All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

My stock broker, who handles my vast (okay, half-vast) investment portfolio, recently changed companies. In response, his employer threatened to sue him if he asked any clients to move with him.

Their tactics were futile. While their communications with my broker were extensive, they neglected to contact me with the identity of my new broker, or even to let me know they valued my business. So I took my business elsewhere.

Several software companies have also tried to use the courts to protect their markets. Apple, Ashton-Tate, Lotus Development, to name a few of the higher-profile cases, have sued competitors for using their intellectual property. All of them lost.

“Hey, wait a minute,” you’re probably saying. “Lotus won some of those lawsuits!”

I wasn’t talking about how the lawsuits came out. I’m talking about the marketplace. Here’s a fact: every company that’s spent its corporate resources defending intellectual property has given up the future of its franchise in the bargain.

This came to me as I sorted through the e-mails and InfoWorld Electric Forum postings responding to my column describing Bill Gates as a revolutionary. (I suggested that he, alone in the industry except for the largely ineffectual Apple Computer, is focused on empowering the end-user – often at the expense of manageability of the desktop.)

The relatively scarce agreement came from end-users who feel stifled by central IS and want to use their computers as they choose. Disagreement came in several forms, most stemming from a misunderstanding over what it means to be a revolutionary.

Some readers objected to Gates-as-revolutionary because of his reprehensible tactics in the marketplace. Here’s a news flash: very few successful revolutionaries have emphasized ethical behavior. Successful revolutionaries tend to be ends-justify-means kinds of people.

I didn’t say Gates is a Good Guy. I don’t hang out in his circles, so I can’t comment. I don’t personally like some of Microsoft’s market tactics either. That’s my privilege, and theirs. I just said Gates sports some characteristics of a revolutionary, that’s all. (To those comparing Bill Gates to Stalin and Hitler: the former dominates a few software markets. The latter murdered millions. Big difference.)

And give Chairman Bill credit: unlike many of Microsoft’s competitors, it wins in the marketplace, not in the courts. The courts are for status-quo people trying to keep other companies down-and-out. The market is the PC revolution’s battlefield, where companies compete for the hearts and minds of customers.

Other readers objected to my calling Gates a revolutionary because he hasn’t come up with any new ideas of his own, instead repackaging the innovations of others.

True enough. Bill Gates has spent his career recognizing good ideas, turning them into products, and successfully marketing them. Successful political revolutionaries have similar histories. Washington led the army; John Locke theorized about democracy before him. Lenin, Mao Tse-Dong and Castro led successful revolutions; Karl Marx theorized about communism before they used his theories to justify their revolutions.

Revolutionaries aren’t inventors. They’re not theoreticians. They’re not pioneers. Those are other people. They’re important people. They just aren’t revolutionaries.

Microsoft has, at times, innovated. More often, it’s used whatever good ideas it can find, integrating them and packaging them to its advantage. That’s not cheating. That’s smart.

Let’s relate this to your own management style. Do you insist on using only those good ideas you’ve developed on your own?

Suggestion: List the dozen most important initiatives you’ve personally promoted in your management career. Mark each one as (a) an idea you thought of yourself; (b) a recommendation from someone who reports to you; or (c) an idea you encountered from outside your organization and appropriated for your own use.

If at least a third of the items didn’t come from outside, you need to rethink your approach. Your job is to find and sponsor good ideas, not to generate them all.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I think we have this Bill Gates thing all wrong.

Lots of IS managers responded to my column on the return of the mainframe mentality, concerned about the damage renegade end-users can cause. Most of these letters recommended processes that prevent end-users from making mistakes.

That’s when it hit me: Bill Gates is the one guy trying to maintain an out-of-control desktop.

Look at Microsoft’s tactics and contrast them with its competitors:

  • Microsoft invented TAPI (Telephony Application Program Interface) which links telephones and computers at the desktop. Novell and AT&T invented TSAPI (Telephony Services Application Program Interface) which provides similar services through a server/PBX connection. IS can control and manage TSAPI. End-users can use TAPI without IS ever knowing about it.
  • Microsoft is putting together “Peer Web Services” which will let everyone publish HTML documents on Intranet servers. This empowers end-users while making them harder to control. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s competitors are focusing on Java, which gives IS new ways to develop and control applications. Significant fact: making HTML the standard enterprise document format breaks Microsoft’s de facto monopoly in word processors.
  • Microsoft builds personal computer operating systems that run on autonomous desktops. Many of its competitors (Oracle, IBM, Sun) have embraced the notion of a network computer – one that only has the functionality IS provides through the network.
  • Microsoft focuses on ease of installation and use – for all the griping, Windows/95 installs with remarkably little pain in the vast majority of cases, and the real attraction of NT server over Unix, Netware, and even OS/2 is how easy it is to set up and administer.
  • You don’t hear Microsoft extolling the virtues of “thin clients” which, after all, waste the processing power at the desktop while requiring bigger servers for IS to run.

Microsoft’s competitors? They all develop for and sell to IS.

Novell used to market (okay, what substituted for marketing for the kids in Sodium Valley) to renegade department managers tired of waiting for central IS, and Novell became the dominant player in the LAN marketplace. Then Novell started to become legitimate, using “Enterprise” as an adjective and selling to central IS instead of its original customer base. Novell now focuses on technologies that increase IS’s ability to manage the enterprise. In the bargain, it has failed to gain significant market share for any product, no matter how excellent, that provides end-users with personal power and productivity.

Sun, IBM, Oracle, Digital? They’ve never heard of end-users, and probably wish they’d go away. End-user activities don’t sell big iron, or even medium-size iron. They don’t sell database servers (you have to deal with IS to get at those).

Yes, the Macintosh is the original end-user machine, and Apple had similar ideas. Unfortunately, years of inept management at Apple caused the product line to stagnate, boring the daylights out of everyone who watches this industry. We all may be willing to wait 15 minutes for a Web page to download, but we won’t tolerate boredom.

End users want to work without IS looking over their shoulders. They want to fiddle around, gradually creating exactly what they want, emerging only when the finished product is ready for inspection, whether it’s a document, a spreadsheet, or a small database application. That’s why personal computers became popular in the first place, and why the big players uniformly missed the boat.

Yes, Bill Gates is a fierce competitor, and in fact is one of just a few in the industry who knows what game they’re playing. Gates, along with Scott McNealy of Sun, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and maybe one or two others, is playing winner-takes-all poker. The rest are busy increasing shareholder value, maximizing profits, and doing all the other stuff that gains short-term success at the expense of world domination.

Only I wonder … does Chairman Bill really want to rule the world, or is he playing a deeper game?

Comments