Integrity (Premium)

I have a deeply personal story to tell. But it’s not about me. It’s about Microsoft.

How to begin?

When I started writing professionally almost 25 years ago, Microsoft was the be-all, end-all of personal technology. Everything was centered around Windows. And that was as true out in the world as it was internally at the software giant.

That time period coincided with an interesting and related shift: Prior to the mid-1990’s, let’s say through Windows 3.1 or so, I didn’t really respect Microsoft or its products. I was coming at this from an Amiga bias, and everything Microsoft did just seemed terribly designed and was undeservedly popular. I resented the company, didn’t understand its growing power and influence.

But that changed. Thanks to my wife’s job, I was exposed to the then-beta version of Word 6.0 and Office 4.0. And I was blown away by how much more mature and full-featured it was then any Amiga word processor. As I started down what I thought was going to be a career in software development, I began writing about Microsoft developer products like Visual Basic 3, and then Windows 4.0 (soon to be Windows 95), Office for Windows 95, Plus! 95, MSN, Windows NT 4.0, and more. Suddenly, this company I had disdained was responsible for products I truly respected and wanted to use. And away we went.

Flash forward a decade and a half, and a lot has changed. Microsoft no longer sits at the center of personal computing, at least on the consumer side, where it is basically a bit player. Today, Apple, Google, and Samsung dominate. There are pros and cons to this. One might argue, for example, that this more heterogeneous world is in some ways healthier for the market and for users. But it presents a problem for those of us who are fully invested in Microsoft.

Now, I’ve always experimented with, and have written about, Microsoft’s competitors throughout my career. So I was well positioned for this shift in some ways. And today I do write about companies like Google, Apple, and Samsung, and about platforms like Android, Chrome OS, and iOS, because they’re important and because they impact our lives today, collectively, even more than Microsoft did 15 or 20 years ago.

But this presents problems, too. As a content creator who is closely associated with Microsoft, my opinions about other companies or their products are often met with a knee-jerk put-down because I am, after all, “the Microsoft guy.” And those companies—Apple, Google, and Samsung in particular—have zero interest in working with me. Perhaps I’m too honest, especially in Apple’s case, where a toadying base of bloggers is the norm.

On the flip-side, with Microsoft naturally veering off in a direction that will be very successful for it but is also almost uniformly uninteresting to me personally—mostly enterprise-based cloud computing—we get into some weird gray areas. And as Microsoft’s consumer efforts fall by the wayside, are sort of knocked-off one-by-one, I find myself being more and more critical of some of its decisions. Perhaps overly-critical, depending on your opinion of such things.

And I worry.

I worry that the phone will ring one day and Frank Shaw will tell me that “we’ve had a good run.” That my mounting frustration at Microsoft’s perceived lack of direction around Windows 10 specifically, or its consumer strategy generally, will finally trigger some kind of a falling out. That I will push too hard and it will be over.

So I went to Microsoft Ignite this year. It’s a show that is deeply focused on IT and the enterprise and cloud computing. And one might argue, accurately, that these are not areas that I cover very much these days. Yes, I have over 15 years of experience writing to these topics, but since I’ve been at Thurrott.com for 3+ years now, I’ve mostly covered consumer technologies.

And, yeah, I’ve been poking the bear.

Not deliberately, not with malice. And not without cause. No one is right all the time, of course, but I’ve made my stand over the years for the users, not for Microsoft. And that’s something that many companies—including, yes, Apple, Google, and Samsung—will not stand for. My plain-spoken form of honesty isn’t for everyone. And that’s as true of companies as it is for people.

And yet Microsoft, collectively, doesn’t just understand what I’m doing. It … appreciates it. And I was told repeatedly at Ignite, by Microsoft employees up and down the org chart, how much they appreciate it. I was rather off-putting. In a good way.

But folks, this isn’t about me. I’m not writing this because I’m the hero of my own stories. I’m writing this because the hero of this story isn’t me. It’s Microsoft.

Think about it.

It would be very easy for Microsoft, institutionally, to shut out—and shut down—this squeaky wheel. To simply ignore me, and to tell others to do the same. But because Microsoft isn’t thin-skinned—as, say, Apple, Google, and Samsung very much are—it instead listens to the criticism. And then acts on it as it can. As good, several people from the company—including Brad Anderson, which I really appreciated—took the time to actually tell me this. That they understand where I’m coming from. That my purpose is true.

And it is this simple understanding that I so love and respect about Microsoft. When I write about Apple, I often mention the faux humility that its executives display on-stage at press events as so-called journalists orgasmically applaud even the silliest of announcements. But Microsoft? This is what real humility looks like. Real credibility. Real integrity.

I appreciate this personally, and I respect them all the more for it. But I’m telling you this story now not because of whatever impact Microsoft’s stance has on me, but because you need to know about. And while we can worry about what it may or may not do with whatever consumer service or why its still putting ads and crapware in Windows 10, at the end of the day, it’s important to look at the big picture. And recognize that this company is different from Apple, Google, and Samsung, and in ways that really matter. Microsoft is better than those companies. This is why I hold it to a higher standard, in fact.

So to those from Microsoft who came to me at Ignite offering words of encouragement, and there were several of you, I just want to say thanks. You made me feel better about myself, which is nice. But better still, you made me feel better about Microsoft, too. And that is something I just need to share with the world.