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Ma Bell, Meet Ma Billby Mitch Stone, Editor/Publisher Remember when you could buy your telephone equipment from only one place, the phone company? You could have your desk phone, your wall phone, or your Princess phone (with the illuminated dial). They came in an array of fetching colors, including white, yellow, red, tan, and of course, classic black. And that was about it. If you didn't like Ma Bell's selection, well that was just plain tough bananas, because it was against the law to hook up anything but phone company certified telephone equipment to the phone lines. And the phone company charged so darn much to own the clunky instruments outright, most people leased them on a month to month basis. Ah, those were the good old days. Uncomplicated. Unfettered by matters of personal preference. Completely over a barrel. Here's a grim prediction: ten years from now, we'll look back at the late '90s and wistfully recall the days when it was actually possible to compete against Microsoft. Before there was a law against it. Before Microsoft became the acknowledged, certified, and regulated information public utility. Oh yes, by then they'll be regulated, just like the phone company of old. Heavily regulated. But this regulatory regime will almost certainly be a disaster, not only for Microsoft, but for the advancement of technology generally. If current events tell us anything, it's that we shouldn't hold our breaths waiting for the courts to rescue us from this fate. The recent ruling upholding Microsoft's "right" to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows only confirms a deeply held suspicion that if the courts slow Microsoft down at all, an increasingly improbable outcome, it won't happen in a timely fashion. Expect the courts to be ruling on motions and counter-motions in this case until we're all old and gray. This observation isn't necessarily intended as a criticism of the courts or the Department of Justice, but simply as a reality check. And the reality is: they can't do very much, and they can't do it quickly enough to genuinely matter. It took nearly ten years for the Supreme Court to effect the Standard Oil breakup in 1911. Granted, this was one of the first big Sherman Antitrust Act cases, but the point is, we don't have ten years this time around. We don't even have two. What's more, the Standard Oil case was prosecuted in an era of overtly progressive and reformist politics. We've got none of that climate today -- in fact, quite the opposite. Despite two solid decades of relentless corporate abuse of regular working folks, we remain a nation enamored of corporatism -- or at least, sufficiently cowed by corporations such that we prefer not to raise our voices in objection to their exploits. In any event, this is not the place in time to expect speedy antitrust enforcement of the kind that will be required to alter the course of history. Even more troublesome is the complicity of the media in this scenario. We are told by virtually every voice in the media, from the popular press to the technology press, that the computer marketplace must be standardized, that the order provided by one standard is essential, and that Microsoft has legitimately won the battle for that standard. We're are not being reminded by the media of the plainly evident fact that a great many markets are served very nicely indeed by competing proprietary standards. Likewise, we are not being informed of the long term consequences of imposing a single commercial standard on everyone. Most importantly, we're being provided with no hint of how much it will cost us to be so heavily dependent on one company for our information technology. Quite to the contrary. As if we needed another example of the media's shameless and uncritical promotion Microsoft's corporate agenda, consider CNN's Bill Hemmer closing a recent "story" about the introduction of Windows 98 by declaring, "Time for you to trade in your Mac!" The media message is clear: time for last few partisans to come out of the woods with their hands up. Haven't they heard the war is over? So long as the media continues to beat the drum for the monolithic industry model, alternative products will be relegated further and further towards the margins. Over time, most will vanish entirely. The result will be a one-company industry, and important one-company industries are invariably regulated. Just ask Ma Bell. Unfortunately, the people running Microsoft are too arrogant, too self-absorbed, and too short-sighted by half to identify and avoid this threat. They now apparently think of the company as a veritable force of nature, beyond the normal workings of economics and politics. This is a huge miscalculation -- the fields of history are littered with the bleached bones of those who regarded themselves as beyond reproach. So we can only hope; perhaps an act of divine providence will restore the high tech industry to some semblance of its gloriously semi-anarchic state before Microsoft became a black hole at its core. But for even an outside chance at such a realignment to occur, we'd need the real issues to be entered into the public debate -- and this is not even close occurring at the moment. The press, the traditional guardians of the public trust, are absent without leave. They're too busy sniffing the air trying to figure out where the antitrust case is headed, or alternately regurgitating corporate press releases, to take their investigative responsibilities seriously. It's a real crime, because the events of the next five to ten years will probably dictate the entire character and direction of the next century of technological progress. How we address Microsoft's largely successful efforts at taking over the information infrastructure is at ground zero of the matter. So five years from now, when the Department of Justice is still earnestly muddling along, expect Microsoft to be more firmly established then ever as the most broadly and deeply ensconced monopoly in the history of the planet. People will then, at long last, begin to feel helplessly ensnared by what Frank Norris, the industrial muckraker of the early part of the century called "The Octopus." Then the pitchforks and torches will come out. Regulations will be passed hand over fist, with little regard for their consequences. And when that sad day comes, the media pundits will no doubt be asking how this could have happened to us -- how we ignored the fundamental issues so completely when we still had the wherewithal to alter the course of history. Clarence Darrow understood the phenomenon well. "History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history," he once observed dryly. Ma Bell, meet Ma Bill. Previous keynotes: Hip-Hip-Hooray? (20 May 1998) Published: 6 July 1998 |
The recent assertions that Microsoft had its current Internet strategy in play as early as December 1993 are utter nonsense.
JOHN DVORAK, PC Magazine
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