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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

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The message from Microsoft -- repeated over and over again at the hearing and anywhere else Gates is visible today, like the cover of this week's Newsweek -- is, We have to innovate or we will die! The government shouldn't stop us from innovating! This mantra might be persuasive if it didn't sound an alarm for anyone who knows Microsoft's history.

Microsoft has been so often criticized for copying or buying up other people's technology, rather than developing innovations in-house, that its latest PR offensive carries a whiff of the old "lady doth protest too much." This is the company that bought its first PC operating system rather than build one from the ground up; Windows itself is still in some ways a clunky copy of the Mac operating system. It's true that today, Microsoft has vast research labs that produce their share of real innovation -- but that's not how the company won most of its battles.

"Operating systems are based on ideas, and no one owns the factory for ideas," Gates told the senators. But if you have a war chest the size of Microsoft's, you can swoop in and buy all the ideas you want. That may not be against the federal antitrust laws, but it's at the heart of the uneasiness so many people in the technology industry feel about Microsoft. In January, when the company's chief operating officer, Bob Herbold, was asked what competing software firms could do when Microsoft decided to fold a product into Windows, Herbold told Bloomberg News that they had three options: fight and lose, sell to Microsoft or "not go into the business to begin with." So much for Gates' professed concern for preserving consumer choice and dynamic, competitive markets.

Aware of this increasing public discomfort with Microsoft's ravenously competitive culture, the company is desperately trying to soften its public image -- why else would Gates subject himself to Barbara Walters and humiliate himself by singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"? This PR effort is the only possible explanation for the hilarious and embarrassing spectacle underway at Microsoft's Slate, where Gates is publishing a daily diary all this week.

Whatever criticisms one may lob at it, Slate has always had some pretty high standards for prose. If musings as vapid as Gates' diary entries had arrived at the Slate offices under any other byline, is there any doubt they'd have been spiked? When he isn't repeating the same arguments he has presented to the Senate about five-second browser downloads and the right to innovate, he is recording flat details ("I stopped by Senator Murray's office and had a doughnut") or expressing a kind of vacant enthusiasm that will be familiar to readers of his "The Road Ahead." Everything is "excellent," "great," "fun" -- except for the James Bond movies he watches on the plane, which aren't as good as they used to be.

Gates' voice here -- diffidently upbeat and affectless in a tone that oddly recalls the Andy Warhol diaries -- lacks the superciliousness that often comes across in his speech. This Bill is either drugged, lobotomized or simply not much of a writer. Any self-respecting "cultural icon" should know better than to show himself in such a poor light.

You could attribute Gates' lack of self-awareness to genuine naiveté or narcissistic arrogance. Either way, the sooner we get over our Gatesmania, the better. This week, we've learned all we need to know about the man's inner life.
SALON | March 5, 1998

RELATED ARTICLES :
Hatch vs. Gates: An interview with Sen. Orrin Hatch on the eve of the Microsoft hearings.
Is Bill Gates a liberal? Andrew Leonard explores Gates' philanthropic record.

Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and talk about Microsoft's battle with the feds.