As I write this column, at the 5-star hotel across the road Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates is speaking at one more function on his third trip to India. Regardless of the topic, one thing is certain—an aggressive sales pitch for his company and its present and future product offerings will be closely interwoven into most every point he makes. That’s been a given at every discourse of his I’ve attended—be it to a world audience at CeBIT in Germany; or in India, to an audience of politicians or industry leaders alike. Doesn’t make for very profound speeches, but firmly brings home the point that Microsoft, right from the very top, is a mega marketing machine.

It would however be foolish to dismiss Microsoft as a company capable only of crafty marketing sophistry (as is the accusation of many of its detractors in rival companies and in the open source movement). Time and again in the last two-and-a-half decades, Microsoft has proved its mettle by spotting opportunities and then turning itself inside-out to change course and overtake or eliminate competition in the chosen segment. It is the ultimate adaptive corporation in the history of corporations—so many others have buckled under and cracked when far simpler adjustments were called for.

At CeBIT in March 1995, Bill Gates spoke of the Wallet PC, video-on-demand and other such esoteric and fanciful projections into a utopian future. The Internet was mentioned only in passing. Then, two months later, came the famous “Tidal Wave” memo to his employees in which, among other things, he stated, “...Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance...” The God of desktop computing had spoken, and in one swoop set in motion an internal machinery that would soon change the Internet landscape forever and transform Microsoft from a desktop software company to a completely Internet-oriented one. This was most visible in the bludgeoning of Netscape into submission and near-extinction (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has an estimated 96 percent share of the browser market today), but in fact also involved massive reorganisation and refocusing for every single product team at Microsoft.

Microsoft could be faulted for its marketing manners, or its methods of releasing bug-ridden software products in captive markets and fixing them only later, or its alleged stifling of competition. But one area that’s been above reproach is the company’s management practices. The corporate and engineering strategy of Bill Gates has been to “pour IQ” into every problem. So Microsoft hires the best, rewards performance, keeps work-groups autonomous, cuts the bureaucracy yet still ensures hands-on top management involvement, keeps morale high, and cultivates a culture that encourages employees to focus on total domination of the marketplace.

This has been a reasonably good year for Microsoft, with its .NET strategies beginning to fall into place and its XML and SOAP bets already beginning to pay off. Simultaneously, the antitrust case has been adroitly conjured away with a little help from the business-friendly Bush administration. But what must be keeping Gates awake at nights is the increasing prominence of Linux and the open source movement. He pooh-poohs it all in public, but perhaps is more aware than anybody else that the day the open source proponents stop selling only an ideology and start offering products that are as easily-usable as they are affordable, the computing landscape could well be transformed once more. I’m a supporter of the open source paradigm and am convinced it will play a significant role in India’s future computing scene, but I sure don’t think it’s going to put Microsoft out of business anytime soon, and am very very keen to watch how Gates pours IQ into this one.

The other company that one cannot but admire is IBM. The big blue behemoth was losing billions in the late 80s, struggling to shrug off its outmoded proprietary mainframe culture that was becoming increasingly anachronistic in a downsizing IT world. A break-up of the beleaguered giant was the only solution, said analysts and IBM top management alike. Then came Louis Gerstner Jr, and in less than 10 years, he “made the elephant dance,” pulling it back from the brink in one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds ever. Not with dazzling technology shifts, but with a return to business basics of cutting costs, increasing efficiencies, bringing in total customer focus, and recreating a unified enterprise. One parallel with Bill Gates? Gerstner’s “passion for winning.”

Gerstner kept IBM intact and increased the services orientation with the creation of IBM Global Services and a new focus on e-business and Web services. This laid the foundation for IBM’s new thrust, underlined by current chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano—a thrust towards computing grids and autonomic systems, heralding an era of “computing on demand” where businesses plug in to On-Demand networks and grids provided by IBM and its partners. IBM’s betting big on this one, all of $10 billion, and tying it in with its newfound passion for interoperability and open standards, with support for the Linux platform.

It’s impossible to pitch one particular technology against another and predict right now which one will come out trumps. But if—as Forrester Research and other analyst firms seem to more or less concur—there’s going to be an “unshackling of business processes from rigid technology foundations” and an increasing abstraction of the network hardware and software, then both Microsoft and IBM seem well-entrenched at the leading-edge of this “Digital Decade” and beyond. And in both cases, without doubt, it’s the management that’s made all the difference.

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com