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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

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: Leadership|Last Updated:

Persuasion is, on the whole, a more difficult task than providing information.

Sure, there are exceptions. Persuading someone to carry an umbrella when the forecast says rain would usually be easier than, for example, explaining how to perform a trustworthy analysis of variance.

For the most part, though, persuasion presents the greater challenge. To inform, you have to know the subject yourself and explain it well. To persuade, you have to know the subject yourself, explain it well, and find ways to handle the other person’s evidence and logic, and find a way to soften the not very subtle implication built into most persuasion situations: I’m right and you’re wrong.

The persuadee’s ego is the persuader’s biggest barrier.

Persuasion is usually about change — about convincing someone that tomorrow shouldn’t look like yesterday, that they need to change their direction or behavior, or perhaps join an effort instead of being an opponent or bystander.

A straightforward formulation can help: Problem, solution, plan.

As William Bridges explains in his outstanding book Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change (2003), the key step is to sell the problem. Once the other person agrees that a problem is real, the rest is … well, not necessarily easy, but easier.

You have plenty of tools at your disposal to sell the problem, some unsavory (propaganda), some more palatable. Sad to say, evidence and logic are two of the weakest.

This isn’t because people are intrinsically stupid, or because they’re willfully ignorant. It’s because those who claim people only use 10 percent of their brains are wrong. People use it all: On the average, 10 percent to think and 90 percent to rationalize.

(If you’re wondering how I know this, the answer is that as a result of careful observation, study and analysis of a statistically valid sample, I made it up. Also if you’re wondering, I define rationalize as “the evidence and logic people use to disagree with me after I’ve presented my case.”)

To slide past the egos and rationalizations of the people you’re trying to persuade, questions are your best friend.

“Here’s the evidence I’m looking at. The conclusion is inescapable,” will simply offend someone who has reached a different conclusion. Compare it to, “Here’s the evidence I’m looking at. What conclusion would you draw from it?”

You’ve just taken their ego out of the equation, because you aren’t offering a point of view different from their own. You’re open to whatever interpretation they reasonably come up with.

Not really, but it sounds that way.

If they somehow manage to reach a different conclusion than the one you privately reached, you’re free to ask them to clarify their logic, so long as you do so in an open-ended, unargumentative way: “I don’t see how you got from here to there … can you help me understand?” is fine (it’s another question); “Your logic is all wrong,” doesn’t work very well.

Questions are effective in bringing people to your solution, too, assuming your solution is a good one: “Any ideas about what we should do?” requires the other person to engage in mutual problem-solving with you, where “Here’s the right answer,” does not.

In many cases, once you understand the problem and the environment for which you’re solving it, the number of discrete solutions is pretty limited. Ask, and the other person will reach the same solution you did.

Sometimes that isn’t the case. When it isn’t … maybe their solution will be better than yours. Maybe not, or maybe it’s just too late because the decision has already been made. If it has, there’s no harm in (at last!) giving an answer instead of asking a question: “I’m part of a team that’s been looking at this. We looked at that alternative, and quite a few others. Here’s what we came up with. Do you think it will work?”

If they accept the problem as you’ve defined it and your solution really is workable, you can probably get them to buy into it.

Which brings us to the subject of today’s column (what — you thought it was how to persuade?).

More and more data centers are running low on power, and just running in another circuit isn’t always feasible. If you were faced with this situation in your company, how would you deal with someone who proposed replacing something that’s already in production and works with a different technology that calls for adding more servers to your already-stressed data center?

Me too. As you know, many industry experts still recommend using Citrix and similar virtualization technologies to move processing from the desktop to the data center. Does that seem like the best solution to you?

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