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Guest View: Microsoft finally empowers business managers


By Lisa L. Morgan
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May 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
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.


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