Road warrior
Bill Gates fights to keep the world safe for Microsoft
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is an unlikely poster boy for the digital age.
His contemporary Steve Jobs oversaw two of the most influential personal-computing standards, the Apple II and the Macintosh, and is the impresario behind the technotoon Toy Story.
Adobe's John Warnock virtually invented desktop publishing, a development whose importance is on the order of the personal computer itself.
Marc Andreessen, still just 24, wrote Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, which transformed the Internet's World-Wide Web from a text-only geek hangout into a vibrant combination of graphics, video, audio, and words.
All three are fabulously wealthy, and none is known for being shy. Yet it is Gates, without a notable technological achievement to his credit, who appears on the covers of Newsweek and Time, whose e-mail messages are breathlessly analyzed in the New Yorker, who's lampooned by cartoonist Berke Breathed, and who's hailed by politicians as evidence that the spirit of American capitalism is alive and well.
Now Gates is at it again, with a book, The Road Ahead (Viking, 286 pages, $29.95), that attempts to position Microsoft as the best airline to whoosh the masses into cyberspace. Captain Bill fails to tell his passengers, though, that Microsoft has barely begun working on its flight plan, even though a number of smaller, more agile competitors have been taking to the skies for several years already.
Running scared
Indeed, Gates is running scared, and the fear that keeps him awake at night would be almost touching if The Road Ahead were not so awful.
Firmly ensconced at the top of the New York Times' bestseller list, the book, which Gates wrote with help from Microsoft vice-president Nathan Myhrvold and freelance journalist Peter Rinearson, says very little about his, and Microsoft's, rise to domination of the software industry. Instead, The Road Ahead focuses on the emerging information age, an age in which we'll use our digital television/telephone/computer hybrids to do everything from order a first-run movie to consult with a leading surgeon, and in which wallet-card-size computers will hold our money, our medical records, and God knows what else.
In other words, Gates has the "information highway" on his mind, so much so that, by my count, he invokes that phrase 153 times, as well as the "information superhighway" twice and the "information private road" once. He's surely right that the information highway is where the action is, even if the digerati no longer invoke that hoary cliché for fear of being laughed out of Starbucks. But the problem for Gates is that the first manifestations of the highway -- the explosive growth of the Internet and the creation of the Web -- have passed Microsoft by.
Oh, sure, Gates has been throwing plenty of stuff at the wall, hoping something will stick. He created the Microsoft Network to compete with America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy. And he's announced deals with cable-TV giant Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) to produce cable-box software, with neoliberal journalist Michael Kinsley to publish an on-line political magazine, and with NBC to launch a news service that would appear both on TV and on the Net. But the TCI partnership is hardly one that will set hearts aflutter, and the latter two moves are about content, not innovation.
Gates's mission in The Road Ahead is to present himself as a seer into the digital future in the hopes that by enhancing his public persona he can get the public to buy Microsoft's version of that future. (What will that future look like? "It will be a shopper's heaven.")
Thus, Gates manfully plows ahead with passive sentence after passive sentence, offering a cross between a dumbed-down rehash of MIT Media Lab head Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and postcards from the 1939 World's Fair. Along the way Gates spices things up with insensitivity ("Each time a job is made unnecessary, the person who was filling that job is freed to do something else"), crypto-fascism ("Almost everyone is willing to accept some restrictions in exchange for a sense of security"), the numbingly obvious ("Except, of course, you won't be able to forward past part of a live show as it's taking place"), and bad taste ("A book I enjoyed greatly, The Bridges of Madison County").
The banality of this isn't that surprising, for Gates, despite his media image, really isn't a technology maven at all. Instead, he's a ruthless businessman who got where he is the same way the robber barons of the 19th century did: by pursuing and either buying out or destroying the competition.
In a piece in Wired last year by Wendy Goldman Rohm, a "high-level executive at a well-known software company" summed up Gates's tactics this way: "We were raped by Microsoft. Bill Gates did it personally. Introducing Gates to the president of a small company is like introducing Mike Tyson to a virgin. This has to be stopped."
License to kill
Microsoft's success is built on the foundation of MS-DOS, (Microsoft Disk Operating System), offered with the original IBM Personal Computer in the early 1980s. As Gates brags in his book, MS-DOS took off because Microsoft reached a deal with IBM to sell it to users for far less than two competing operating systems.
Soon, makers of PC clones were paying Microsoft a licensing fee to install MS-DOS and, later, Windows, Microsoft's graphical operating system, effectively shutting out any competition. After all, who wants to pay for a better product when you've already got one that does the job?
Microsoft was accused of engaging in darker behavior as well. The most intriguing charge: that the company relied on proprietary information about Windows to make its own Windows-based application programs -- Word, Excel, and the like -- perform better than its competitors'. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton's Justice Department caved in on its antitrust investigation of Microsoft, reaching a settlement so craven that a disgusted federal judge nearly derailed it.
The only standard not to fall entirely under Microsoft's sway was Apple's, whose Macintosh operating system, unveiled in 1984, was so superior that Windows still hasn't caught up. Not that Gates hasn't tried: Windows is such an obvious knockoff that Apple sued Microsoft for copyright violation. Apple lost (in fact, both companies copied their products from Xerox's Star system, but only Apple held the licensing rights), which is why Windows 95 is even more Mac-like than its predecessors.
It's emblematic that the CD-ROM included with Gates's book can only be used on a computer running Windows. At least the Web site for The Road Ahead is Mac-compatible, though I prefer "The `Unofficial' Bill Gates Home Page".
Ultimately, Gates's vision is a pinched, narrow hope that the, uh, information highway will lead us to a bigger, better, faster version of the same centralized, consumer-oriented culture that made him rich and famous in the first place. Cyberspace philosophers such as Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow talk about technology creating a radically decentralized, democratized new society, but you'll find none of that in Gates's book. What you will find is a future in which huge corporations -- like, say, Microsoft -- will continue to play the same dominant role that they do today.
"Markets from trading floors to malls are fundamental to human society," Gates writes, "and I believe this new one will eventually be the world's central department store."
Bill Gates doesn't get it.
At least I hope not.