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In 1988 I saved taxpayers million of dollars by talking my client, part of a government agency, out of its planned conversion to OS/2. Pundits were predicting OS/2’s success, but I saw no easy migration path from DOS, difficult integration into existing LANs, and no hurry. Besides, IBM’s decision to build OS/2 from scratch instead of creating “personal UNIX” struck me then, as now, as unnecessarily complicating its product line.

In 1990, a NeXT sales representative asked what it would take to bring some NeXT computers into our organization (I had rejoined the private sector by then). “It has to run a WordPerfect-compatible word processor, a Lotus-compatible spreadsheet, and log into our Novell servers,” I answered. It didn’t and I didn’t, seeing no easy migration path from DOS, difficult integration into existing LANs, and no hurry. Besides, I hated NeXT’s weird capitalization.

To invade an existing architecture, new technology must offer: (1) easy integration into existing environments; (2) a clear migration path; (3) a compelling advantage; and (4) attractive pricing.

And right now, as Bill Gates seems to dominate the known universe, invasion of the desktop OS is possible for the first time in years. Four disparate factors lead me to this conclusion.

Factor #1: Dissatisfaction with current PC operating systems. The market leaders are all awful. Windows/95 is a kludge, Windows/NT is flabby, OS/2 only runs on Intel and has no applications, and the Mac OS lacks memory protection and preemptive multitasking. And they’re all hard and expensive to manage.

Factor #2: Openness to other solutions. The Network Computer, while a bad idea, has created a crack in Microsoft’s mindshare, and mindshare – the perception that a company is now and will be an important player – is all that matters. If you have mindshare, marketshare will follow; if you don’t, marketshare is irrelevant. If you don’t believe me, just look at Novell’s slide into irrelevance.

Factor #3: Bill Gates’ imitation of Napoleon. The similarities are compelling: while physically unprepossessing, Napoleon was and Gates is a brilliant strategist and tactician. Napoleon fought a two-front war and lost his empire. Gates has instituted repressive laws “at home” (Microsoft’s ridiculous new desktop licensing terms, reported in several recent issues of InfoWorld) and has engaged its enemies (everyone else) on the network OS, Internet, and DBMS fronts. That’s a passle o’ wars to fight all at once.

Factor #4: Steve Jobs and NeXTStep at Apple. While Gil Amelio reportedly is a shrewd businessman, he’s not the visionary Apple needs to reclaim industry mindshare. Steve Jobs can grab industry mindshare while the Apple name can give NeXTStep instant industry credibility.

Put these factors together, and imagine Apple does everything right for a change. Imagine it ports NeXTStep to the PowerPC; makes the transition from the current Mac OS to MacNeXTStep as easy as it made the transition to the PowerPC a few years ago, building backward compatibility into MacNeXTStep so current Mac applications will run well; keeps the Mac’s legendary ease of set-up intact; makes it easy to port applications written for other UNIXes to MacNeXTStep; builds in manageability (easy to do with UNIX); and matches current Wintel price points. Oh, and demonstrates betas by mid-year and ships by 1998.

You’d have a new desktop architecture with everything going for it: price, integration, migration path, compelling advantages, and industry credibility.

How does this affect you today? You’re writing client/server applications right now, and you have to make decisions on the desktop platforms you’re writing them for. Every new application makes transition to a new architecture more expensive, no matter how attractive the technology may be on its own merits. So what should you do?

Watch closely, make short-term, pragmatic decisions, and invest in flexible, portable application architectures. The world is about to become even more interesting.

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If you blow enough smoke, you’ll convince a lot of people there’s a fire somewhere.

Last year, Bob Metcalfe and other pundits predicted the imminent collapse of the Internet. I, on the other hand, courageously predicted its non-collapse, and even more courageously endorsed the free-market economic model on which it is based.

The collapse contingent cites big outages last year, especially at Netcom and AOL, as evidence of the coming collapse. Their recommendation: throw a big party for the Internet’s inventors, thank them, shake their hands, and send them home so professionals can take over the job, replacing the current “anarchy” with modern central administration.

Here’s where I get lost. Netcom and AOL are private corporations operating centrally planned and administered networks. Both suffered big, noisy, noticeable outages. So to save the Internet from collapse, we want to centrally plan and administer it?

What am I missing? Most Americans think communism collapsed because big, centrally planned and managed economies don’t work. Most Americans are right. The Internet’s stability comes from its decentralized model. Rules are established centrally and kept simple – hence “Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and “Simple Mail Transport Protocol” (SMTP) – while implementation of the rules is decentralized.

(One other problem with the proposed solution: there are no other professionals to call in. Only the Internet’s designers and implementers have experience in designing, building and running a successful, global network that links millions of independent computers. Who else are you gonna call?)

Despite all this enjoyable gloating, I give Dr. Metcalfe a lot of credit for sticking his neck way out, and for making a self-preventing prophesy. When disaster fails to strike, very few people give credit to those who sounded the alarm. I wonder how much of last year’s investment in Internet capacity resulted from the publicity attending Bob’s predictions.

Any lessons for you in all this? Ya, you betcha, as we say in Minnesota. The Internet’s successful use of centralized rule-making and decentralized implementation, far from being anarchic, gives you a wonderful model for organizational design.

Awhile back one of my readers sent me Sahakian’s Rules (Corporate Partnering Institute, Skokie, IL, 1995). It’s worth buying. One entry: “In ancient times, in order to manage large masses of people in the battlefield, Commanders used gongs, banners and horns. If a plan of battle was not simple enough to communicate with gongs, banners, or horns, it was a bad battle plan.”

Manage your organization like the Internet, or like a Commander on an ancient battlefield: with simple, easily communicated rules, not close, central supervision.

One other useful lesson: when you manage, ignore currently fashionable theories, especially those that demonize some group that Isn’t You. The idea that current Internet management doesn’t hack it anymore comes from one such notion that I call the BIG/GAS theory (for “Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid”).

Yes, you can certainly find waste in government. Some comes from its sheer size, more comes from having lawyers (most of Congress) designing work processes, and much of the rest is unavoidable. (The military, for example, is staffed to conduct wars. When there’s no war, it’s over-staffed. Big deal.)

While government isn’t as good as it could be, the Internet’s history proves that BIG/GAS is just … vapor. In the 1960s visionaries in the academic and defense community created it. It’s been an international reality for decades.

In the 1980s the Graphic Communications Association (where, coincidentally, I worked for a few years) began creating the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Commercial publishers ignored it; the defense community embraced it as part of its Computer Aided Logistics System (CALS). Early in this decade, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (the international particle physics laboratory) adapted SGML to invented the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

And business finally caught on three years ago. BIG/GAS indeed.

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