job and the future of
software. Following are excerpts:
Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t
supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.
A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one
big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it
wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s
try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new
user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just
trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the
same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.
Q. In the future, will the software model change? Will the Internet, for
example, be the way most software is distributed?
A. That will happen. It’ll happen from us. It’ll happen from everybody.
Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much
shorter, months instead of years?
A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office
Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six
months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every
couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and
it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of
time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms
every month. It’s just not done.
Q. Is Vista the last operating system of this era? That is, the last
operating system in the traditional sense of being this monolithic software
product? Don’t these Internet changes open the door to Windows à la carte?
After all, you have different versions of Windows now for personal
computers, cellphones and hand-helds.
A. Windows is a little different because Windows manages the hardware. It’s
got to come with the hardware and manage the hardware. For the thing called
the PC — the thing we think of as having a big screen and a keyboard — there
really is one infrastructure for supporting hardware, for supporting
application development. It’s not 100 percent monolithic. But it’s almost
100 percent monolithic.
Q. Can we talk about Europe?
A. Beautiful place. I lived in Brussels for three years as a kid. I do love
Brussels.
Q. I was thinking of what seems to be the continuing conflict — the
disputes, penalties and fines — over how Microsoft designs Windows and what
features you put in the operating system. Is there a way around that
problem?
A. First of all, I wouldn’t call it conflict. We really have — no, I mean
this genuinely — have been having a constructive dialogue. Now, no
regulator, not in this country nor in Europe, is going to give you a gold
star that says, I will attest that everything in Vista is OK. The Department
of Justice is not going to do that, and the European Union is not going to
do that. At the end of the day, we can get a lot of guidance. And then we
have to make the call and we have to take the risk. We really just have to
decide whether we think the thing is compliant. It’s not really their issue.
It’s kind of our issue in an odd way.
A. With Bill Gates making the transition out of day-to-day involvement at
Microsoft, what is the biggest challenge you have to overcome?
Q. Well, there are sort of two. First, it’s not like Bill’s written every
line of code or designed every product or done anything like that for many,
many years. But Bill’s been an incredible contributor. If Office 2007 is a
great product, give Bill 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the credit. We have to make
sure that — whether it’s 5 or 7 or 10 percent — we get those values
someplace else. And second, with Bill people have understood that we’re
committed to long-term innovation. Bill’s been emblematic of that. We’ve
shared that vision all along the way. But I think I have to pick that up.
Because people want to know that the buck-stops-here person is committed to
continuing to invest and do things.
Q. Several of the areas Microsoft is betting on for future growth — Xbox,
Zune and ad-supported Web software and services — are consumer markets. How
do you think the consumer perceives Microsoft?
A. All our surveys will tell you consumers think the world of Microsoft. At
the same time, you have to go win the consumer in each area. I’ll give you
an example. When it came time to name Xbox, there was certainly a class of
people who wanted to have Microsoft and/or Windows more prominent. They all
lost. And it was a wise choice. Not because Microsoft is bad. But it wouldn’t
have meant what it needed to mean to that audience. And Zune could have been
Microsoft music system or Microsoft entertainment system or Xpod, I guess.
But again, we thought the experience was different and it was worth giving
its own identity. So I think we have a good seat with the consumer, but we
have to prove ourselves every time as our competitors have to do, too, by
the way. Google has a good brand. It didn’t help them a lick in video.
Q. What do you see as the most significant changes in how people use
software?
A. I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community.
That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people and
it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of multiple people
interacting on things — that will forever continue. That’s different today,
and we’re going to see those differences build. You see it in a variety of
ways now, in social networking sites, in the way people collaborate at work,
and in ad hoc collaboration over the Internet. You see it in things like
Xbox Live, the way we let people come together and have community
entertainment experiences. And you’ll see that in TV and video. It’s not
like the future of entertainment has been determined. But it’s a big deal.
October 9, 2006
A Challenge for Exterminators
By JOHN MARKOFF
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 5 — On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft
conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer
captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.
The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come
from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted in a 19th-century observation
about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for
the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world’s
largest-selling software packages.
As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the
equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal
computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe
with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat
the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.
The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named
Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a
new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to
materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years
ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual
modernization and ease of use.
Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of
both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that
as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.
“It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical
problem, and there was a turning point,” said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer
scientist who is director of Windows program management. “We’ve confounded
the analysts and the press.”
As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a
Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the
product to be introduced on time. “The Vista development organization has
made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista’s performance,
reliability, and compatibility,” he said.
[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test
version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is
positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]
The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce
Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year,
and to home users early next year.
