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I’ll never forget the meeting. It occurred around 1996 in a small meeting room. I had sent out a Request-for-Information (RFI) to a few vendors of small-platform database management systems to make a DBMS decision on which we would build a restaurant back-office application to replace one that already had a sizable customer base but was using obsolete technology. The target environment in the back-office of a restaurant at the time was little more than a desktop computer. High bandwidth connectivity to stores was not cost feasible at the time, so most back-office transactions (forecasting, scheduling, ordering, etc.) needed to take place at the store and communicated to a corporate center in nightly batches (remember modems?). The target environment was well-described in the RFI. The existing customer base for this restaurant system was well over 50,000 stores and therefore the product we selected had a high potential number of seats, so we really had caught the vendor’s interest (we thought). The first couple vendor meetings went well. Then we had the third and final meeting - the obligatory meeting - the meeting with Microsoft.

The Microsoft salespeople came in and set up to deliver a presentation. That was a little odd; the other vendors showed up with a demo of their product. Like the other meetings, I kicked it off with a two-minute recap of the essential needs and asked if they understood what we were looking for or if they had any questions from the RFI. They responded that they understood and had no questions. Then they started to deliver their canned SQL Server presentation. About 15 minutes into it, somewhere about the time they were proudly telling us how many hundreds of users their DBMS could support, I broke into their presentation with my concerns. “Guys, we don’t have many users, we only have one”, I said. Beginning to fear they did not understand our application, I asked them what type of computing environment their product required. They responded that that was covered later in the presentation and suggested I hold that question until the proper time. I remember being a little angry but also a little amused by that response and decided to endure a little more. The salesperson returned to his canned presentation, repeating his initial points he had already made on the slide just like a teenager rehearsing his lines for a high school play. It was painful to watch. A few minutes later, he started talking about how scalable the product was and how adding more and more servers only made the thing better. Steve, a guy I worked with, couldn’t take it anymore. Steve was well-known as a tough negotiator and I had involved him to work the financial end of the deal. So up until now, he had been relatively silent in all our meetings. Steve pointedly declared, “You guys aren’t listening; we don’t want to scale up, we want to scale down”. The Microsoft guys were confused by the interruption. Steve told them to answer my question now: what type of computing environment was needed to run this beast? Reluctantly, they skipped a hundred or so slides forward to the “server requirements” slide which suggested a high power server was needed configured by an on-site and well-trained DBA. At this, Steve got more confrontational and the salespeople got more defensive.

Steve: “You guys didn’t even read the RFI, did you?”
Sales Guy: “Our product is used by more retail companies than any other”.
Steve: “You guys have no idea what the target environment is for our application, do you?”
Sales Guy: “We are investing heavily in making this product the best there is now and in the future”.
Steve: “Oh my God, I get it now: You have become IBM!”

I laughed so loud I almost fell out of my chair. The Microsoft sales team had a look of bewilderment that only made me laugh harder. The whole room was chaos and the meeting had lost all control. So I choked down a couple more giggles and asked for a short break to get everyone out of the room. Then I handed the RFI to the sales guys, directed their attention to the section on the target environment and pointed out the inconsistencies with what they were presenting to us. They seemed to get it and assured me that Microsoft probably was still the solution, but they would have to get back to me after meeting with their engineers. I thanked them and ended the meeting. I never heard back from them after that.

Now this story, while true, does not in itself prove that Microsoft turned to the “dark side” in 1996. No, all we know from this story is that I had my first experience with Microsoft that put the notion in my head that something about Microsoft was profoundly different and not in a good way. The experience was so vivid, I’ll never forget it. You could say it was just a result of a couple of bad sales people and could happen anytime with any vendor. I suppose. But Steve’s declaration, You Have Become IBM, hits hard to anyone who grew up in the IBM era and watched Microsoft evolve as I have. It suggests that there is a life-cycle, perhaps an even unavoidable fate to technology vendors that is almost scary to contemplate. In Part Two of this thread, I will give another example. In Part Three, I’ll examine the implications of “when software vendors turn to the dark side”.