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Guest View: Microsoft finally empowers business managers


By Lisa L. Morgan
May 1, 2009 — 
I remember sitting at Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 conference in 1991, listening to Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and then-rival Borland Founder Philippe Kahn talk about object-oriented programming. At the time, OOP represented a major paradigm shift in computing.

According to the then marketing hype, OOP was supposed to be so simple (compared to hand coding) that line-of-business managers could build their own applications. It sounded too good to be true (and was), but time has a habit of changing things.

I was really excited about the prospect of building my own business applications because commercial “productivity applications” were so brain-dead. I also bore the scars of Saturdays spent writing BASIC programs in the college computer lab. I not-so-fondly remembered how the simplest of hand-coded errors could cause the program to essentially regurgitate all over the continuous-feed printer paper.

OOP had such simple concepts, like object reusability, inheritance and polymorphism, that its appeal was downright seductive. Of course, there’s always a delta between what marketing departments promise and the reality of what happens out-of-the-box. Nevertheless, by 1991, OOP had existed for at least 15 years and C++ had been around for about a decade. The Microsoft Visual Basic programming language and Borland C++ IDE were both new, and the market was ripe for them. (Technology adoption cycles moved much slower in those days than they do now.)

I was in the middle of all this. I’d worked for a consultancy that had a substantial software practice, and our focus was primarily on PC productivity software, utilities and programming languages. You couldn’t work in that environment and not know about Smalltalk, the first OOP language invented by Xerox PARC.

The new kids on the block, Microsoft Visual Basic and Borland C++, were about to take OOP to the next level. You could tell by the amount of money Microsoft and Borland spent on marketing and the bulging sizes of user group conferences.

So there I sat at Dyson’s conference in the OOP session. I was acquainted with all three of the panelists, having dined with Bill Gates and Jerry Kaplan (the CEO of pen-computing company Go) the night before and having done some work for Borland. (It is fair to say Gates and Kaplan did not opt to have dinner with me. I was invited to sit at the “Seattle table,” which also included Paul Allen and others thanks to my former client, Traveling Software Founder Mark Eppley.) The dinner lecture that night had to do with ant colonies. Go figure. Frankly, the OOP panel was far more captivating.

During the Q&A session, I couldn’t help but question the marketing drivel. I asked Gates and Kahn whether OOP was really a viable option for the average businessperson, meaning me specifically. They both tittered and said, "No.” The reality was that OOP would make developers more productive, not business managers.

Being a long-time rebel with or without a cause, I ignored the do-not-try-this-at-home warning because I really wanted to experience OOP for myself. I also wanted to personally experience the exact delta between what the marketing departments were promising and what the products actually delivered. So, when I got back to the office, I got my hands on the products, ripped open the boxes, installed them, and started to play. As had been implied, Visual Basic and Borland C++ were about as “intuitive” to a non-C++ programmer as the brain-dead productivity applications of the time. Did I write an object-oriented program anyway? Yes. Was it a success? Let’s just say if one of the examples shown at Dyson’s conference was the monolith depicted in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," mine was a tombstone.

Fast-forward to modern days (notice it’s about the same time-difference as the invention of OOP and the broad commercialization of it), and OOP has indeed remained the domain of software developers. In that time, Microsoft unveiled and evolved .NET, and now there's SharePoint, which Microsoft says can be used by programmers and non-programmers alike.

Ah, the sweet familiar sound: Even business managers can build their own applications. But how real is it this time?

Recently, I interviewed some SharePoint consultants and developers who confirmed that, yes, line-of-business managers can actually build websites and assign users using SharePoint, rather than having to bother IT with the everyday details that go into building and managing a website.

This is truly great news for marketing and IT professionals. There are fewer back-and-forth conversations that attempt to translate business-speak into geek, and vice versa, which means both parties can be more productive. Businesspeople spend less time waiting for the IT department (because they no longer have to), and IT can focus on more meaningful things like building custom applications, as opposed to making simple changes to websites.

The bad news is putting technology in the hands of non-technologists can underscore the need for technological savvy after all. IT may still need to mop up some of the messes business users create because business users don't understand what they’re doing. Yes, they know they want a website to look a certain way, but no, they don't know that just because they can create websites ad infinitum doesn't mean they necessarily should create websites ad infinitum, at least from a technological standpoint.

The gap is closing somewhat between technologists and non-technologists, because business affects technology and technology affects business. Software developers now have to understand the business case that's driving the need for an application and how that application will affect the business. Business professionals need to understand how technology can be used for competitive advantages. As a result, cross-departmental dialogs must continue, and thanks to modern software tools, the dialogs are becoming more productive.

It is not foreseeable that discussions between IT and business professionals will disappear altogether anytime soon, if ever.

It's gratifying to see after years of promises that business professionals are building things that were once the exclusive domain of technologists, and that the results are far more impressive than my corner office attempts to build object-oriented applications. For me, it brings at least partial closure to the issue of whether line-of-business managers can actually build something without having to become programmers. Then again, technology has evolved significantly since 1991 and at a much faster pace than it once did.

The fact that businesspeople still need to be saved from themselves by technologists is no surprise. It confirms my early suspicion that software abstraction can only take non-technologists so far.

Lisa Morgan is a management and marketing consultant who focuses on the high-technology industry. She is also a contributing editor to SD Times.


Related Search Term(s): Microsoft


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