MISCmedia for 5/9/00
A Cure for MS?

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.

MISCROSOFT HAS BEHAVED LIKE A WORM for so long, I wouldn't be surprised if splitting it in two would just turn it into two worms.

The U.S. and 19 state governments imposed just about the harshest penalty (oops, "remedy") they could think of to stop MS's legacy of misdeeds. But the result could just leave the computer world with two Great Crippers of Young Adults. MS-1 would continue trying to force everything in the computing world (and hence in the world as a whole) around Windows. MS-2 would try to force everything around the Office applications package and Internet Explorer.

The traditional operating principle of most companies is to try to make money by selling stuff. The operating principle of newfangled Internet companies is to spend money building market share, hoping your competitors will run out of cash doing this before you do, leaving you at the top of the heap when the expected Big Consolidation phase of the industry starts (soon?).

The operating principle of a classic monopoly, however, is like that of a military power--to hold and expand its strongholds, to strategically isolate and vanquish real and perceived enemies, and to blanket the Home Front with fervent propaganda campaigns designed to bolster civilian morale and silence dissent.

It doesn't take an umpteen-volume Findings of Fact report to figure out MS has behaved just this way.

And it continues to do so; probably out of hard-to-break habit.

For a company that wants to be the undisputable fulcrum of anything and everything involving the emerging info-economy, MS sure acts like an old-fashioned centralized, linear industrial company. Like GM in the '60s, it has little apparent awareness of what's wrong with it and few internal means toward finding out.

Instead, it treats all outside criticism of itself as resulting from either rivals' sour-grapes attitudes or "perception" problems among the critics. Inside the Redmond fortress, everything the company has ever done has always been right.

(So much for the idea that "wired" companies are gonna automatically be more attentive and public-responsive than old factory-age companies.)

Meanwhile, one of the most astute commentaries about the whole affair comes from one Thomas Wetzel. "Microsoft is not the enemy," he writes; "it is merely a clue. Its operating system only does that which the culture as a whole appears to do to us everyday."

It's widely acknowledged that IBM won the Age of Mainframes because its sales force did a better job of hob-nobbing with business leaders, even though other companies had better technologies and services. Similarly, Wetzel argues, Microsoft and the Windows platform give business what it really wants--not quality, not reliability, but a single clearly-defined path to follow, with no confusing options to consider.

Just like the principle in the name of that other broken-up monopoly, Standard Oil.

TOMORROW: Electric cars are coming, for sure this time maybe!

ELSEWHERE:

• The cable-access renaissance continues with Know-It-All Floyd! (found by Bird on a Wire)....
• Dunno 'bout you, but I'm rooting for the Pacers....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
• 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.
• Strange stuff in the Seattle Times.
• The continuing story of CNBC.
• James Twitchell-- one English prof who (hearts) marketing.
• USA Today turns 18, tries to start looking more mature.
• Announcing the launch of MISCmedia Radio.
• Parts one and two of a poet's fascination with the business press.
• Parts one and two of the clash between the arts scene and the info biz, and how it can be resolved.

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