One of the blogs I’ve been following for the last few months is Robert Scoble’s.

He really needs no introduction for most bloggers; if you’re clueless, just know that Scoble is a Microsoft higher-up who has a blog that touches on a lot of stuff, mainly Longhorn, as that is his area at MS. This is his personal blog, and he claims little interference from Gates/Ballmer et al, and it reads that way.

One of the interesting things I always take away from reading him is the notion that – first and foremost – MS is a business: It exists solely to make money. Everything else comes from this.

And I don’t write this in a negative way – it’s just reality.

MS is not out to help you or me; MS is out to make money. It’s called capitalism, and is often practiced in these United States.

OK?

But this capitalistic streak in MS means the following:

• MS can’t fix things that even it wants to: As Scoble notes, he’d love to get IE back up to being the most standards-compliant browser. But as he shares, how can you make a business case for spending, say, $100M to fix an old tool when a new version (embedded in Longhorn) is underway? You can’t.
• Other updates are tough to make: Simply because of the tight integration of tools and DLLs and all that, changes to anything is difficult – to change one DLL, for example, you have to make sure it works on all these platforms (Win 9x line, NT line, CE) – across all languages its deployed – and with all the tools that hit it (will this affect the print driver for the Epson123 printer with the Tablet OS blah blah…). Lots of dependancies. Remember the recent snafu with the Mac OSX update – Panther – that erased some users’ hard drives? That’s bad, but OSX users are (relatively) few. Imagine if the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (coming, I understand) did the same thing? Villagers with torches would be marching on Redmond!….
• MS is going to make decisions that lock you in: Why should this be a surprise? Hell, it’s only after years of squawking that Sun has (sort of) released Solaris for Intel (i.e., non-Sun hardware). This allows the vendor (MS/Sun) to make more money, and also has a benefit for users: If you buy, say, MS Advanced Server, you know MS SQL Server will run on it without a hitch (in theory, OK?). Sure, you can slap Oracle or mySQL on the box, but you don’t have the tight integration to the OS that allows some cools stuff to happen.
• Locked-in software is easier to support/extend (shared APIs etc) So you’re going to see an even bigger push for closed standards. Face it, open standards are great, but to get everyone on board with them is virtually impossible. And the standards formed are often weaker than a proprietary solution, simply because you can’t be all things to all people. You can, however, be all things to some (MS buyers) people much more easily. (NOTE: As indicated above, this integration can come at a cost)

Basically, Scoble frequently points out that MS is a business, a successful one at that. Part of the price users have to, as well as MS itself has to, pay for this success is that MS cannot be as nimble as small companies with a handful of products and one or two business targets. MS is all over the map, and even that small DLL change can effect a lot of stuff, which – in turn – affects the bottom line. MS != evil; MS == pragmatic.

I have to agree, at least to a degree.

Obviously, Scoble is talking from the point of view of a MS honcho, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things. He lightly slams MS in some cases, and in others – such as updating IE6.x – presents compelling arguments as to why that just can’t happen.

He does gloss over some issues – he does not really mention the whole security/lawsuit morass that the MS campus is sinking into, but I can excuse that. He is a MS honcho, and – his own blog or not – with that title comes responsibility.

And no, I don’t agree with him all the time. But he’s a nice counterpoint to all the anti-MS rants (see just about any thread on /.), and he frequently has interesting points of view.

I personally just don’t see how he has the time to write all he does – and he frequently responds in the comments threads, as well.

Information – biased or otherwise – is never a bad thing.