Adam Barr '88 writes about his experience working for Microsoft

Looking down from the highest cliff on the digital mountain, then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates described to the business savvy world of 1996 the past, and what might be the future, of the internet in his first book "The Road Ahead."

Last year, after a decade of working as a developer for Gates, Adam Barr '88 published his own perspective, "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years as a Microsoft Programmer."

In the book, Barr explains how Microsoft works on the inside, and how Microsoft's business practices that he knew helped the company to reach success on the outside.

Barr's first impression of Microsoft was his grueling job interview with them shortly after graduating from Princeton. Partly to find the best developers — as the computer programmers are called there — and partly to shape the image of the corporation, the Microsoft interview is not an easy test to get through, Barr remembered.

After joining Microsoft, Barr began interviewing prospective employees himself. He said the interviewees seemed to be thinking, " 'If everyone else that works here made it through that interview, they must be good.' "

"The interview itself sort of sells you on Microsoft," he added.

At 33 and already retired — for now — from the programming 'biz, Barr wants to give writing a second try.

Barr's life as a developer started at the bottom of Microsoft's totem pole. He began by programming network device drivers and network protocols for Windows NT — routines that enable computers to exchange data, much like the protocols used by computers to access the Internet.

In the mid-90s, Barr worked on Microsoft's interactive TV projects, "which wound up not going anywhere," according to Barr. And, after moving between projects, he returned to the Windows NT team — later renamed Windows 2000 — where he worked on remote booting, a task related to networking.

The atmosphere among the developers, Barr said, was one of Darwinism. The best concepts would make it into the final product, and unfit ideas were washed away in intellectual arguments among the developers. "You can expect to have resistance to ideas you propose," but defending those ideas ensures the product is the best it can be.

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Barr said it was a "hard core," competitive atmosphere. "Some of that spilled out at the trial."

And Bill Gates — who is no longer Microsoft's CEO, but now Chairman and Chief Software Architect — was no exception to that rule, Barr recalled his coworkers' feelings.

Though Barr had never been in a meeting with Gates,"People one level above me would be in meetings with [him]."

Gates, Barr's coworkers told him, would be excited when good ideas were suggested. But, "If he thinks something's bad, he'll insult you. He won't feel bad about what he thinks," he said his coworkers expressed.

Among those that are not sold on Microsoft's business practices is the Department of Justice, which convinced a U.S. District Court last year to rule in favor of splitting Microsoft into two companies. One company would develop applications and the other would develop the operating system.

The ruling is currently being argued in appeal. To Barr, a breakup would mean a slight loss of quality in the two Microsofts' software departments. Because the operating system and the applications have been designed under the same roof, the two mesh well.

Completely separating those two tasks, Barr said, will lead to increasing conflicts and confusion over how to make the two products work well together.

"In two or three or four years, you'll discover that . . . it just won't be quite as clear," Barr said.

Another disadvantage of a breakup, he added, is that "whichever one didn't get Bill, that would be a negative."

Barr said he believes the breakup is not a solution to the problems that the DOJ has alleged. "If you look at the illegal sins," Barr noted later, "it was all done by the operating system part of the company."

One of Microsoft's alleged unfair practices was packaging Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. This, the DOJ claimed, gives Microsoft an unfair edge over rival web browser Netscape Communicator.

But Internet Explorer, Barr explained, was developed by Microsoft's operating system department, not its applications one. Had the company been split years ago, he said, nothing would have changed.

"[The] punishment is punitive, not any kind of correction to fix up the industry," he said.

Barr said he thinks the appeals court will rule in favor of Microsoft anyway. "They even spent some time focusing on the judge's conduct," he said, indicating the appeals court justices believe the original decision may have been biased. "I'm a little hopeful, also."

While not contending lawyers, Microsoft still has a market to manage. Some people, Barr said, felt the internet would push Microsoft into the past.

The former developer, however, described Microsoft's new .NET technology as "the new platform" that may keep Microsoft in the center of the digital world.

"Instead of running on a computer," Barr explained, "[an application using .NET] runs on the whole Internet."

Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and other online stores are all "reinventing the wheel" in developing their software, he said, in that each site does very similar tasks. In the .NET framework, preprogrammed components "plug-in" to websites to add functionality, much like computer hardware.

The same design or component is used in many applications without the need for each application to develop the functionality on its own.

Credit card authentication, Barr said, is an obvious example of a component that many web sites would benefit from.

A company would need to only plug-in the .NET component to their site, and then the service would be active. Though Barr said the end user will not notice much of a difference, the sites will become easier for providers to establish, and products will become cheaper.

"It's certainly possible that Microsoft can establish .NET as a standard," Barr said.

And then there's the question of Linux — a rival operating system to Microsoft Windows. "It is very dangerous to Microsoft" because of the direction Microsoft has being going — toward writing software for corporate network servers and high-end Internet servers, Barr said. "That's what Linux is good at."

In those environments, reliability is key; 'your program has performed an illegal application' is not only inconvenient, but also dangerously expensive.

But, Barr is confident Linux developers will not be able to change home use of PCs. "They're making a great operating system for themselves." Linux, known for its often cryptic interface, is not the operating system you would give to your grandma, Barr joked.

"I don't think there is really anything magical about [the way Linux is created in an open environment]. I just think there are some good people working on it," he said.

Although Barr feels Microsoft could match Linux's stability, and make Windows "faster and better," he knows the company has not been focusing at all on their fastest growing competitor.

"They're not going to beat Linux just by accident," he said.