The October launch of Windows XP, Microsoft's new operating system, had been anticipated as the saviour of the personal computer industry. (An operating system is a piece of software that turns a computer from a box of electronics into a potentially useful gadget.) As the number of personal computers sold in the US has been declining this year for the first time ever, manufacturers hope the new system will spark interest.
In its selection of what is included and excluded, Windows XP is a gamble by Microsoft. Once again the company has used the launch to attempt to wipe out competitors, not through a better product but just using its market domination. This is a close repeat of its earlier decision to use a monopoly over operating systems to enforce purchase of its Internet Explorer software against competitor Netscape Navigator.
With the help of the Bush administration, Microsoft has now won that battle in the courts. Its repeated cry was "we won't be denied the right to innovate". This is a core belief among Microsoft supporters. The truth is very different, and has been extensively documented. (Its secondary message is "we have more lawyers than the US Justice Department and we will punish anyone who gets in our way".)
One interesting piece of evidence is a book by Bill Gates in 1995, The Road Ahead. At the time, this was quite an influential book in business circles. It apparently introduced the claim that modern computer networks create "friction-free capitalism", by doing away with all market inefficiency. I say "apparently", because Bill Gates and Microsoft are notoriously reluctant to credit anyone else with ideas, often stealing them and presenting them as their own.
Buying this book today gives the impressions that in 1995 Gates was ahead of the pack in predicting the internet's runaway success in the second half of the 1990s, a prediction helped by Microsoft's own strategy: After the personal computer revolution, he writes, "We are all beginning another great journey ... which in its early stages we might call the 'Internet Revolution'."
In fact this passage, and most of those referring to the internet are actually added in the second, 1996 edition of the book. The evolution seems to be that Microsoft first noticed the Internet in 1994. By 1995 when Gates' original book was published the company was trying to work out how to replace interest in the internet for its own advantage. Only in 1996 did Microsoft realise that this was hopeless, and the company had to deal with (attempt to profit from) the internet on its own terms.
According to a December 1996 internal memo, senior Microsoft executive Jim Allchin, quoted in John Naughton's A Brief History of the Future, wrote: "I don't understand how IE [Microsoft Internet Explorer] is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything Netscape does packaging and product wise." This directly led to the solution: force all computer manufacturers to include Internet Explorer as the default internet access software.
This has been the pattern throughout Microsoft's history: don't invent, copy and impose. Microsoft can take credit for being the outstanding profiteer of modern information technology. But it can't claim to be an innovator.
BY GREG HARRIS (gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com)
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 5, 2001.
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