This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for
Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide
and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm
Gartner.
Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the
software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an
extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate
partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send
data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.
The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million
users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software,
generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000
employee computers are running test versions.
Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer
users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have
sent crash data back to Microsoft.
Such data supplements the company’s own testing in a center for Office
referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and
other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less
interesting name — Windows Test Technologies.)
This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly
while looking for errors.
The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft’s
director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr.
Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he
undertook for the nation’s telephone network.
“Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things,” he said.
“When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to
this.”
The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5
petabytes of information — the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000
home PC’s.
The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent
months between Microsoft’s designers and its partners, who have been
tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.
On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called
Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take
advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.
Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft
disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility
with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner
company.
That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted
directly to the testers’ computers over the Internet within four days — a
vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.
Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects —
which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers
and testers here — there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long
it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.
“We’ve been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,”
said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that
Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a
significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith
said.
Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative,
and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for
itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.
A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent
a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.
While Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his
company abruptly in the mid-1990’s to respond to the challenge posed by
Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar
challenge to its dominance from Google.
Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward
Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant
efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.
Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the
rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut
Microsoft’s software development model — using a proprietary software
development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.
In an internal company memo titled “Don’t Bet Against the Internet,” he
wrote recently, “Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on
the Internet), most proprietary standards (I’m thinking of Exchange e-mail
and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open
protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet.”
The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his
career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate
degree in philosophy from Reed College.
Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard
curve.
Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond
teaching philosophy — with the possible exception of finding and killing
bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve
particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has
been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.
“If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it’s very
high,” he said. “There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they
hate us, and we want to help.”
October 14, 2006
Saturday Interview
Is Windows Near End of Its Run?
By STEVE LOHR
Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The
next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to
arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust
rules in Europe.
Mr. Ballmer, 50, has been deeply involved in the discussions with the
European competition authorities.
Windows Vista and Office 2007, according to industry analysts, may be the
last time Microsoft can really cash in on these lucrative personal computer
products, as software is increasingly distributed, developed and used on the
Internet.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Vista would be shipped in late January
and expressed confidence that it would pass regulatory scrutiny. [Page C3.]
In fast-growing consumer markets, Microsoft is playing catch-up. It trails
well behind Google in Internet search. Next month, Microsoft will introduce
its Zune music player, in an uphill effort to take on the Apple iPod.
At Microsoft, Mr. Ballmer must adjust to being alone at the top, as his
friend and longtime partner, Bill Gates, eases out of his company duties to
work full time on philanthropy.
In a meeting this week with editors and reporters of The New York Times, Mr.
Ballmer answered questions about Microsoft, his job and the future of
software. Following are excerpts:
Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t
supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.
A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one
big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it
wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s
try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new
user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just
trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the
same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.
Q. In the future, will the software model change? Will the Internet, for
example, be the way most software is distributed?
A. That will happen. It’ll happen from us. It’ll happen from everybody.
Q. Doesn’t that mean that software product cycles are going to be much
shorter, months instead of years?
A. Things will change at different paces. There are aspects of our Office
Live service, for example, that change every three months, four months, six
months. And there are aspects that are still not going to change but every
couple of years. The truth of the matter is that some big innovations — and
it’s a little like having a baby — can’t happen in under a certain amount of
time. And, you know, Google doesn’t change their core search algorithms
every month. It’s just not done.
Q. Is Vista the last operating system of this era? That is, the last
operating system in the traditional sense of being this monolithic software
product? Don’t these Internet changes open the door to Windows à la carte?
After all, you have different versions of Windows now for personal
computers, cellphones and hand-helds.
A. Windows is a little different because Windows manages the hardware. It’s
got to come with the hardware and manage the hardware. For the thing called
the PC — the thing we think of as having a big screen and a keyboard — there
really is one infrastructure for supporting hardware, for supporting
application development. It’s not 100 percent monolithic. But it’s almost
100 percent monolithic.
Q. Can we talk about Europe?
A. Beautiful place. I lived in Brussels for three years as a kid. I do love
Brussels.
Q. I was thinking of what seems to be the continuing conflict — the
disputes, penalties and fines — over how Microsoft designs Windows and what
features you put in the operating system. Is there a way around that
problem?
A. First of all, I wouldn’t call it conflict. We really have — no, I mean
this genuinely — have been having a constructive dialogue. Now, no
regulator, not in this country nor in Europe, is going to give you a gold
star that says, I will attest that everything in Vista is OK. The Department
of Justice is not going to do that, and the European Union is not going to
do that. At the end of the day, we can get a lot of guidance. And then we
have to make the call and we have to take the risk. We really just have to
decide whether we think the thing is compliant. It’s not really their issue.
