Simon’s Blog

Microsoft has invented developed a new image format - called Windows Media Photo. From a quick glance, it looks pretty good (check out the nice work that Bill Crow, Microsoft’s Program Manager for Windows Media Photo, is doing on his blog). I’m more than a little interested in image formats at the moment - we’re building systems that are generating around 2.4TB of high-quality image data per day (which is why I’m also interested in products like the new product from Sun - Thumper). We need to extract a lot of information from these images - some of it sufficiently subtle that it isn’t easily visible to the human eye. So preservation of information in the image is critically important to us. But also important is the cost of storage, and the ability to process the data in a timely manner. So, as always, there are trade-offs to be made. In addition to static image formats, by the way, I’m also interested in video formats - but let’s not even go there!

Anyway, on this project, we’re using a mix of software technologies - Java and C#.NET; and a mix of computer hardware/OS platforms - Solaris on AMD, and Windows on Intel. So, back to Windows Media Photo. Before investing too much time looking in detail at what Windows Media Photo has to offer, I thought I’d check out the licensing. As many of you know, Microsoft isn’t known for making life easy for its customers when it comes to licensing. In fact, their licensing is often rather complex and unhelpful - particularly when it comes to using their technologies on platforms other than Windows. So hard to understand is Microsoft licensing, that it frequently costs more money to understand the license, than it does to actually buy the license (has anyone inside Microsoft ever heard of standard liceneses, I wonder). So, what are the licensing issues for using Windows Media Photo? I invite you to take a look here, and here.

After just a quick glance at these pages, I have concluded that I have neither the time, nor the inclincation to pursue looking at Windows Media Photo very much further.

I have two messages for Microsoft, speaking as a Microsoft customer. You’ve made it hard for me to understand the restrictions on the use of your technology. I am not impressed by this - in fact, to be honest, I would like you to pay me a substantial sum of money to compensate me for the time I’ve wasted. I simply cannot understand why you want to make life so difficult for your customers.

So, let me make my requirements clear, where you’ve made yours opaque:

• I pay you money for Windows, Office, and other technologies such as developer tools. You make a huge profits on this.

In return, I expect not only that:

• your technologies work well

but also for you to recognise that:

• a) I want to use software technology produced by other companies in combination with your technology (e.g. technology from Sun Microsystems, such as Solaris and Java); and
• b) I don’t have the time to bother with software technologies that involve hugely complex licensing

All this means that, where I have a realistic option to, I will always choose software techologies where the licensing is easy to understand in preference to technologies where the licenses are hard to understand.

Now, I know all too well that lawyers tend to get out of control when drafting legal agreements of any kind, including software licenses. But this isn’t an an acceptable excuse for anyone inside Microsoft to use - not developers, not managers, and not execs. See, when I instruct lawyers to draft licenses for our software, I typically give them a brief to “make it simple, and less than two pages”. Of course, what I get back from them is usually a fifty page license. However, my response to this isn’t, “Thanks, guys, that looks really great!” - which is what it looks like the Microsoft teams do. My response is, “What part of ‘less than two pages’ didn’t you understand? Please do it again.”

The bottom line is: times are changing in the software industry. I think it would be in Microsoft’s best interests to simplify the licensing of their software technologies - as it is now, it’s value-destroying for both Microsoft and its customers. Why? Because there are more and more options for people out there, with easy to understand licenses. If they’re not very careful, customers will start walking away… in sizeable numbers…

Just one example for you. Another project we’re doing at the moment is building the entire IT infrastructure for a rapidly expanding start-up. We’ve been with them from the start. They’ve gone through Series A and Series B rounds in quick succession, and will likely IPO later in the year. Their market cap is projected to go from zero a year go, to around $100M at IPO (a couple of months from now) to $500M two to three years from now. We started them off on Windows on Dell on the server side, when they incorporated and got their seed finance. The new server infrastructure, however, will be running Solaris on Sun servers. Why? Because Solaris has superior technology (such as Zones, ZFS), it’s lower cost (free), and Sun’s licensing is easier to manage. Oh yeah… and also because people like Jonathan Schwartz, Tim Bray, and Simon Phipps have the inclination, and are not afraid, to engage in real conversations…