Behind the Headlines

One of the unsung facets of working reasonably up in the org structure of a large, successful tech company is that you get a unique view of how the tech media machine works.

Tech writing (like Tech Marketing) is hard, because 1) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, 2) Only magicians really understand the magic, and 3) Magic skill != writing skill. So, back in those ol' days, I wasn't that surprised to find that media pieces often originated in the Marketing departments of big companies, but I am always surprised when media outlets appear to run the Marketing feed unedited.

As a sign that some of the old ways still prevail, today we have the following two, loosely-coupled headlines: Vista success hinges on developers and Developers take advantage of Vista. A nice two-headline tautology.

I'm sure both headlines are valid, but looking at things that shallowly completely misses what's going on in software right now. OEM Agreements guarantee Vista's success - things might be better if developers come aboard, but Vista should do just fine (on every new machine shipped) even if they don't.

This was probably true even back in 2001, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously cried 'Developers! Developers! Developers!'), but it really doesn't bear up to scrutiny today. In 20-odd years of mass-market windowed software development, Zawinski's Law (*"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."*) - has basically held, and now even the simplest "mainstream" apps offer a staggering amount of functionality.

In the desktop software world, probably 95% of all usage is performed using about a half-dozen applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Browser, Itunes, IM Client). Even if all the developers stay home, that still means that Vista will lose functionality only at the remaining 5% margin.

There are two things worth drawing from the articles: 1) We'll see better software on the Vista platform if developers flock to Vista, but Vista's success does not depend on that flocking, and 2) if you are writing software today you have to be mindful that most (95%, if you accept the guesstimated figure above) of the "horizontal software space" is already filled.

That's not to say that there's not room for great new software, only that great new software isn't going to take a piece of the current pie -- the only way to create great new software is to make the pie bigger.

In a later post, I'll talk about models for doing just that.