Paranoid
delusions
aside, Microsoft does want to rule the world--by driving serious
business
computing applications
by Alan Zisman (c) 1995 First published
in Business in Vancouver
, Issue #311 October 10, 1995 High Tech Office column
Last week, we took a look at software giant Microsoft
Corporation, whose operating systems run an estimated 80 per cent
of the world's 200 million-plus personal computers. After years of
offering also-ran word-processors and spreadsheets, the Microsoft
Office package has 80 per cent of the sales in this hot product
category.
Even on rival Apple's Macintosh platform, Microsoft is the
biggest-selling software company.
Being
number one, of
course, means attracting more than your share of gossip and rumours,
and becoming the subject of unprecedented resentment from people (and
not just business competitors) who fear that Microsoft wants to control
the world of computing. It's been said that just because you're not
paranoid, it doesn't mean that someone isn't following you, and
similarly,
even though Microsoft has been subject to a wide range of half-truths
about its overweening ambition, Bill Gates' baby does
want to rule the world, if only in order to maintain its rate of
growth.
There's only one problem: while Microsoft has ended up with a dominant
position in desktop and personal-computer software, it has a poor track
record in other important areas of business computing. But it's
trying....
Take
networks: despite
Microsoft's years of marketing products like LAN Manager, competitor Novell
continues to define corporate networking. Various
forms of Unix remain the operating system of choice for the
technologically important workstation market. And the up-and-coming
model of networks of PCs and workstations replacing aging mainframes
to run corporate databases suggests a future where these systems will
play an ever greater role in business computing. And while the desktop
PC market may be beginning to stagnate (has there really been that
much real change in word processing lately?), these areas are where we
can expect continued growth.
Microsoft
doesn't plan
to stay a bit-player in these high-growth areas. While Windows 95
is aimed at the desktop computer-user at home or in the office,
Microsoft
is hoping to move "serious" business-computer users directly to its
high-end Windows NT product.
NT (for
'New Technology')
seemed a bit of a disappointment when it was released a couple of
years ago. It took too much RAM and was too slow to replace Windows
3.1 on user desktops. But that wasn't really its target: Microsoft
intended it for two other markets. In its Server version, it was
intended
to compete with Novell Netware, and in its workstation version, it
was intended to provide an alternative to Unix. Sales started slowly,
but have gradually taken off, helped by a couple of trends: newer
versions of NT run on less RAM, while performing better, and computers
with
16 megs or more of RAM are more common than they were when NT was
released. As a result, some businesses are seriously considering
skipping
Windows 95 altogether and adopting NT as their working platform,
especially
since most business applications designed for Windows 95 will also
run under NT.
And while
huge numbers
of business desktop computers are running Microsoft Office on computers
running Windows (either 3.1 or 95), Microsoft hopes to repeat this
feat for businesses currently running anything from a Novell network
to an IBM mainframe. BackOffice bundles NT Server with a set of
applications
aimed at "serious" business computing--Mail Server, SQL Server, SNA
Server, and System Management Server. And soon, Microsoft hopes to
add Exchange Server to compete with the popular Lotus Notes.
With these, businesses could construct custom systems to handle the
bulk of their computing needs while gaining the security and robustness
that even NT's critics have praised.
And
because NT runs
on a wide range of hardware (there are even versions for the Power-PC
from IBM and Apple), Microsoft will no longer be dependent on hardware
built on Intel chips. In future, Microsoft says, a version
of NT code-named CAIRO will be used, along with future versions of
BackOffice, on the computers running your business's network and
database,
as well as on the desktop PCs.
In July, The
Economist put Bill Gates on its cover, just as Time
magazine had a few months earlier. In the Economist' version,
however, he was pictured as a spider, wrapping up his competitors,
and extending his web throughout the computer industry. Quietly,
patiently
(Microsoft supported Windows for five years from 1985 to 1990 before
it caught on as a popular computing platform), it is hoping to extend
its reach from the desktop to the machines that, behind the scenes,
are increasingly vital for business computing. And other strategies
are unfolding to keep Microsoft growing in non-business areas ranging
from games to cable TV.
It's not as
exciting as
speculating that Microsoft wants to read your love letters off your
hard drive, but it may have more important implications for the way
we all use computers to do business in the last years of this century,
and the early years of the next one.