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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K You're always online and it's not even part of your job: Internet addicts discuss their obsession in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________
R E C E N T L Y Pod people Boon or boondoggle? Let's Get This Straight Internet censure-ship Information theory and practice - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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MICROSOFT ON MICROSOFT | PAGE 1, 2
In contrast, Microsoft rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems have Encarta entries that end abruptly in -- believe it or not -- mid-1993. Surely, if Microsoft's entry can take us within months of the release of the current edition of Encarta, some attempt could have been made to record what two of the foremost technology companies in this industry of blisteringly fast developments were doing over the past five years, during which some minor events -- like the rise of the Internet -- took place. As it is, IBM's entry concludes with Big Blue's early '90s miseries -- its 40,000-plus job losses, its cut in stock dividends, its management and CEO resignations. Meanwhile, Sun gets a meager 200 or so words and, in an otherwise tech-savvy article, there's nary a word about Sun's phenomenal success in the Internet server market or its development of Java, with the continuing threat that poses to Microsoft. Apple, though, gets a lengthy and cheerful entry bringing us right up to summer of 1998 and the return of Steve Jobs to the Apple fold. Interestingly, the Microsoft investment in Apple isn't mentioned. Similarly, the People's Chronology supplies an intriguing backdrop to the current government suit. With content written before the suit began, the Chronology nonetheless reflects, subtly, the Netscape-Microsoft rivalry. There's nothing overt, just little nuanced sentences in which Microsoft's nose seems to wrinkle ever so slightly at the faint whiff of its rival. Take the description of the founding of Microsoft: "Microsoft is founded at Seattle by computer whiz William Henry Gates III, 19, and his friend Paul Gardner Allen, 22. Gates, who wrote his first computer program at 13 and scored a perfect 800 on his math S.A.T., has dropped out of Harvard to start what will be the biggest seller of computer software and will make Gates a billionaire before he is 30." Contrast the language describing Netscape's IPO, and the implication that fat cats Andreesen and Clark fiddle while the company burns: "Netscape Communications goes public August 9. The company has yet to show a profit with its Navigator Internet browser, but sale of stock brings in $2 billion, making Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark enormously rich." For 1996, the Chronology adopts the language of strength and capability to describe Microsoft's launch of Internet Explorer 3.0: It is "unveiled" and "challenges Netscape's Navigator." Netscape "responds" by merely "revealing plans" for Navio software, which will "try" to put browser software on a wide variety of applications. That's as far as the Chronology takes us in the browser wars. But there are other little jibes and needlings against competitors that contrast with small glories for Microsoft. For example, Apple gets a little snigger: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak spend "6 months designing the crude prototype for Apple I, using information picked up from visits to Xerox technologists at Palo Alto." Besides being erroneous -- the information Apple gleaned from Xerox shaped its work on the Mac and its predecessor, the Lisa, not the Apple I -- the passage also implies that the Steves didn't innovate but obtained their significant technologies elsewhere. Yet these reference works never acknowledge that MS-DOS is a technology Gates did not create himself but purchased from another company. In the Chronology, IBM at least is given credit for still existing in 1995, when its purchase of Lotus "positions IBM to challenge Microsoft for leadership in the software industry." We're thus gently reminded, in case we had any doubts, who the boss really is. The launch of Windows 95 two months later, though, gets positive spin and is credited with being so hugely significant that it injected the hardware market with new vigor: "Windows 95, introduced with great fanfare by Microsoft August 24, is a new operating platform that makes IBM-compatible computers more 'user friendly.' It requires more capacity than most existing personal computers and sparks a rush to upgrade PCs or buy new ones." The Chronology's cheerleading for Microsoft can be downright embarrassing: The launch of Microsoft's magazine Slate is considered to be worthy of an entry in 1996; a brief listing of major nonfiction literary releases for 1995 concludes with Bill Gates' tome "The Road Ahead"; and the launch of MSNBC is deemed worthy of a separate entry -- marking it as one of the world events from 3 million B.C. to 1997 deserving of special note. Silly excesses or a stealthy rewriting of history? In an age of large media conglomerates, Microsoft's marketing of content as well as technologies may not seem like a big deal. And Microsoft's story is surely too important to be ignored by contemporary histories. But name another producer of reference works that presents its own
history and that of the industry in which it operates to its readership,
and shapes the record of its own controversial saga. What other publisher
of standard research works has such a vested interest in influencing the
way we think about it?
Karlin Lillington is a technology
writer in Dublin whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Irish
Times and other publications. |
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