WinTernals buy is bittersweet

There’s a bittersweet quality to the news that Microsoft is acquiring WinTernals Software, the brainchild of Windows guru’s Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. On the one hand, you’re happy for Mark and Bruce, who will become esteemed members of Microsoft’s development staff. Mark, in particular, will become one of only 14 Microsoft Technical Fellows, taking his place alongside legends like Windows NT guru Dave Cutler and Jim Gray. On the other hand, you’re sad to see the end of a project like Sysinternals, which has provided free tools like Process Explorer, Autoruns, and Filemon to millions of Windows users and net admins — free — for going on a decade now. Sure, I know Sysinternals was the fun side of the business and Mark/Bryce are gonna have to get their kids’ teeth straightened just like the rest of us. But the tools they created and then gave away — dozens and dozens of them — are incredibly adept at cutting through the layers of administrative UI gobbledgy gook and making important features easy to access and use. I often found myself wondering “Why did Winternals have to do this?” Did MS need a third party developer to tell them that it would be nice to be able to view and edit the programs that start up with (and often slow down) Windows? With the turf wars, competing agendas, release schedules and institutional torpor that often settles on large companies, the short answer is “Yes.”

Unfortunately for us, the future for Sysinternals is, as the Magic 8 Ball would say “cloudy.” Mark promises to keep the site running “for the time being while Microsoft determines the best way to integrate it into its own community efforts, and the tools will continue to be free to download.” I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I’m not too hopeful.

In the big scheme of things, though, we’ll all benefit. Mark’s probably best known for putting the word “rootkit” into the common parlance after he uncovered Sony’s tricky DRM stealth technology back in October, 2005. But his technical expertise extends well beyond rootkit technology. Off the bat, he will be working closely with MS staff on issues like scaling in multicore environments, virtualization and creating a more manageable application model for future versions of Windows. Judging from his tireless morning and evening presentations on rootkits and kernel security at Teched 2006, Microsoft will get their money’s worth out of him.

Beyond that, things get fuzzy. Bill Shelton, group product manager for Windows Server, said Microsoft isn’t ready to talk about how the Winternals/Sysinternals software might be integrated with Microsoft’s existing products, and won’t be ready for a few months. But he did make it clear that Mark and Bryce are moving to Redmond “immediately.” The goal, said Shelton, is to use the Winternals and Sysinternals wares to reduce the “TCO” (total cost of ownership) of Windows.

For his part, Mark said that working for Microsoft will give him much more leverage to improve the lives of Windows users than Winternals and Sysinternals ever could. “If I have an idea for a utility now, we can make it available to everybody that uses Windows, or get it in embedded in Windows and that will make peoples’ lives better.”

I sure hope so. Good luck Mark and Bryce!