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.00 .'. WSJ.comodeRed

. ,Battling Google, MicrosoftChanges How It Builds Software

By RoBERTA. GUTHREDMOND, Wash.-Jim .A11chin,asenior Microsoft Corp. executive,walked into Bill Gates's office here onei day in July last year to deliver a bomb-',

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eneration of Mi-. crosoftWindows. ""It's not going to work," Mr. Allchin.. says he toldthe Microsoft chairman. TheI . .newversion, code-J named Longhorn,I was so complexits! writerswouldnever'

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' be able to make itrun properly. provedversions. . .. The news got Microsoft can't entirely replicate that. evenworse: Long. approach;sinceWindowssbyitsnaturea.. hornWIISrrede"'!- m~v' p",,,,am o_",'ng


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A14 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2005 THE WALL STRE

. Code Red: Battling Google, Microsof!I

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ContinuedFromFirstPageOld-school computer science called formethodical coding practices to ensurethat the large computers used by banks,governments and scientists wouldn'tbreak. But as personal computers tookoff in the 1980s, cOIJIpanies like Mi-crosoft didn't have time for that. PCusers wanted cool and' useful featuresquickly. Ther tolerated-or didn't notice-~e bue-s ndQIing- the software. Prob-lems could. always be patched over.With each patch and enhancement, itbecame harder to strap new featuresonto the sOItWaresmce new code couldaffect everything else m unpredIct[!jleways.The 53-year-old Mr. Allchin, whojoined Microsoft in 1990and is now co-head of the Platform Produc ts and Ser-vices Division, says he always dis-dained the fast-and-Ioose culture of PCsoftware. The holder of a doctorate incomputer science, Mr. Allchin craveddiscipline in code writing. .But in thebooming 1990s, when it seemed Mi-crosoft could do no wrong, there was,little Mr. Allchin could do. As soon asMicrosoft was done with one version' i tpushed on to the. next. Mr. Allchin washaunted by what he calls his "little de-mons." .In 2001Microsoft made a documen-tary film celebrating the creation ofWin-,dows XP, which remains the latest fullupdate of Windows. When Mr. Allchinpreviewed the film, it confinned some ofhis misgivings about the Windows ciIl-ture. He saw the ' eleventh-hour heroicsneeded to finish the product and get it tocustomers. Mr: Allchin ordered the filmto t,Jeburned.When the Longhorn project to buildan XP .successor got started, teams ofengineers set off to develop it as theyalways had. Mr. Gates was especially ea-ger for them to add a fundamentalchange to Windows called WinFS tha twould let PC users search and organizeinfonnation better. One goa l was to letusers scour their entire computer forwork they had done on a subject withoutneeding to go through every individualprogram or document.Mr. Allchinsays he soon saw hisfeats realized. In making large soft-ware programs engineers regularlybring together all the new unfinishedfeatures into a single "build," a sort ofprototype used.to test how the featureswork together. Ideally, engineers makea fresh build everY night, fix any bugsand go back to re fining their featuresthe next day. But with 4,000 engineerswriting code each. day, testing thebuild. became a Sisyphean task. Whena bug popped up, trouble-shooterswould often have to manually searchthrough thousands of lines of code tofind the problem.Mr. Gates's WinFS project was sotroublesome that engineers began talk- 'ing about whether they could make the"pig fly." Images of pigs with wings

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started appearing in presentations andoffices. 'And Microsoft's culture was facing anew threat. The mass of 'patches andagglomerations that made, up Windowsturned it into an e~y ta rget for virusesand other Web-based attacks. Mr. AI-

Ichin had to divert top engineers intothe effort to fix security problems inexisting versions of Windows. "The shipwas just crashing to the ground," Mr.Allchin says.In late 2003, Mr. Allchin called onthe help of two men. The first was oneof Microsoft) best-known. "shippers,"people known for their ability to turnaround troubled software projects. Win-dows veteran Brian Valentine had a rep-utation for booming motivationalspeeches, beer bashes and stUnts likeshowing up to work functions as Elvis,the Easter Bunny or even once' a hulagirl with a coconut bra.The second man Mr. Allchin tappedwas Amitabh Srivastava, now 49, a fel-low purist among computer scientists. A.newcomer to the Windows group, Mr.Srivastava had his team draw ~.of how Wmdows' PIeces fit toe-ether. It:s eIg~ feet tall and 11 feet ~~ an1Ked. e a haphazard train map withht.iiU'Ifedsof tracks crisscrossing each,otheL ' ,~at was just the opposite of h ow Mi-crosoft's new rivals worked. Google andothers developed test versions of soft-ware and shipped them over the Internet.The best of the proirams from rivalswere like Legoblocks-they had a smg-Iefunc tIOn and were designed to be con-nected on 0 a lar er wnole. Google andeven Microsoft's own online imitcould quickly respond to changes in theway people use~ their PCs and the.Webby adding incremental improvements.In April 2004,Google, seemingly outof nowhere, introduced its Gmail ser-vice, competing with Microsoft's Hot-mail program. Tiny Inte rne t browsermaker Mozilla Foundation heat Mi-crosoft to market with browser features

