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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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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Last week’s column used MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson’s Hillariphobia to introduce the subject of persistent sexism in the workplace(“Managers who have discriminating tastes,” Keep the Joint Running, 5/12/2008).

Last week, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews provided more Hillariphobic drivel to help introduce this week’s column: “It’s almost as if Hillary Clinton is the Al Sharpton of white people.”

Clearly, the Fifth Amendment should override the First. As the t-shirt says, “You have the right to remain silent. Please exercise it.”

We need to continue last week’s discussion, to help out MSNBC if for no other reason.

Among the many e-mails I received were some that changed my view of the subject:

  • An African-American IT professional described his experiences. He did not describe overt racism. What he told me is that over a long career he never stopped being an outsider, and it hurt his career.
  • Another correspondent, Roy Schweiker, pointed out that some women, as well as the boss, like watching professional sports. Not all men do. “Of course,” he said, “if a man fails promotion for not talking sports he can’t file a discrimination suit.” Mr. Schweiker recommends calling the boss a “sportist.”
  • Then there was this: “In my workplace, to ‘be one of the boys’ apparently requires a sincere dedication to video games and movies. This is all my manager and ‘his boys’ talk about, sometimes for hours on end while the rest of us do the work.

Needless to say, the interesting or prestigious projects, and the promotions, go to those employees who are most like the manager, or play ‘World of Warcraft’ with the manager.”

  • And one more: “I’ve been working in corporate America for close to 25 years, in major corporations, including 5 years in Israel. I’m an Orthodox Chassidic Jew and have never been ‘one of the boys’ nor did I want to be.

Did it adversely affect my career? Of course it did. But I chose to be this way and I chose not to join the ‘boys club.’ Did I suffer financially? Of course I did.

Were all these corporations anti-Semitic? I don’t think so. But even if they were, does it really matter? I wish there weren’t anti-Semitism in the world. I also wish we lived in a perfect world. We don’t — we live in the world as it is, and have to deal with it.”

Until this week I considered “diversity training” to be a code phrase for “going through the motions to avoid legal liability.”

That does happen. There’s no excuse for it.

Diversity training has a vital role to play in every company big enough to have a diverse workforce. That role is to help managers especially, and also every employee, recognize how easily employees can divide into insiders and outsiders.

It doesn’t really matter whether the cause is a shared appreciation for sports, video games, soap operas or romance novels. Shared interests help build the trust needed for effective teams to function. When they cross the invisible line where building trust stops and making the workplace exclusionary starts, everyone has work to do.

Leadership has to (of course) take the lead. If a manager loves baseball, and enjoys talking about it with those employees who share her interest, that’s fine … so long as the manager shows just as much interest in talking with other employees about what interests them.

Employees also have a role to play, on their own initiative regardless of how their manager behaves. That role is to recognize outsiders and help them feel included. Not everyone is comfortable barging into a conversation among people who are talking about a subject that’s of intense interest to the group but not to themselves. The group can help by inviting them in.

The group can also help by expressing interest in the outsider: “You don’t talk much about yourself, Howard — what do you do when you aren’t busy writing code?” is a decent, if obvious icebreaker.

This isn’t the tyranny of the minority, and outsiders can help themselves by expressing interest in whatever it is that the insiders find so fascinating. Who knows — even if knitting is your hobby, you might find World of Warcraft has some possibilities, too.

Diversity means we understand that our differences make life more interesting, that we all have common ground if we look for it, and that we turn our understanding into action.

Appreciating differences while finding common ground isn’t political correctness.

It’s simple good manners — no small thing in a team environment.

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