Douglas Rushkoff: ONLINE
No matter how much we might love to hate Bill Gates, we can’t help but have mixed feelings about the United States Justice Department and the two dozen or so states suing Microsoft for violating anti-trust laws.
Fresh from their unsatisfying victory-with- no-spoils over the tobacco industry last season, US attorneys general are anxious to take down another perceived enemy of the people, as publicly as possible. On TV and to the press, they explain how Microsoft’s “anti-competitive” practices must be curbed in order to promote innovation and preserve consumer choice. But by the logic of the marketplace – the only logic left in USpolitics and, arguably, its value system – government intervention is itself anti- competitive. When winners and losers are judged only by their profits, the ends justify any means.
Although Microsoft uses every weapon in its arsenal to win the “browser war”, this is all in the spirit of competition. Playing a bit dirty – or a bit fast, loose, or close to the chest with standards and compatibility – is merely the kind of “extreme” competition we can expect from an industry founded by hackers and accelerating at this many megahertz per second.
Predatory business practices are not anti- competitive; they are hyper-competitive. Or so the thinking goes, at this, the great bull market’s endgame.
If the many well-meaning but ill- informed justice departments are going to stand a chance of winning this case – either in court or in the arguably more significant court of public opinion – they are going to have to abandon their posture of protecting a competitive business environment, and instead demonstrate how their lawsuit will make for a better digital future.
Instead, America’s prosecutors have allowed themselves to be drawn into a phantom battle.
While they think they are preventing Microsoft from leveraging its Windows monopolies into other areas, they are merely fighting for concessions that, very soon, won’t matter to Gates at all.
First, they want to force Microsoft to let computer-makers modify the Windows desktop by adding competitors’ software icons to the opening screen.
Second, and more far-reaching, they want to curb Microsoft’s ability to “tie” software applications to its operating system, making it illegal for Microsoft to demand that computer-makers include Internet Explorer or any other software application as a condition for obtaining a licence to distribute Windows.
But what happens when there’s no such thing as software?
Thanks to competitors like Netscape – which was threatening to expand its own programs into entire operating systems – Microsoft got the bright idea of expanding its operating system into programs.
In the Windows future, users will no longer “open” programs from a desktop. You won’t use a separate browser program to view the Internet, word processor to edit a document, or spreadsheet application to calculate your profits.
In other words, your operating system will not be the platform from which you “launch” software; it will be the software.
Instead of buying new programs, you will add functionality to the system, much in the way you now download “plug-ins” for your Web browser.
Microsoft has nothing to fear from losing its battle with justice. The Internet Explorer icon is merely a placeholder for the program’s impending absorption by Windows – a way to keep Netscape from setting its own Web-browsing standards while Microsoft steadily integrates the Internet into its overall system.
Microsoft is already expanding on numerous other frontiers simultaneously.
New cable television services and palmtop computing devices are all adopting versions of Windows. The number of Web servers and back offices based on Windows is also growing.
Microsoft is awaiting the moment when these different computing worlds – consumer, business, television, palmtop – begin to touch one another. Then, Windows will be the system that runs our world. c Douglas Rushkoff
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