MSFT apologia

Ok, it's not a huge secret that I'm a Microsoft apologist (that is to say defender). Not that Microsoft hasn't made its share of mistakes and done some things wrong. But yesterday a friend, not a developer but a power user, lightheartedly referred to Bill et al. as "software bozos" and I felt obliged to point out a few things...

Microsoft produces great products under an unbelievable set of constraints. Customers want Microsoft stuff to work seamlessly on everything from cell phones to PCs to set-top boxes to web servers to XBox 360s; they want it to make sense to everyone from CEOs to doctors to my mom; they want it to be localized (support local language, culture, currency, calendar, phones) everywhere in the world, and to be accessible to the handicapped and to be secure even when an extremely unsophisticated user tries to do really dumb things.

They also want it to be inexpensive and to work on any cheap hardware you buy off the 'net and install it on (unlike, say, Apple, where the OS is only legal and supported on the hardware they're in the mood to offer this month); oh and besides being a general purpose operating system, customers like it that Windows is one of the most advanced 3D gaming platforms, competing with dedicated gaming consoles that cost just as much to build as a PC and need do nothing except play games...

Oh, and also, unlike pretty much any other OS I'm familiar with, customers (especially business customers) need it to be perpetually backward compatible, so that when they put a new Vista machine together today it'll still run line-of-business apps that were written for DOS 4.01 in the 80s, and somehow magically these old apps will print reports on the new color laser printers attached to the computer, that were never even dreamt of when the apps were written. And mostly this actually works.

Now let's say you live in America and you buy a new/upgrade copy of Windows every 4 years for about $200, and a new copy of Office for about $400. You're paying about $12.50 per month. And you get the security updates, and browser updates, media player, Virtual PC, development tools (if that's your thing) and all kinds of other stuff for free (or included in your $12.50 per month admission price if that's the way you want to think about it.)

I'm not sure there's anything else I pay $12.50/month for that even tries to think about solving problems on this kind of scale, let alone succeeds.

Lastly, someone will be tempted to point out that Microsoft's enormous presence in the client OS and office productivity space may inhibit all kinds of other software ecosystems from flourishing. There are a number of open questions about this. First, it is reasonable to believe that standardization at one level in a stack enables massive innovation at the next level up the stack, which would otherwise have been impractical. This goes for any platform piece -- Ethernet, Windows, *nix, Java, HTTP...

More importantly, do not assume for a minute that the open PC architecture would even exist without the dominating historical presence of Microsoft Windows. The fact that you can even sit down with an assembler and start hacking a boot image and work your way up to running literally whatever you want on a readily available PC has never been a given. Considering the attitudes of more closed OS and hardware makers in other ecosystems (like cell phones), it is entirely possible that without Microsoft and the need for backwards compatibility, just running code on a cheap mass-produced box would long ago have required signed code, a crypto key from some industry licensing group, and more cash for membership and fees than any small company is ever going to have.