Editorial

Posted on 2 Apr 2009 at 11:00

 

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Microsoft execs should learn from Apple rather than banning its kit...

Know Your Enemy. So said Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a Chinese military strategy from the 6th century. Reading it would likely be hard going now, but the text has come to be considered a classic, and it still has relevance today. Why else would nation states spend so much time and money spying on their enemies?

Industrial espionage exists, too, and it works along the same lines, with companies employing moles inside their rivals' organisations to leak commercially sensitive information. But why? There's an easier way to get the lowdown on what your competitors are up to, and that's to use their products.

I've been on more than my fair share of factory tours, and it isn't unusual to find competitor products stacked up in offices around the production line. Printer manufacturers are a prime example: I've seen HP devices in Epson offices, and a Canon inkjet on an HP press trip. It's just common business sense: rather than denying the benefits of their opposite numbers' technical achievements, they learn from what they've done and try to better it. That's why modern printers, which can cost as little as a Blu-ray movie, are some of the most exacting machines on our planet, accurate to within a millionth of an inch when they're dropping ink on the page.

Perhaps the most famous example of learning by rivals' achievements was revealed in a series of excitable emails sent between Microsoft execs when they first got their hands on the Tiger beta. Released as part of the US Government's anti-trust action investigations, they show not resentment on Microsoft's part, but admiration at Apple's achievements.

'Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store,' wrote Lenn Pryor, the company's Director of Platform Evangelism. 'I did system-wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and... my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f***ing amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.'

So why does the company's chief exec, Steve Ballmer, still ban iPods from his home. '...on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed,' he said. 'You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.'

It's no better in the Gates household. Melinda Gates, Bill's wife, revealed: 'There are few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.'

It's a shame. No doubt iPods, iPhones and Google are well-used in Microsoft's labs, but why not in the execs' homes? If they truly want to know their enemy, they should keep that enemy where they can see it.

Author: Nik Rawlinson