Communications - March 2009

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.