, planned for ~nghorn.Most alarming: By July 200,4,itbe-came clear that Google was working ona "desktop search" toolfor finding infor-mation~on a PC"-offe ring some of thefeatures that Mr. Gates's WinFS pro-gram was supposed to bring to Long-horn. Google, previously focused exclu-sively on the Internet, was now step-ping onto Microsoft'i; turf as the creatorof softwareinsidethe PC. .While Windows.itself coiIldn't be asingle module-it had. too manyfunc-tions fpr that -'-it could be d~~igned so. that.M:ic~o~oftcQuld; ea.sil}'pl!lg in or.pl1JlJlutnew features .:Witho).ltAisruptingthe whole' system. .Tha t wai Ii corner-stone of 'a plan Mr. Srivastava proposedto his boss, Mr. Allchin. Microsoftwould have to throw out years of com-puter code in Longhorn and start outwith a fresh base. It would set up com-puters to automatically reject bug-laden

code . The new Longhorn would have tobe simple. It would leave bells and whis-tles for later-including Mr. Gates'sWinFS, Messrs. Srivastava and. Allchinsay.Mr. Allchin signed on to the plan andbroke the news toMessrs. Gates and Ball-mer. Mr. Allchin remembers .that Mr.Gates pushed him to keep going with theoriginal plan, saying ifthe software writ-e rs needed more time Microsoft couldship a scaled-down version of Longhornin the interim. The executives agreed toreserve a final deci-sion until Mr. Ball-mer returned from

a business trip, ac-cording to Mr. AI-Ichin and Mr. Valen-tine, who was alsopresent.Over the nextfew weeks, Mr.Gates expressedfrustration. In meet-ings, :he berated, , Longhorn engi-AmitabhSrivastava neers for themess,say people familiarwith the meetings. After one teJ;lsemeet-ing with Mr. Gates on August 17, Mr.Srivastava says he called his team to-gether, acknowledging that he had under-estimated the scope 9fthe challenge theyfaced in'fixing Longhorn, though he washeartened by the group's apparent will-ingness to change. (Mr. Gates says hedoesn't remember the meeting.)On Aug. 27, 2004, Microsoft said itwould ship Longhorn in the second halfof2006-a t least a year late-and tha t Mr.Gates's WinFS advance wouldn't be part

, of the system. Days later in Microsoft'sauditoliium,Mr. Allchin announced tohundreds of Windows engineers thatthey would "reset" Longhorn using aclean base of codethat had been devel-opedfor a versionOfWindowson.corpo-rate server computers.Atthe event,Mr.Ballmer promised the engineers thatwhateverfeaturesgot cutfromLonghornwould make it into future versions. .Ashe started to learnmore aboutMr.Srivastava'sbroaderplan,}Ii!.Gatesw.asconcerned that the UIlproventools forkeepmg the Windowscore clean wouldlevy-'a "tax" on engmeers-m otherwords. that mey wOUldspend so muchtim . gtomeetMr.Srivastava'sstan-dards tha ey WQ t be able to de-vise InnOV'dIlons tor wmnows users. At ameeting on Sept. 8, Mr. Snvastava'steam wiJ!>walking Mr. Gates through theplan when he challenged them. Why, hewondered, weren't the reformers aSkingthe mass ofWindows engineers for theirviewof the changes? '"It was all just, 'Hey, bless this pro-cess, ' which I was uiJ.will ingto do," Mr.Gates says; "They're just talking aboutprocess and I'm frustrated we're not talk-ingabout how the teams are respondingto it." .

By late October, Mr. Srivastava's~--~~ ~---'-~'_m'_m-


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ft Changes How It Builds Softwaret teamwasbeginnirigto automatethetest- shoulqshut up and supportthis effort,"1ing that had historicallybeen done by accordingto one of his team members,I,hand. If a feature had too many bugs, G.S., Rana. (Mr. Valentine says hef software"gates" rejected it frombemg does,n't remember the r~Jlrks 'butrIIRP!i in J.o~~~~ilf emnneershad too doesn't disputeMr.Rana's rec6lle~tion.)! ~~ oUle10years from now, I don't come back andfind I'was wrong.like I was with 'JusticeSouter," Mr.'Grassley said.

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