It’s kind of our issue in an odd way.
A. With Bill Gates making the transition out of day-to-day involvement at
Microsoft, what is the biggest challenge you have to overcome?
Q. Well, there are sort of two. First, it’s not like Bill’s written every
line of code or designed every product or done anything like that for many,
many years. But Bill’s been an incredible contributor. If Office 2007 is a
great product, give Bill 3 or 5 or 10 percent of the credit. We have to make
sure that — whether it’s 5 or 7 or 10 percent — we get those values
someplace else. And second, with Bill people have understood that we’re
committed to long-term innovation. Bill’s been emblematic of that. We’ve
shared that vision all along the way. But I think I have to pick that up.
Because people want to know that the buck-stops-here person is committed to
continuing to invest and do things.
Q. Several of the areas Microsoft is betting on for future growth — Xbox,
Zune and ad-supported Web software and services — are consumer markets. How
do you think the consumer perceives Microsoft?
A. All our surveys will tell you consumers think the world of Microsoft. At
the same time, you have to go win the consumer in each area. I’ll give you
an example. When it came time to name Xbox, there was certainly a class of
people who wanted to have Microsoft and/or Windows more prominent. They all
lost. And it was a wise choice. Not because Microsoft is bad. But it wouldn’t
have meant what it needed to mean to that audience. And Zune could have been
Microsoft music system or Microsoft entertainment system or Xpod, I guess.
But again, we thought the experience was different and it was worth giving
its own identity. So I think we have a good seat with the consumer, but we
have to prove ourselves every time as our competitors have to do, too, by
the way. Google has a good brand. It didn’t help them a lick in video.
Q. What do you see as the most significant changes in how people use
software?
A. I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community.
That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people and
it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of multiple people
interacting on things — that will forever continue. That’s different today,
and we’re going to see those differences build. You see it in a variety of
ways now, in social networking sites, in the way people collaborate at work,
and in ad hoc collaboration over the Internet. You see it in things like
Xbox Live, the way we let people come together and have community
entertainment experiences. And you’ll see that in TV and video. It’s not
like the future of entertainment has been determined. But it’s a big deal.
October 9, 2006
A Challenge for Exterminators
By JOHN MARKOFF
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 5 — On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft
conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer
captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.
The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come
from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted in a 19th-century observation
about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for
the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world’s
largest-selling software packages.
As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the
equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal
computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe
with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat
the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.
The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named
Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a
new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to
materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years
ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual
modernization and ease of use.
Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of
both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that
as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.
“It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical
problem, and there was a turning point,” said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer
scientist who is director of Windows program management. “We’ve confounded
the analysts and the press.”
As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a
Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the
product to be introduced on time. “The Vista development organization has
made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista’s performance,
reliability, and compatibility,” he said.
[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test
version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is
positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]
The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce
Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year,
and to home users early next year.
This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for
Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide
and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm
Gartner.
Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the
software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an
extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate
partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send
data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.
The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million
users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software,
generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000
employee computers are running test versions.
Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer
users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have
sent crash data back to Microsoft.
Such data supplements the company’s own testing in a center for Office
referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and
other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less
interesting name — Windows Test Technologies.)
This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly
while looking for errors.
The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft’s
director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr.
Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he
undertook for the nation’s telephone network.
“Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things,” he said.
“When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to
this.”
The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5
petabytes of information — the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000
home PC’s.
The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent
months between Microsoft’s designers and its partners, who have been
tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.
On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called
Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take
advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.
Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft
disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility
with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner
company.
That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted
directly to the testers’ computers over the Internet within four days — a
vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.
Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects —
which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers
and testers here — there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long
it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.
“We’ve been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,”
said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that
Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a
significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith
said.
Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative,
and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for
itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.
A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent
a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.
While Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his
company abruptly in the mid-1990’s to respond to the challenge posed by
Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar
challenge to its dominance from Google.
Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward
Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant
efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.
Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the
rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut
Microsoft’s software development model — using a proprietary software
development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.
In an internal company memo titled “Don’t Bet Against the Internet,” he
wrote recently, “Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on
the Internet), most proprietary standards (I’m thinking of Exchange e-mail
and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open
protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet.”
The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his
career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate
degree in philosophy from Reed College.
Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard
curve.
Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond
teaching philosophy — with the possible exception of finding and killing
bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve
particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has
been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.
“If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it’s very
high,” he said. “There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they
hate us, and we want to help.”