I was recently speaking to a friend about the bad old days of software, in the mid to late 90s to be exact when one heard the strange boast from Microsoft that their new operating system upgrade had pushed the code past the 19 Million line level. The result being that we've now been through four major releases of the Windows NT system. As I said, it's grown from about -- if I remember correctly, about 7 million lines of code when we did our first release back in 1993, to approximately 19 million lines of code today.
What intrigues me about this statement is not just the numbers but the point of view that it has come to symbolize, the point of view that software is the center of the problem solving universe. The underlying belief is that in order to solve more problems we just need to offer more software, more code. Eventually we don't really even care about the problems anymore. We kind of make problems up as we go along because the marketing people persist in the thought that solving problems is the way to sell our software. In the world in which I live the opposite is the new mantra, led by new software services, or on-demand computing. The last thing that I and the people that I know want is more software. In fact we really want to get out of the software business, if not entirely, then to the greatest degree possible. We don't care about owning software, we just want to be able to do valuable things with it. We want to be able to create a professional looking document, but if we didn't have to stop twice a week to download software patches onto our computers to generate a professional looking document we wouldn't cry for a second. The world that we are looking for is about services not software, end results not the means of production. Likewise I want to buy a pair of shoes not sit at a cobbler's bench and make a pair. I first got a hint of this skewed marketplace reading a report of the Consumer Electronics Show from Las Vegas by Matt Roush of local radio station www.WWJ.com in his morning newsletter The Great Lakes IT Report: Gates shows off Vista, new operating system, gives tech tour de force: In a pretty-much-all-business presentation very different from last year’s yuck-it-up with TV host Conan O’Brien, Microsoft Corp. co-founder and chief software architect Bill Gates laid out the future of Microsoft software – and thus the future of much of the tech world – to officially open the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Wednesday night. In a presentation nearly two hours long, Gates and his executives stressed three themes: high-definition video imaging, the importance of partner innovation and technology that works seamlessly from the PC to the TV to the camera to the phone to the PDA. He began by offering a dreamworld where huge video screens in every room display news and the kids’ artwork, and allow music choices for the room. At work, a huge display –six feet long and three high – covered the whole desk, offering the same displays. The technology stretched to Tablet PCs and cell phones, and the cell phones turned into full-size displays when laid down on a special video table Gates said would be available at airports. Instead of a password, Gates authenticated his computer use with his thumbprint. Microsoft also showed off Windows Vista, the new operating system to replace Windows XP later this year. It offers improved switching between applications, with a taskbar that showed previews of each application; a new way to switch between applications, with windows rolling by like cards on a Rolodex, and most interestingly, Windows Sideshow, a tiny LCD screen on the side or bottom of a laptop on which small applications like calendar or weather can run without even powering up the PC. Company officials stressed the software will be more secure – but did not mention the current security risk of embedded malware inside e-mail messages, a risk for which Microsoft has not yet produced a patch. Vista will also offer improved searching and music management. Microsoft also announced Urge, a new music service in conjunction with MTV, VH1 and CMT. (That produced what little star power the presentation had, an appearance by Justin Timberlake.) Gates also said the company will continue to make Tablet PCs more mainstream and that their cost premium should fall, and said Windows Mobile continues to make inroads in pocket computers. Windows features are also being added to simple wireless phones, Gates said. The presentation also featured a tour of Windows Media Center software, designed to take over a home’s entire entertainment package, from TV to movies to pictures to music to e-mail. While not viewed as a big success, it’s true that 6.5 million copies of Windows Media Center are in use now, up from 1.5 million a year ago. The presentation ended with a demonstration of the amazing graphics of the new Xbox 360, as Gates – playing as Muhammad Ali – took on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, playing Joe Frazier, on the Xbox game Fight Night. The company also said later this year, it would produce an external high-definition DVD drive for the Xbox 360.
This all hit me as very strange. Then my week took off into a flurry of activity and I put it aside. Several questions remained unanswered: So much activity in consumer electronics, how will they have time to focus on business software applications? Our whole world dependent on software installs, upgrades and technical assistance - pass the Prozac? Then I read a very good post by Nick Carr on The geek's paradise that really put the whole issue into perspective. So what does Gates talk about? The "digital lifestyle" with "software at its center." Maybe robots want digital lifestyles, but human beings don't. Human beings want lives. This digital lifestyle, as Gates envisions it, is just another big pile of software features that we have to sort through and make sense of. We get up and stare into a vast computer screen in our kitchen, with multiple video feeds, multiple digital images of our children, and a map on which we can track the moment-by-moment movements of our family members. (What's next? The Xbox Digital Chastity Belt?) When we get to work we sit down in front of - guess what? - an even bigger computer screen filled with a bunch of software features, not to mention a handy tablet PC to doodle on. Go to the airport? Another big screen with another bunch of software features. As we move between the big screens, we have the little computer screen of our cell phone, loaded with, yes, a bunch of software features. What's revealing about Gates's vision of the future is that it is completely devoid of direct human contact. It's a geek's paradise. You get to fiddle with software all day, from the moment you get out of bed to the moment you fall back into it. We're not freed from the box; we're trapped inside it. Endlessly
Carr's take on the Microsoft presentation is more about the social cost of this software centric universe than mine. I don't think that even Microsoft can tear apart the human need for human contact. My real concern is that it's just not practical or useful to keep asking the software users to technically master the software. And let's be fair, Microsoft is not the only company in the world that thinks in this way. They're just the biggest. Frankly, there is a whole world of software companies and consulting practices and training companies that think the computer is really all about the software and that the end results - the documents, spreadsheets, sales forecast, AR Aging report, you name it - are really all about the computer system. I've personally witnessed some of the largest Fortune 500 companies nearly buckle under the weight of the 'System'. The system's size and complexity is nothing to boast about. This was the reason that I found NetSuite such a compelling opportunity; a complete business system without the need for on-staff engineers. A clean user interface and a clear respect for simplicity made the NetSuite story all the more interesting, enough so that we formed the consulting and implementation practice around it. Frankly I really thought that we were starting to turn the corner when the computer would be wrestled from the grip of the engineers, but I guess that they are not going to give up easily. It's like the engineer's Will to Power to maintain their supremacy in the information age. Well the market talks best with their feet and soon it will be the sound of a stampede as more users, especially in the corporate world, move to software services. |
