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T A B L E__T A L K

Is your computer year 2000 compliant? Should it be? Join the millennium crises debate in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

To be or not to be?
By Greg Lindsay
It's fast, it's fresh and it already has a cult following. But will the new high-end operating system find a market?
(03/04/98)

Babel off
By David Futrelle
AltaVista's Translation Assistant turns the language barrier into a fun house mirror
(03/03/98)

A glitch in time
By Scott Rosenberg
"Time Bomb 2000" author Edward Yourdon talks about just how bad the millennial computer crisis is going to be
(03/02/98)

"Myst" partnership is riven
By Karlin Lillington
Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who created the world's most popular computer games, go their separate ways
(03/02/98)

Talking 'bout my "Net generation"
By Andrew Leonard
Review of Don Tapscott's book "Growing Up Digital"
(02/27/98)

BROWSE THE ARCHIVES FOR LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT

All Gates, all the time
FROM THE WEB TO CAPITOL HILL, THERE'S NO ESCAPING BILL

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BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | Was Bill Gates' appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week a win or a loss? There's no consensus among the press. On one hand, even after having packed the panel with two sympathetic colleagues, Gates had to sit back and stew while his rivals pressed their charge that Windows is a monopoly before a national audience. Then he had to sit calmly while senators grilled him on the details of Microsoft's marketing practices -- and rein in his more typical responses to impertinent questioners, like "That's idiotic!" or "That's nonsense!"

On the other hand, the Capitol Hill appearance was a full-blown festival of Gatesmania, with -- as numerous accounts told us -- senators wisecracking about the horde of TV cameras and schoolgirls "squealing" as they basked in the presence of the richest man in America.

One benchmark for the Gates craze: Slate editor Michael Kinsley's declaration in a column in Time magazine's 75th anniversary issue that Bill Gates has become "a cultural icon, right up there with the beautiful princess who died with her lover in a car crash in Paris." Maybe there's some truth to that; still, it might have been more seemly for Kinsley and Time to leave such judgments to someone who is not on the Microsoft payroll.

Icons are universal and simple to read, but Gates remains an enigmatic figure, and the press corps had a hard time gauging his performance in Washington. Reuters says "Gates was unruffled" by the hearings, while the New York Times says he was "shellshocked" by the end of the day. (Maybe that was just the cracking in his adenoidal voice.) The next day, interviewed by Charlie Rose at the New York Public Library, Gates declared that the experience was "kind of fun."

The New York Post's decision to have a "body language" expert named Hilka Klinkenberg cover the event was doubtless a little eccentric. But Klinkenberg may have been onto something in noticing that Gates' head was shaking "no" as he praised the rise of the Internet -- and that he wore a "tight insincere smile" every time he spoke of competition and innovation by his competitors.

The public is unlikely to follow all the convolutions of Sen. Orrin Hatch's questions and Gates' answers about the tactics Microsoft has used to promote its Internet Explorer browser. In media-event terms, the moments that made the most lasting impact were those that touched on everyday users' experiences. And it was Gates' opponents, particularly Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, who seemed most in touch with the real world. Meanwhile, Gates kept declaring that it only takes "five seconds" to change your browser -- the comment of someone who's been using a fast T1 line for so long he's forgotten that most of the modem-bound world thinks twice before downloading a big program.

Anyone can call a competitor a monopoly. It's much more effective to turn to a crowded committee room and demonstrate the monopoly in action -- as Barksdale did Tuesday. He simply asked the audience how many of them had Intel PCs. When about three-quarters raised their hands, he asked them how many of them used Windows as their operating system. There weren't a whole lot of Linux devotees in the room.

In a similarly unscientific but telling approach, more than one senator had staff members call Dell Computer to try to order a PC with Netscape Navigator installed; Dell's sales reps repeatedly told them that this was impossible. Why? "It has something to do with Microsoft." Everyone who lives and works in the PC universe has a story like this. (When I tried to buy a laptop computer last month, I found the lowest price, called the retailer -- and discovered that they only had one of the model I wanted in stock. Unfortunately, they could not sell this particular IBM computer to me -- one that ships with Lotus' own applications suite already installed for free -- unless I also purchased Microsoft Office with it. Why? The company never told me -- but whatever agreement tied their hands was strong enough that they lost the sale to me rather than break it.)

Microsoft's power in the computer marketplace today is too overwhelming to deny. Gates repeatedly told the senators that Microsoft never forgets it could lose its lead in a flash -- just as IBM once fell to Microsoft's onslaught. But no one at the hearing was able to present a plausible scenario of just how that might occur in the near future. "The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English," Sun chairman Scott McNealy quipped.

N E X T_P A G E | The latest Microsoft innovation -- Bill Gates' diary