Allchin's last stand?

The first time he tangled with video was during the antitrust trial, when Allchin used a video to illustrate tests he'd done to document the difficulty of removing Internet Explorer from Windows 98. Government attorney David Boies latched onto a frame-by-frame analysis of the video to show that Microsoft had "doctored" the tape by making a subtle edit.

Allchin insisted his tests were effectively reproduced on the tape, but a representative headline of the day told the real story: Judge not listening. Coupled with Bill Gates' Clintonesque performance on the deposition tapes, the damage was done. As is so often the case, the vehicle of communication overwhelmed the message. As Clinton, and Nixon before him, learned, it's the cover-up that will kill you, not what is covered up.

Thus, we come to the second tape. The occasion: Microsoft's Longhorn announcements of August 27, 2004. Unlike Longhorn's week-long debut at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles last year, the Longhorn restructuring was positioned as customer-driven in a single-page press release, one Bill Gates interview with CNET news.com, and a new Allchin video.

This video was no professional production like the one that drove Allchin into a sabbatical in mid-2000. Instead, it was a Channel 9 production, the video blog project that emerged out of the group that hired evangelist (and A-list blogger) Robert Scoble. Transparency is the operative word for Scoble and 800 other Microsoft bloggers, and Channel 9 crews have lugged their $450 consumer video cameras around Redmond hallways in search of warm and cuddly glimpses of the bowels of the Borg.

It's not clear whose idea the video was, or whether the tape was recorded in a Channel 9 office or Allchin's. Perhaps it was a nod towards Sun president Jonathan Schwartz's blog, which has regularly dominated Sun corporate messaging since it debuted several months ago. But as Novell Ximian CTO Miguel de Icaza observed in a blog post, "Allchin looked nervous." To one industry wag (me), it was strangely reminiscent of Saddam Hussein getting his oral examination, trying to readjust his eyes after days in the bunker.

Indeed, internal blogs and trade press sources suggested that Gates, Ballmer, Allchin, and Brian Valentine (SVP for the Windows division) had begun discussions over the July 4 holiday, accelerating all week with meetings into the night before going public on Friday. Unlike similar fire drills around the .Net and Hailstorm launches and subsequent repositionings, there was no pre-briefing of mainstream media such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. It may not have been what Dave Winer called "taking out the garbage" -- waiting until Friday to bury the news in the Saturday papers -- but certainly the lid was on the story.

"So the bottom line is, we're going to make two big changes," Allchin begins, ticking off the list of projects now recently completed -- Windows XP SP2, Media Center and Tablet PC updates. "And now it's time us to sort of do a reflection on, are we doing exactly what our customers want in terms of both our partners such as OEMs, corporate accounts, consumers and developers?"

Movement of the Channel 9 team behind the camera momentarily distracts Allchin; he appears unsure whether to address the camera or Channel 9's Lenn Pryor. The camera tentatively begins to pan to the right to include Pryor as Allchin continues: "And so we did that reflection, decided to make two changes. The first change is that we're going to go hard core for a Longhorn client in '06, and hard core for a server release in '07."

Now the tripod-bound camera is lifted and carried around to an over-the-shoulder interview-style position, as Allchin soldiers on: "And the second thing that we're going to do is that we heard feedback from developers that they would like some of the Longhorn technology for breadth to be available [down-level] on XP and [Windows Server] 2003, and in particular our plan is to take Avalon and to take Indigo and make those available on those platforms."

Allchin takes a deep sigh and closes his eyes briefly, as the camera begins to zoom in 60 Minutes-style. "And in order to become more crisp about the dates, we've had to make some hard tradeoffs. Now, one tradeoff that we wrestled [it could have been wrassled] with for some time is, just like we've gotten some feedback about what should happen with Avalon and Indigo, we got feedback on WinFS -- and one of the pieces of feedback was, 'well, we really like table access….'" Allchin has clearly decided he is talking to developers now via Pryor and the Channel 9 conduit.

" 'And oh, by the way, if you do just the client, then some of the scenarios don't work out as well because we'd really like the new synchronization capabilities to go to the server as well -- through like client server,' " Allchin recounts. "So we were in a situation of, do we keep going on this path, or do we stop and take that feedback and do something about it?"

Allchin glances over at the camera with the answer: "So we're going to stop and do something about it. What that means is, given the hard focus on dates, that WinFS won't be in the client release in '06 -- it will be in beta at that time -- and then they [??] will follow it up with a shipment a little bit later." Another deep sigh.

Now comes what Dave Winer calls the "Dancing in the Streets" segment. "Now, I think from my feedback of this -- it's just brand new news today -- has been incredibly positive because I personally have talked to lots of corporate [customers] about what they want in terms of deployment, what they want in terms of the features of security…." The camera zooms out as if to reflect the easing of Allchin's tension.

"And then, from the consumer side, people are telling us they want us to fix malware and go at that problem, along with the features that we already had," Allchin continues. . "They still love all the searching, people are excited about the Aero [Avalon-based] UI and the like, but," Allchin grabs thin air with both hands for emphasis, "they really want us to make sure that we nail the basics."

