creeger’s Response:
The CTO Roundtables are conversations,
not well-defined treatises with clear-cut conclusions. Discussing early-stage
adoption of commercial technology involves
differences of opinion about definition, best
practices, product maturity, and best ways
forward. We provide the discussion; the
reader decides.
My focus as moderator is commercial
benefits and best ways to realize them,
conceding that my success varies. Logrippo
suggests and I agree we need to do more
to extract key ideas and make them more
accessible to the reader.
While virtualization goes back more
than 40 years, it has gained renewed
commercial appeal in the past decade as a
better way to provide application services.
Overhead, risk, cost, and resulting benefit
must be evaluated in the context of the
commercial problems being addressed.
The goal is not to define virtualization
as a new CS technique but address its
relatively recent status as an attractive
commercial technology. When a panelist
supports virtualization, it mean to him its
benefits far outweigh its impact on service
infrastructure.
mache creeger, Head Wrangler, CTO
Roundtable Series, Portola Valley, CA
more Legacy from Gates
Michael Cusumano really knows something about Microsoft, and his Viewpoint column “Technology Strategy
and Management” on “The Legacy of
Bill Gates” (Jan. 2009) is the best popular assessment I’ve read on the subject.
However, for the public to fully understand how Gates affects the world,
three more aspects of that legacy must
be understood:
Product lock-in. In the marketplace
for everyday consumer software, consumers’ decisions are overwhelmed by
their need for compatibility with popular file formats; all other desirable attributes, including cost, quality, speed,
security, ergonomics, simplicity, size,
and feature sets, are simply inactivated
by this one imperative. Gates understood this network dynamic at the time
he founded Microsoft and has pursued
it relentlessly ever since. Never before
has a popular world market been so
tightly constrained by this idea; billions of consumers have thus been
deprived of choices through a single
mechanism. Paradoxically, this lock
on the market happened even as the
technical capacity to produce cheap alternative products mushroomed;
Wheels of justice. As a business calculation, Microsoft ignored a court-im-posed fine of one million Euros per day
every day for three years. This action
(as well as others by Microsoft) created
a new level of frustration for court systems and represents a phenomenon of
corporate behavior that may now need
specific new methods of redress. Speed
of compliance with court orders is crucial in a marketplace moving as quickly
as IT. As long as the wheels of justice
turn slower than marketplace evolution, many laws may be reduced to irrelevance; and
Battle against standards. Microsoft is
fully aware that open public standards
are an impediment to the perpetuation
of its monopolies and spends billions
to defeat them. Public standards are a
pillar of efficiency in free markets, addressing the lock-in problem by solving the compatibility problems, and
hence of immense value to consumers.
Unfortunately, the tactics in this battle
are largely out of the public’s view.
Such business behaviors are only casually understood by the public. None
are new, but globalization and the extraordinary new arithmetic of marginal
costs in the software industry have intensified their effects. Gates elevated
each one to the level of boardroom
stratagem, using it to prevent the market from becoming as competitive and
productive as it could be. It behooves
the world to pay as much explicit attention to these things as Gates did and
decide if a response is needed. As economies change, our free-market system
requires diligent protection from every
scheme that suppresses efficient competition.
J. stephen Judd, Plainsboro, NJ
Deserves more than an
ad hominem Response
When columnist Michael Cusumano
used the phrase “religious-like responses from the faithful” in his response to a comment (by Ian Joyner,
Dec. 2008, concerning his Viewpoint
column “Technology Strategy and
Management, Sept. 2008) to simply
dismiss the comment, it constituted
an ad hominem and self-referential
attack, not a principled response, and
was unworthy of the professional standards ACM is attempting to establish
in the new Communications.
Rosemary m. simpson, Providence, RI
cusumano’s Response:
It was quite a rude comment to me, and
I reacted to the tone of it. No doubt it is
best in such cases to wait awhile before
responding. But when a reader criticizes
every argument by saying I am simply
“anti-Apple,” there is not much use in
replying point by point. I have had many
such encounters with Apple users, given
my extensive work on Microsoft and
concluded there is indeed such a thing as
“the Apple faithful” and a strong element of
religiousness to them. But I disagree that
I am simply anti-Apple. I have been much
more critical of Microsoft and Bill Gates. The
main point was that I believe Apple could
have become the dominant PC technology
had Steve Jobs adopted more of an open
“platform” strategy, much as Japan Victor
did with VHS, which dominated Beta mainly
because of the much greater availability of
prerecorded tapes (software) and extensive
OEM licensing deals (hardware).
michael cusumano, Cambridge, MA
Communications welcomes your opinion. to submit a
letter to the editor, please limit your comments to 500
words or less and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
Coming Next Month in
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Computing as a Social Science
The Future of Database
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Retrieval
The Roofline Visual-Performance Model
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