MISCmedia for 5/15/00
The Pre-Post-PC Era

BEFORE TODAY'S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It's Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

EVERY NOW AND THEN, for at least the past five years, somebody's come along proclaiming the End of the Personal Computer.

Nowadays, such punditry often comes under the guise of Microsoft antitrust-case commentary.

The big antitrust cases of the past, these commentators tend to note, found their resolutions just as their affected industries were changing. Standard Oil was broken up just as the automobile was starting to turn petroleum from a grease-and-heating-fuel commodity into a major fulcrum of world economies. AT&T allowed itself to be split as new technologies enabled new communications services to explode. IBM's antitrust case dissolved as first minicomputers, then PCs, put a wrench in the old mainframe empire.

Similarly, these pundits claim, the Internet's throwing a curve at the old local-machine-centered business model that's been central to Microsoft's complicated schemes.

MS used to have a slogan on the floor of its main reception area: "Each day brings us closer to a computer on every desktop." Each of those computers, the floor didn't say but could have, would be expected to run an MS operating platform and applications programs. The whole world would do everything in the "One Microsoft Way," as implied by the company's mailing address.

But the Net doesn't work that way, say these commentators. And Microsoft can't make it work that way, despite such attempts as Internet Explorer, MSN, Advanced Windows Services, and the decidedly non-cross-platform MS version of the Java programming language.

At least for now, the Internet (or at least most of the stuff transmitted through it) doesn't care what your OS or your hardware configuration is. Companies that come up with new Net data formats (Real Networks, Macromedia, Netscape, even MS) are expected by Net users to make their formats readable, if not writable, on Macs and Unix boxes as well as Windows.

And even the long-delayed dream of a "network computer," a semi-dumb terminal that would easily access the Net but do little else on its own, has finally found a smidgen of success via devices like the I-Opener.

The catch behind all this talk is that MS has been busily anticipating how to respond to these changes, and to force its dominant status into any new computing era. It owns WebTV. It's pushed cut-down Windows variants as OS's for semi-dumb access devices. It's tried to promote Windows-first or Windows-only Web applications for everything from online gaming to online banking.

And, oh-yeah, it's tried to force IE and MSN onto a not-always-grateful computer world.

Any final antitrust remedy that really works will have to address the fact that the computing scene is changing, but hasn't completely changed yet. It'd have to tru to make sure MS, or any multiple MS successors, couldn't force-feed us all a Windows-only (or MS-Office-only) Internet.

IN OTHER NEWS: Wheel of Fortune just had a week of "Wheel of Fortune.com Sweepstakes" episodes; essentially a big infomercial for the show's website. The show's set was strewn with the logos of the site's assorted corporate sponsors, rendered on walls of video monitors. Despite the high-tech pretensions, it looked just like the logo-decorated sets of old '50s game shows, as shown in the movie Quiz Show. The more things change....

TOMORROW: Does a library have to be "world class"?

ELSEWHERE:

• Copyrights: Who needs 'em anymore?...

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• Modern art as capitalist tool.
• Prepare to say goodbye to the Children's Hospital thrift store.
• Parts one and two of Matthew Stadler's look at urban dreamers in the distant and more-recent past.
• Dissecting the Way-New Left.
• Parts one and two of luxury-box stadia as a sort of Utopian vision.
• Harper's Magazine discovers those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
• The new world capital of photography.
• The continuing story of CNBC.
• James Twitchell-- one English prof who (hearts) marketing.

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