An engine for change

Developers, developers, developers -- you don't need to see Larry and Sergey jumping around like monkeys to get the picture, and neither does Steve Ballmer. Microsoft has been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since Google unveiled Google Docs two years ago, and with the debut of Google App Engine last week it landed with a thud. Sure, Windows is the reigning OS and Office is a cash cow. But Ballmer's no

Developers, developers, developers -- you don't need to see Larry and Sergey jumping around like monkeys to get the picture, and neither does Steve Ballmer. Microsoft has been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since Google unveiled Google Docs two years ago, and with the debut of Google App Engine last week, it landed with a thud.

Sure, Windows is the reigning OS and Office is a cash cow. But Ballmer's no dummy. He knows that if the House of Redmond is built on software, independent developers are the mortar between the bricks. Now along comes Google, and it's holding a chisel.

How else to explain Microsoft's Google obsession? It would be crazy to spend $45 billion to buy Yahoo if online market share was the goal, when Yahoo remains a distant second to Google in the search business.

Google Apps offer a good clue. The last thing Microsoft needs is a viable competitor to Office with big-name brand recognition. But Google Docs can't compete with Microsoft Word in this writer's toolbox, and I suspect most enterprise customers -- Microsoft's most important base -- feel the same.

Ah, but the developers -- those developers, developers, developers. Google App Engine is still in testing mode, but when it matures, enterprising programmers will no longer have to settle for whatever applications Google offers up. They'll be able to start building their own. By making its infrastructure available to third-party developers -- including its server farm, storage, and key APIs -- Google transforms itself from product to platform.

Worse, it's a kind of platform that Microsoft doesn't fully understand. Marc Benioff gets it -- no surprise how quickly Salesforce.com became a Google App Engine partner. But Salesforce and Google's method of software delivery doesn't fit in with the commercial, shrink-wrapped model that has sustained Redmond for so long. Notoriously slow to embrace the Internet in the 1990s, Microsoft is in some ways still behind the curve. Only gradually is it beginning to grasp the precariousness of its position.

In programming there's a concept called "exception handling." An exception is an unforeseen condition -- some combination of data or events that interrupts the flow of a program and demands special attention. What happens next depends on how the code handles the exception. Fail to respond properly, and the exception is considered fatal: The program has no choice but to terminate.

For Microsoft, the rise of Web-delivered, network-centric software is an exception. The story of how it handles that exception -- or fails to do so -- will play out over the next several years, but it will be an exciting one to watch and to learn from.

And that's what this blog is about. In the 10 years that I've covered IT and software development, at InfoWorld and elsewhere, I've seen many such exceptions arise. They're a fact of life in the software business, as they are in any market. How they're handled -- whether through innovation, market forces, or plain dumb luck -- is the fundamental force that shapes the future of computing.

I hope you will join me as we continue to chronicle that process of change. Just remember: In software and online, it's always about the developers.