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If you want to stir up controversy among IT professionals, all you have to do is to say something complimentary about Bill Gates and Microsoft.

Or, say something critical. Either will do.

Last week’s column, in general complimentary, resulted in quite a bit of disagreement, in particular on the question of whether Microsoft has ever innovated. You’ll find some of the exchange chronicled in Advice Line (“Microsoft innovation, or not,” 7/8/2008).

My assessment hasn’t changed. A view of innovation limited to product features earns Microsoft a D, and that’s being generous. If the best it has to offer in the way of innovation are Microsoft Bob and the Ribbon … the word that springs to mind is “ugh.”

To help focus its R&D efforts, here are two useful features missing from Word. The first is easy: If I write, “Microsoft code is flabby, insecure and buggy,” and decide to reorder the list to, “Microsoft code is buggy, flabby, and insecure,” I have to fiddle a lot to keep the commas and “and” in the right places. Intelligent and unobtrusive list re-ordering would be quite useful.

Far more useful (and far more challenging to develop) would be a true intelligent assistant — one that scans and analyzes my writing to learn my style, so I can tell it, “Send a diplomatic-sounding nastigram to Senator Bupkis about his position on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In it, make these points:” followed the specific evidence and logic I want to include.

If you’re part of the Open Office project, feel free to beat Microsoft to the punch.

To put Microsoft innovation in a more useful context: Its impact on the software industry has parallels to the impact of the Roman empire on Europe, the Mideast, and North Africa.

Not everyone at the time appreciated being conquered. On the other side of the subject … well, George Bernard Shaw on his worst day was more eloquent than I am on my best, and so, from Julius Caesar:

APOLLODORUS

I understand, Caesar. Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce.

CAESAR

What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain.

Microsoft’s “art” … its innovation … isn’t about its products. In its early days it won through “conquest” (exploiting the mistakes of less canny competitors, and sometimes encouraging them — for example, WordPerfect’s focus on OS/2 instead of Windows). Now, it wins through “civilization” — pre-built integration of complete infrastructure solutions so customers don’t have to glue things together.

In that vein, correspondent Ted Johnson made this excellent point (edited for space):

As a small business IT director, I see Microsoft’s play for the future being the integrated system stack. When I look at the ease of integration of Server 2008, SQL 2008, SharePoint, Office, the various BI tools, and the Dynamics ERP/CRM line, it is hard to argue with on a limited budget.

The main competition I see to Microsoft is open source. I would love to take a deep look at Compiere, but … I don’t have the time to learn the system well enough to do the gap analysis and determine the cost savings over 5 years of switching to Compiere from Dynamics NAV.

So, I need a BI solution. SQL 2005 is already installed and running my ERP. We’ll start there.

I need an intranet/content solution (very small scale). My guess is it will be SharePoint as it will already be a display target for the BI solution and the future version of Dynamics NAV.

[Since I’d have to] hire more IT staff to work through the technologies in the open source community, it’s hard to see how I will leave Microsoft. I have proposed replacing Office with Open Office on our Citrix servers. I’ve looked at Drupal for an intranet site, but with the integrations mentioned above, why would I invest in server and expertise to go there as opposed to SharePoint?

The lock-in seems even tighter today.

All of which illustrates the original point: There is as much genius and artistry in adopting and integrating the good ideas of others as there is in figuring things out on your own.

If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t take the time to read Keep the Joint Running every week.

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On the occasion of Bill Gates’ retirement, it seems everyone has written a retrospective.

Not wanting to be left out …

Bill Gates’ original significance to the software industry was his recognition that it was still a software industry. It’s the complaint of those who disparaged him back then, boiled down to its pure, concentrated form.

In 1980, we who lived in the world of small systems had a script: Personal computer companies … primarily Apple and a host of garage start-ups that ran CP/M … would free us from more than just the clutches of the IBM monolith. They would democratize information technology. Being a community of people who all liked and trusted each other, they would work together and with us to build a brave, new, more congenial world of small systems.

It was going to be a different kind of industry that broke the old rules of dog-eat-dog competition.

Then, along came Bill Gates, who targeted competitors and, in spite of it being considered gauche, went after them. Gates’ original significance was that he was the one who changed the world of small systems from a hobby to an industry. Many of us were, at the time, outraged. Some never did forgive him for it.

But really, we had nothing to complain about. The nature of capitalism is that companies win and lose in the marketplace. Microsoft under Gates won.

Gates is also often credited (or reviled, depending on the source) for adopting or co-opting whatever ideas he could find that seemed to make sense for Microsoft to pursue, instead of innovating the way Apple did.

This was always a silly complaint. Apple got its ideas about a graphical user interface from Xerox PARC Labs — an organization that was brilliant at creating ideas that made a lot of money for a lot of companies, none of them Xerox.

Apple learned about GUIs from Xerox. Microsoft drew its ideas from Apple, IBM, Digital, and just about everywhere else there was a good idea to be had. That Microsoft established its family of features through adoption instead of originality is something to admire, not despise, as those in the open source community must, if they’re honest, attest to.

Early on, Gates also recognized a cardinal rule of the software industry: Those who control architecture dominate. Those who don’t occupy fragile niches. Gates was the only player of his time who played this game well.

Gates leveraged MS-DOS to get to Windows, Windows to get to the office suite, and his office suite to control the architecture that truly mattered: Data formats. Once Microsoft Office came to dominate the desktop, no other company could intrude on it.

So as TCP/IP’s open networking supplanted IBM’s closed SNA, Microsoft became the only company able to truly control an architecture.

As Bill Gates phases out and Steve Ballmer takes full control of strategy, everyone knows the big threat to Microsoft is Google. But I wonder whether Google really is the strategic threat to Microsoft that so many in the industry imagine.

At its core, Google is a media company. Its search engine and applications are bait, used to attract the Web users it sells to its advertiser customers. That’s where it makes its money — from advertising revenue.

Microsoft makes its money licensing software.

CIOs and CTOs are more likely to entrust their enterprises to products from a company that depends on the revenue they generate than from a company that would be just as happy selling electronic tulips should they prove to be of more interest to Web users.

The real threat to Ballmer’s Microsoft is XML, and Microsoft Office’s switch to it as its go-forward document format. With the switch, Microsoft’s strategy of architectural control is becoming more a matter of historical interest than future utility.

The desktop is about to rediscover its roots. Just as Borland released Quattro Pro — a better Lotus than Lotus — and gave corporate IT an economical and architecturally neutral spreadsheet alternative, now anyone who wants to get into the desktop applications game can do so.

All they have to do is to read and write either Open XML or ODF … both open formats; soon to be interoperable … and they can sell a risk-free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Unable to compete on architectural lockdown, and with exciting new features increasingly hard to think of, what’s left are three radical alternatives.

Microsoft under Steve Ballmer will have to compete on some combination of: Efficient code, price, and service.

It will be an interesting game to watch.

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