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Ellison takes a fun jab at Microsoft
>From http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctb360.htm:
Shakespeare has the Seven Stages of Man. Now Larry Ellison has Microsoft's
Four Stages of Stealing an Idea.
Ellison, CEO of Oracle and an archrival of Microsoft, has hit a nerve. He
has been making this observation to a number of people, and did so publicly
in a recent Upside magazine interview. Everyone who hears it thinks it's
deadly accurate to the point of being hilarious.
Here are the stages as Ellison describes them:
Stage One: Have Nathan Myhrvold ridicule the idea.
Myhrvold is Microsoft's chief technology officer. He's one of the smartest
people anywhere in the computer industry. And he's a load of fun to talk
with because he's blunt, excitable and funny.
Ellison told Upside: "Nathan's job is to ridicule other people's ideas when
Microsoft is about to steal them." He cites, as an example, Myhrvold's
comment when Ellison started making plans for cheap, low-power network
computers, or NCs. Myhrvold called the idea "dorky and stupid."
That made me laugh. Myhrvold has often made caustic remarks to me about
something another company was doing. Last time I talked with him, he took
aim at Sun Microsystems' premise that Java allows programmers to write one
version of software that would run on any kind of computer.
"It's a fairy tale notion," Myhrvold said. "If you're trying to write
world-class software with Java - good luck!"
Others in technology agree that Stage One sounds accurate, except that it's
not always Myhrvold. "There can be any number of Stage One participants,"
says Mark Eppley, chairman of Traveling Software.
But everyone I talked to says that when Microsoft first confronts a new idea
- the Internet, intelligent agents, NCs - the first reaction is ridicule.
Anyway, I figured it was only fair to ask Myhrvold what he thought of
Ellison's theory. I e-mailed a copy to him.
Myhrvold's reply: "Psychologists call this projection - when a person
projects his own characteristics onto others. Larry certainly spends more of
his time ridiculing other people's ideas than I do!"
Stage Two: Start saying, "Yeah, there are a few interesting ideas there."
At this point, Microsoft seems to be thinking out loud. It looks at the idea
more carefully and proclaims that while the other company's basic concept is
idiotic, the idea raises some interesting points.
Bob Metcalfe has a slightly different version of this stage. Metcalfe is
co-founder of 3Com and an inventor of networked computing. To him, Stage Two
of Microsoft's Four Stages of Stealing an Idea is saying the idea is old. As
in: "The NC is a diskless PC, an old idea, and it did not work out last
time," Metcalfe says.
Around this stage, Microsoft gets worried, starts working on the idea and
holds a "day" like the recent Scalability Day. These are seminars at which
Microsoft sounds boisterous about something it's unsure of. It's the
best-defense-is-a-good-offense approach.
Stage Three: Say our version is better than theirs.
The NC idea has now entered this stage, Metcalfe says. Microsoft has created
a version of the NC that's a bit different, called the NetPC. And Microsoft
officials are saying the NetPC is better than Ellison's NC.
Web browsers are at this stage, too. Microsoft is saying its Internet
Explorer is better than Netscape's Navigator.
If you have an idea and it hits this stage, you know Microsoft's torpedoes
are in the water and heading your way.
Stage Four: Say, "What are you talking about? It was our idea in the first
place!"
By this point, Microsoft has won and is building a new industry around the
idea. The originator of the idea might as well pack it in and go fly-fishing
in Alberta.
As you can imagine, Ellison intended his remarks to be a put-down of
Microsoft.
It's a way of saying that Microsoft doesn't play well with others. But oddly
enough, the stages also describe one of Microsoft's great strengths.
"Microsoft's distinctive competence is adjustment - facing up to a lapse,
having the debate and fixing it or filling the hole," says George Colony of
Forrester Research.
"They have a systemic process for staying on top, even if it means
backtracking on their public posture," says Don Hutchison, senior vice
president of @Home. "It's what makes them a formidable competitor."
Unlike most companies, though, Microsoft has a habit of working through its
problems in public. Its gyrations get amplified by the press. "It's not a
pretty process to observe," Colony says.
By the same token, it's not pretty to watch Ellison and Myhrvold take
potshots at each other. But, man, it's a load of fun.
--
Eric Bennett ( [email protected] ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Viewers/Converters for common internet file formats at
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Windows DNA: another frightening software mutation from Microsoft!
http://www.microsoft.com/sitebuilder/dna/default.asp
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