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I am sitting in an apartment in Helsinki, Finland while I write this column in June. I had been to Finland the winter before, and my hosts at Helia (Helsinki Business Polytechnic Institute) promised me that this trip I would be warm and get to see the city in daylight. That was true. The only catch is that the “midnight sun” effect of the long summer days can mess up your internal clock if you have not grown up with it.
True Techies
I got to visit with an old friend from Helia, Mika Wendelius. He is working on going public with his BDB Monitor tools, but I am not sure what the status of this project will be when you read this column. The tool monitors the database usage of an entire system, not just a single SQL query. Once you have a profile of the whole system, you can see what queries are executed most often and what tables and indexes are most used. Then, the package makes recommendations for adding or dropping indexes and which queries need to be rewritten.
Usage in a system is mostly likely to follow a Zipfian statistical distribution. That rather fancy-sounding name is also known informally as the “80-20 rule” or “Sturgeon’s law” — no, not after the fish, but after the deceased science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who used it in an interview. The popular versions of this rule are specific heuristics, like “80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your customers,” “80 percent of your complaints come from 20 percent of your customers,” and so forth.
It looks like 80 percent of the innovative stuff in computing is coming from the Nordic nations—less than 20 percent of the population of Europe. Clever people work on a product and bring it to market, depending pretty much on technical excellence to sell it. Unfortunately, this approach is not the only way to do business.
The Pretender
While I’ve been in Finland amongst true techies, Microsoft lost its antitrust case and is now scheduled to be broken up. Of course, this decision will be appealed in the courts for a few years and then perhaps even taken to the Supreme Court. I’ve seen some of the institutional advertising Microsoft has been doing to make itself look like “the good guy” and read the PR releases from Microsoft and its front organizations.
I guess the thing that gets me in all these public protest statements is that Microsoft keeps referring to itself as an innovative company. But it never says what it has innovated. The version of Basic that started the company was a port from the DEC Basic. DOS was bought from another company. Microsoft copied the Windows interface from Apple, and Apple got it from Xerox. Microsoft was running late in getting a Web browser. Do you remember Stacker, a patented data compression technique? When Microsoft ripped off that idea, it forgot to remove the original copyright notices in its code. Microsoft’s SQL Server originally came from Sybase, and Microsoft acquired other technologies by buying smaller companies, such as FoxPro and others.
Is it the leader in software quality? When I teach a class, I always ask how many people who have owned their computer for more than a year have had to reinstall their copy of Windows at least once. No fewer than 80 percent of the audience raise their hands. This is Sturgeon’s Law to the extreme — only one vendor is giving you the vast majority of your problems. In contrast, Linux people boast about how many months, or years, they have between problems.
Is it a leader in industry standards? No, the company tends to oppose standards, rather than support them. Even at its greatest strength, IBM had the good sense to attend ISO and ANSI meetings, take over the committees, and put its proprietary specifications into the public domain. Microsoft will not even do that.
Look at Java. When Microsoft could not overpower or destroy that standard effort, it tried to poison it by making a proprietary version of the language. Then, the company withdrew from the effort and started slandering it.
The only Microsoft innovation I can remember is the license contract that requires computer manufacturers to pay based on their total production, rather than the actual number of units of software installed. This contract is not a technical innovation; it is a legal innovation. And this distinction should not be a surprise; Bill Gates comes from a family of very rich corporate lawyers, not techies.
There is a certain ironic justice in seeing the courts destroy a lawyer masquerading as a techie.
Joe Celko is an Atlanta-based independent consultant. He is the author of Instant SQL Programming (Wrox Press, 1997). You can contact him at www.celko.com or 71062.1056@compuserve.com.
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