WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Caribbean Blues [WebTech]

Today we've been docked in Cozumel, and I've been laying low. I had thought to snorkel again but it's been raining and the photos would come out dark, and anyway I've been feeling a little miserable over last night's debacle with the conference. The short story is that after yesterday's lunchtime presentation, the guys giving the .Net presentations told Neil they didn't want me at the evening Q & A session.

The longer story involves asking questions about Microsoft's internal ethos. The story goes like this: I'm on a Geek Cruise, co-sponsored by Neil Bauman's company and by a company called Wintellect who major in Microsoft-oriented training. The faculty here are some of the gods of Microsoft publications - people like Jeff Prosise and Jeff Richter, whose names have been up in lights for years and who I have respected greatly for a long time both as engineers and as authors.

Anyway, my remit has been to present a meta-layer to their classes, talking about industry trends and directions. So I delivered my keynote on Sunday evening, where I talked about the past, present and future of 'loose-coupled' computing, explianing how technologies like web services, XML and Java (and subsequently C#/CLI/CLR) have been evolving the infrastructure for the Internet. In that talk I explained about open source - how it's a business model and development methodology, not a free stuff movement, and how it's well-tuned to the Internet's main-spring, the net effect. All pretty standard stuff for me, and scrupulously avoiding any mention of anything specific to Sun or in fact any other company.

I was surprised at that talk by how hostile the reaction I got from the other speakers was. Jeff P later explained that any mention of open source is felt by the Microsoft community to be a form of attack on them, so even though I had been speaking pretty abstractly about the idea it was taken badly. He and I understood each other pretty well, I thought, so the discussion at the Evening News round-table the next night went pretty well.

The last straw seems to have been the working lunch session on Wednesday. I presented about J2EE and web services during the first slot (about 20 minutes), explaining about the way web services has been adopted by the non-Microsoft world and how this now provides an intergation bridge. In the second slot I spoke for 15 minutes or so to explain the Linux desktop world that's rapidly evolving, epitomised by Sun's 'Mad Hatter' project. The Java session was scrupulously non-partisan (at least in intent & in my opinion), the second was more Sun-oriented as the case-in-point was Mad Hatter & there was no way to generalise it.

During the afternoon, Neil came over to me and said that some of the other speakers (no names) had been incensed that I covered Java in my talk and said they had asked that I not participate in the evening Q & A. We reached an accommodation. End of history.

Now, what's interesting here is the dimension it illuminates for me of the outlook of Microsoft insiders. This is the first time I have ever had other speakers approach the event organiser and ask for me to be removed from the agenda, and naturally my first reaction was to feel hurt, shamed and insulted (in roughly that order). I have gone out of my way, being aware this is billed as '.Net Nirvana', to be non-partisan and inclusive and to avoid at all costs criticising either .Net or Microsoft - only one slide out of everything I have presented has even attempted a comparison.

But the more I think about it, the more it resonates with what I have read in books like 'Hard Drive' about Microsoft's ethos being one of 'Win at all costs, and they are all out to get us'. It seems the automatic assumption of some of the other speakers was that I was in some way 'out to get' Microsoft, that my agenda was attack, so despite that being absent from my intent it was read in as a sub-text to what I said. Considering that the people involved represent the attitudes of the largest, most aggressive company in my industry, immune from almost every attack and even able to shrug off conviction under the Sherman Act like a speeding ticket from a small-town cop, they showed a vulnerablity and insecurity which speaks volumes of the way Microsoft likes its people to feel and act. I stand educated.

posted at 11:28 PM (UK) | |