When I heard Bill Gates' new job title the other week, for a moment I thought someone had accidentally put an extra word in it. Instead of Chief Software Architect, surely that should have been simply Chief Architect? Or - even shorter - just plain 'God'. However you look at it, moving aside from CEO to become CSA in a company like Microsoft can hardly be regarded as a demotion. The company would be nothing without its software, and that's what Gates is now firmly and determinedly in charge of.
Strange, then, that so much rubbish should have been written about the move. Many observers remain obsessed with the US government's anti-trust case against Microsoft. They interpret the change at the top as some kind of Machiavellian plan to pre-empt a possible break-up of the company. So let me see how that would work, then ... the DOJ forces the company to split, so Gates goes off with the software while his chum, newly-promoted CEO Ballmer, is left with ... well, what exactly?
As I've written before, the DOJ is fighting a battle that no longer matters - something that governments are wont to do. Microsoft's domination of the desktop computer in the 2000's ranks alongside Union Pacific's domination of the US railroad industry in the 1930's - with hindsight we'll discover that new forms of computing are where the real action is taking place.
Gates already knows that today's generation of Windows is about to get obsoleted just as effectively as the railroads were sidelined by the advent of mass road transportation in the 1930's and 1940's. His new role is designed to fend off not the DOJ, but real-world competitive forces during what looks set to be a massive inflection point for the software industry.
More by luck than by design, Microsoft has had its finger on the pulse of these changes over the past eighteen months or so. It has had early warning of a structural shift in the nature of software, requiring a network-centric, collaborative architecture that is in complete contrast to the standalone islands of computing that characterise the traditional client-server environment.
Last September, Gates and other Microsoft executives started talking about this new form of computing, calling it software-as-services. Now they have an acronym for their response to it - NGWS (Next Generation Windows Services).
Even more rubbish is going to be written about this development than about Gates' job swap. Many observers see it as a continuance of earlier moves by Microsoft into Internet services. Others interpret it as Microsoft developing an IT services arm, in the same way that companies like Oracle and SAP have teams of consultants that get paid for helping customers implement their software.
These interpretations are short-sighted attempts to map Microsoft's intentions onto conventionally-accepted norms of behaviour in the software industry. Microsoft may be guilty of many sins, but lack of imagination is never likely to be among its faults.
True, NGWS are Internet-based, but they're not Internet services like Yahoo! or LastMinute.com. They're more like system services that an application invokes on a computer. In the old Windows architecture they would have been stored on the computer. In the NGWS environment, they're out there on the Internet.
They're certainly not services performed by people. Instead, they automate processes so machines can do them instead of people. The jobs will still disappear, but through automation, not disintermediation.
In this brave new world of Internet-centric, software-based services, individual desktop computers are relegated to the periphery, pegging equal status with mobile phones, pocket organisers, digital TVs and intelligent toasters (whatever they are). Servers and data centres are higher up the scale, because they are where the applications and the data reside. But the real power lies out there in the application infrastructure of the entire Internet, and that is what NGWS is all about - a new operating system layer for the next, Internet-based generation of computing.
In his new job as Chief Architect of the Future of Computing, Bill Gates faces his biggest challenge since Windows won the war for domination of the client-server age. He must love his new job.
This article was first published January 2000 in Microscope, the weekly trade journal of the UK computer industry.
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