[plug] Fwd: [CS-FSLUG] Different Views Of Microsoft

[Leon Brooks]

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Subject: [CS-FSLUG] Different Views Of Microsoft
Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 23:09:23 -0400
From: "Fred A. Miller" <fmiller at lightlink.com>

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Different Views Of Microsoft

Just how good--or bad--is the quality of Microsoft's software?
It's a tricky question if you're a Microsoft executive with
responsibility for developing or selling products. On the one
hand, you want customers to have confidence in your operating
systems, databases, and applications. On the other, you want them
to know you're fully committed to improvement. That dilemma is
resulting in some mixed messages at the highest levels.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect,
brought attention to the subject in January with his memo on
trustworthy computing, which was ostensibly intended only for
Microsoft's employees but quickly made its way into the
mainstream. "As an industry leader, we can and must do better,"
Gates wrote at the time (see "Software's Challenge," Jan. 21, p.
22;
http://www.informationweek.com/872/bugs.htm ). All of a sudden,
Microsoft's software was in a glass house, though not the kind of
glass house (the corporate data center) the company has been
aiming for with its DataCenter Server. Many of us on the outside
are now looking in, our noses pressed against the, well, windows.

What do we see? Certainly, there's a greater sense of awareness
of the issues related to software reliability on the Microsoft
campus, with many of the company's developers being trained to
write better, more secure software. It's safe to assume that this
all-hands-on-deck approach will be reflected in a positive way in
products that are in the development pipeline, to be delivered in
the months and years ahead.

At the same time the company is going through this cathartic
process, however, there's a defensiveness that could undermine
the well-meaning and praiseworthy goal of establishing greater
trust in its products among customers. Over the past few weeks,
InformationWeek editors have talked to several top Microsoft
officials--Gates earlier this month; group VP Jim Allchin and
senior VP Paul Flessner in March--and they not only defend the
quality of Microsoft's software but even blamed others for some
of their problems.

Here's Flessner on Gates' trustworthy computing memo: "I was glad
to see Bill capture what we've been doing for a long time. We're
doing a huge amount of work, I think ground-breaking work, in
software quality."

And Allchin: "I wouldn't say that we're any better or any worse
than anyone else. I think it's a disservice to point fingers at
us. ... I do believe that systems have worked just fine if
they've not been under malicious attack. Malicious attacks don't
have anything to do with quality, per se."

Gates: "We're more of a testing, a quality software organization
than we're a software organization. ... We love to have people
compare our quality to other people's quality. We will win in
that any day."

Gates blamed many of the problems familiar to customers on a
variety of other things: device drivers, the failure of customers
to download updates and patches, and opening E-mail attachments
when users have been warned against it.

So, there's the rub. Microsoft execs agree that developing clean,
bulletproof software is their top priority, but they find it hard
to admit, or simply don't believe, that poor programming
practices or past mistakes on their part are to blame for the
hacks, crashes, and glitches that resulted in a perception of
buggy software among customers. But they understand that
perception is reality, which explains the urgent effort to get
things right.

There's a vast gray area in the concept of trustworthy computing,
a fact not lost on Gates. When we asked him to rate Microsoft's
software on a scale of 1 to 10, Gates gave Microsoft a 9--but
acknowledged from the customer's point of view, it's probably a
1. That's quite a gap to span, regardless of who's to blame.

In a survey by InformationWeek Research on software quality
featured in this issue, Microsoft scored last among 16 software
companies in customer satisfaction
(http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHPC0Bce7K0V10Bc6e0AH
). That
raises the question: Are Microsoft's practices--past and
present--really as good as their veteran managers think? If not,
trustworthy computing risks becoming an oxymoron. - John Foley is
editor/print of InformationWeek. E-mail him at jpfoley at cmp.com.
You can join in on the discussion about this column at:
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHPC0Bce7K0V10OT60AY

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