"And so we're spending a lot more focus on that, and of course, we'll also have the APIs as we've talked about -- except it won't have the WinFS APIs because that won't have shipped yet."

Whoops. Let's recap: security is a feature, more focus on the basics, we're shipping the new APIs, but not the Holy Grail ones. Now back to our movie.

"So feedback has been super-positive and [here it comes] some people are really dancing everywhere because they say, 'Hey, I can really get this technology earlier than I could have before. And certainly the hardware vendors are super happy [Microsoftese for 'they'll get what we give']." Suddenly, it's over, as Pryor thanks Allchin. And then comes the defining moment of the whole tape, as Allchin asks: "Does that make sense?"

OK, that's enough. One of the fundamentals of motion pictures is the suspension of disbelief. Let's parse this movie one more time. The premise: Jim Allchin, the toughest customer in the technology business, has just dropped in to Blog Central to fill developers in on the latest exciting news about the disemboweling of Bill Gates' 10-year dream for unification of the file and operating systems.

After diverting the company away from Longhorn for a massive security overhaul of the current Windows platform, Allchin has now discovered that "customers" want less of Longhorn quicker. Apparently they want a new set of APIs to learn, a down-level and downloadable version of the Avalon graphics engine for Windows XP and 2003 that will choke virtually all of those machines, and the mother of all auto-update downloads when WinFS is finally ready "off-cycle" in 2007 or so. Maybe.

For customers, the logic is that they will have access (via free updates) to Longhorn-ready apps with some but not all of the features that Microsoft has spent the last year evangelizing as unique and impossible to deliver on current systems. Suddenly, it turns out that many of the search features have been discovered lurking in Office 12, the next version of Office, which, coincidently, was shifted from a Longhorn-only release to a down-level Windows 2000 and XP release several months ago.

"Actually," Gates told CNET, "MSN is doing some nearer-term local-search things, building on that same technology." Actually, that would be the prime motivator of Microsoft innovation: the smell of competition--Google. Look at WinFS 2007 through Google-filtered glasses and the focus becomes clearer--adding what Gates calls "the tabular stuff" and what Allchin calls "table access" and "new synchronization capabilities to go to the server."

Hmmm…synchronization. That rings a bell. Oh yes, the Alchemy stuff that Adam Bosworth was working on at BEA before he left to join Google. The Alchemy framework establishes an intelligent cache layer between the server and the browser client, allowing robust support for transactions and off-line support within standards-based browsers, just what Google needs to extend Gmail and other services to enterprise customers to G-Spot. When Avalon development lead Joe Beda quit to join a Seattle-based Google team, Microsoft's outspoken Dare Obasanjo blogged his prediction of attrition across various product teams given the recent Longhorn news.

I can't imagine someone so openly challenging Gates and Allchin in the past, but such is the new ecology in the blogosphere. Maybe it's because Gates is so dismissive of the Google threat, pigeonholing it as just a technology problem that his search team can conquer. "They [Microsoft's search team] understand exactly what they're measured against and how everybody thinks Google walks on water, and they've got to surprise the world," Gates told CNET.

"Then we have other groups, like WinFS, where we're way out in front," he continued, "and there's nobody to compare ourselves to." Yes, way out in front… of your customers, Bill. Now you've painted yourself into a corner where you have to sell an upgrade based on a subset of the services you've already pre-sold the market. Of course, by the time Microsoft ships something in 2006, customers will have forgotten the original promises.

But, there is somebody to whom Gates and company can compare themselves-- an updated version of Microsoft, a hungry team of up-and-comers and alumni hitching a free ride on their browser platform, unencumbered by a business model that limits its platform to a subset of the network and innovation around RSS and other disruptive technologies.

In a world of Longhorn Interruptus, a free, advertising-subsidized, combined e-mail and RSS aggregator client will have an even better chance of eating away at Microsoft's control of the desktop. Gates inadvertently acknowledged as much when he summed up the new plan: "So now, we're doing the search stuff in Longhorn '06, and then we're releasing WinFS off-cycle as a development platform and as sort of an information management shell synchronized with a release of the database server."

Meanwhile, Sun's Java Desktop System, Mozilla Firefox, Apple's SafariRSS, and even Chandler, Mitch Kapor's long-awaited open source collaboration system, will interconnect with Alchemy, peer-to-peer VoIP messaging services such as Skype, and componentized enterprise apps delivered as services by an alliance of software-as-a-service vendors.

In other words, Microsoft will spend 2005 and 2006 competing against itself with what will likely be a free downloadable (a la XP SP2) pruned version of Avalon and Indigo while delaying a competitive response to the Google-led hosted alternative to the Office "information management shell" to 2007 and potentially beyond. No wonder Allchin asks: "Does that make sense?" If Longhorn, the latest incarnation of Allchin's 1995 Cairo unification of Windows and SQL Server, slips again, he may not be around for the answer.

Steve Gillmor is a Contributing Editor at ZDNet and host of IT Conversations' The Gillmor Gang Web radio program.