That's when Bill Gates pressed the send button on an e-mail message that made security Microsoft's top priority. You will find the time stamp on the message, which went to every Microsoft employee worldwide.
As of Jan. 15, a date that in some ways has connections to the aftermath of 9/11, Microsoft's top job is keeping bad people from doing evil things to computers and the Internet. In Bill's words, "Now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security."
According to Rob Lemos's ZDNet News story, Microsoft's top priority has become making computers and the Internet--and by extension, Microsoft--something we all can trust. In the process, Gates wants to chop hackers down to size, lock out the industrial spies and al Qaeda, and build computer systems that do more to fix themselves and recover from problems.
This e-mail, obviously intended for both employee and public consumption, is an important symbol.
BILL DOES NOT send a message like this every day, every month, or even every year. When he does, it carries the weight of a supreme authority. A friend who works at Microsoft on security issues said his reaction upon reading the e-mail was, "Whoopee!" Finding consensus in sometimes tough development meetings will now become easier--security wins. Bill has made it that simple.
Previously, Microsoft's top priorities had been major undertakings like building a graphical user interface called Windows, making the Internet an integral part of the user experience, and building a foundation for next-generation network-based applications.
But real progress toward fulfilling Bill's new commandment won't come quickly. What's more, focusing on security will doubtless slow progress in other areas.
It may also give Microsoft a collection of new products and upgrades that are hard to sell. For example, if Microsoft can't persuade customers that they should replace Windows 9x with the much more stable Windows XP, how will they convince people to pay for security? And what about those who will balk at paying for security that they believe should have been there in the first place?
THERE HAVE BEEN HINTS that Microsoft was headed in this direction for a while--including two much less significant security initiatives. And at a dinner before the Windows XP introduction, Gates broadly hinted that Microsoft might enter the security business with software products of its own.
My suspicion is that Bill was reluctant to embark on a security crusade until the underpinnings, namely Windows XP and .Net, had taken shape. With those safely birthed, the focus naturally turns to protecting them.
With this directive, he has made very clear that computing, which used to be a small town where people were nice to one another and you could leave your keys in the car, has become a big city that's also inhabited by people who are, well, evil. And protecting ourselves from them is an absolute necessity.
Bill did not, however, name a single point person as being responsible for this initiative. That is something I'd encourage him to do, and it would put the missing exclamation point at the end of the e-mail.
AT ONE LEVEL, the memo is proof that many of the idealistic goals of personal computing have been met. Still, that Don Henley song, "The End of the Innocence," keeps playing in my mind. It's the one that talks about how things change--and not always for the better--as we grow up and face the world as it is.
Security problems are, of course, nothing new and are very much a part of our lives. And Gates should, if anything, have sent this memo a year or two earlier. But the shift is so significant--programmers, after all, have been trained to build features, not hacker traps--that I can understand why it took him so long.
Really, I wish it were possible for Bill to never have sent the e-mail at all. But good people sometimes have to take a stand against evil people. This, and not just in computing, is one of those times.
