Killing Them Softly

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 03 May 1999 15:00:00 -0700

Morris Beton has a lean, taut frame and gray hair swept back from a high forehead. At 45, he has the bearing of an off-duty French army colonel, courtly enough for civil conversation but with a mind never far from battle.

Beton is not your typical khaki-clad Microsoft (MSFT) executive. He avoids the foam-at-the-mouth marketing pitch. You won't find him guilty of the sort of technical arrogance that has made the company so successful - and ultimately the target of so much legal action by the companies it has beaten and the government officials it has derided. Instead, Beton wields a kind of diplomacy that is not a strong suit at the Redmond, Wash., software kingdom.

"I want our salespeople to sell as many Microsoft products as possible," says Beton, the company's general manager of developer programs. "But we don't fit into a world where we're the only player."

One of Beton's tasks is to lead five "competitive evangelists," who work closely with heated competitors like Oracle (ORCL), Sun (SUNW) Microsystems, Novell (NOVL) and IBM (IBM) - companies that the rest of Microsoft wants to pulverize.

The job breeds divided loyalties. For example, while Microsoft's database group has Oracle in its gunsights, Morris' evangelists are helping Oracle's engineers build a rival Windows database. The relationship goes beyond technical help, as the evangelists often fight for marketing attention on behalf of Microsoft's most bitter enemies.

"They've been instrumental in acting not only as our liaisons but our champions inside Microsoft," says Christopher Stone, senior VP of strategy at Novell. "I've been impressed. It's a thankless job inside the monopoly."

As a matter of business, Microsoft's top execs have always maintained informal relationships with the competition. Until four years ago, though, there was no formal channel of communication and no one to massage wounded egos when necessary.

Enter Beton. Involved with the software business since 1977, he spent 15 years at IBM, where he managed large corporate accounts, including Boeing and Metropolitan Life. He joined Microsoft four years ago after a VP stint at enterprise network-software maker Attachmate (dossier) and began working to convince software developers to write Windows NT applications. Gates, Paul Maritz and other top brass handled the stickiest relationships, but as Microsoft aggressively expanded the feature set of Windows and pushed into markets for groupware and databases, it was clear that sensitive negotiations called for sensitive people. Beton proposed a formal team.

"We think of ourselves as diplomats with no Diplomacy 101 course," says team member Marc Kuperstein, who was previously in charge of technology strategy at publishing giant Reed Elsevier. "Not everyone can do the job. You have to learn to remove emotion from the discussion."

Last summer, when Microsoft was hoping to bolster support inside IBM for Microsoft's Windows NT system, Beton's team was sent to play good cop - think of them as the advanced scouts for top-level discussions.

But even if Beton's team represents the good guys, not all competitors are as publicly effusive about Morris' team as Novell's Stone. IBM refused to comment for this article. So did Sun, which is suing Microsoft for its attempts to derail Sun's Java technology. A Sun spokesman acknowledged, however, that the hardware division of the company has recently begun talks with Morris' group about building Windows-compatible data-storage devices, the first contact other than legal wrangling the two companies have had since Sun filed the lawsuit in October 1997. Naturally, suspicion remains.

"We're not there to gather or disseminate competitors' product features or schedules," says team member Marshall Goldberg, 54, who came to Microsoft in 1992. "The only way they can trust you is over time."

Take the case of Novell. Last fall, Beton's team lobbied to get Novell a prominent booth at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference - the high-tech equivalent of letting the fox into the henhouse. The request drew howls of protest from the Windows marketing team. (A reciprocal booth at Novell's conference won them over.) "We gave away 2,000 copies of Netware," chuckles Stone.

Still, Novell could be the rockiest test. The Active Directory, a crucial piece of the upcoming Windows 2000, competes head-to-head with Novell's flagship product. While Beton's team negotiates with Stone's team to make sure Novell's directory runs well on Windows 2000, it's also out touting the benefits of the Active Directory to large software developers like SAP (SAP).

"The directory is my major business," says Stone. "There are lines being drawn in the sand."

The ultimate goal of Beton's battle is the spread of Windows 2000 far and wide. Microsoft can't achieve that goal without convincing other developers to make Windows applications, despite its history of other antics: dominating the market with its own applications - the Office desktop applications, for example - or making third-party products superfluous by building features like browsers or networking software right into Windows.

Competing with Windows developers can cause a lot of "collateral damage," Beton acknowledges. He won't say how much influence he has on product strategy decisions, but, he says, "on behalf of companies we work with, we've recommended that Microsoft not do certain things."

As if the pressure of his divided role isn't enough, Beton will have more responsibility as the company reorganizes. He's now in charge of all developer outreach, including trade shows and Microsoft's online support resources. What's more, when his boss Tod Nielsen was dispatched to Washington, D.C., to help shore up flagging PR efforts during the antitrust trial, Morris took over most of his duties in Redmond.

That's a lot of pressure to add to Beton's shoulders, which makes what could be the toughest job at Microsoft even tougher. Adversaries like Novell's Stone shake their heads: "Man, I'd hate to be those guys."

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Killing Them Softly