Microsoft Does Windows, Not Substance
Why can’t I hate Bill Gates the way all my friends do? It seems so satisfying. For everyone I know, Gates and Microsoft are now the evil empire threatening their personal freedom and that of the world. And they tell me all this in splendid indifference to the fact that the angry e-mail letters they send me are composed and shipped on Windows 95.
Never have I found myself so alone in defense of a dubious cause as after I took Microsoft’s side in a radio discussion on NPR. All I said was that as a threat to control our lives, Microsoft is a paper tiger. Maybe I feel that way because I briefly worked for Microsoft and know how incompetent they are when it comes to providing content rather than the operating system on which it moves.
Last summer, I was hired as a freelancer to lead a mini-expedition to Southeast Asia for Microsoft’s online adventure magazine, Mungo Park. There I was in Siem Reap near the jungle of northwest Cambodia where the dreaded Pol Pot was holed up, reporting on the pathos of a country ruled for a quarter of a century by genocide and war. The Cambodian coup was in progress, a curfew was in force and armed teenagers were everywhere, and what did the top dogs in Microsoft corporate at Redmond, Wash., want? A link to their Expedia site to encourage tourist travel to where I was. “Fellas,” I pleaded, “you recommend that tourists come here to get shot and you’re gonna get sued.”
“Duh, maybe you have a point.”
I don’t fear Gates because he’s proved totally inept at controlling our thoughts, even if one assumes that is his goal. Mungo Park is now defunct and Microsoft’s star contender for news and feature coverage, Slate magazine, had less than 20,000 paid subscribers last time I checked. Microsoft does Windows, not substance.
The power of Microsoft to control our thoughts is a myth. The company is as innocuous as AT&T; in the old days; it provides the trunklines but not what travels on them. Gates has succeeded precisely because he regarded his operating system as a public utility and made it accessible to competitive software developers.
The real danger on the net is control of content. And the serious threat is not Microsoft but rather America Online. By providing an incredibly efficient and inviting interface, AOL lures you into a world of information that it controls. You may think you’re signing on just for e-mail, but then it hooks you with its news, features, editorial opinion and ads at every click of the mouse.
The television networks used to be feared because they invaded one’s house; AOL is the house. And 12 million of us are now its inhabitants, seeing the world through the peepholes that AOL provides. When we sign on, it is AOL that tells us what the breaking news is and it’s AOL that seduces us into the Internet venues of its choice, including a digitized version of your own city.
The whole antitrust suit against Microsoft is based on an enormously irrelevant and boring tangent: the ability of Netscape to compete with Microsoft’s browser. It may be heresy to state this, but browsers have nothing to do with the free marketplace of ideas. Who cares that AOL is using Microsoft’s browser? The editorial decisions about where that browser takes you are being made not by Gates but by anonymous executives at AOL, and they shape our perception of the world.
I don’t deny that AOL has succeeded in winning customers like myself because they are good. Of course, there are other choices, but why wasn’t there more of an outcry when AOL bought out its main competitor, CompuServe? Why no hand-wringing over the demise of Prodigy, once another strong AOL rival? AOL is fast becoming the universal mailroom and even wary customers like me are sucked in by its convenience.
What AOL does is cut through the insane clutter and noise that passes for freedom on the Internet despite the filtering of search engines. But the price paid is that AOL becomes your “editor,” able to censor sites, assault with pop-up ads and compile a personal profile of each subscriber. That has the serious potential for an invasion of privacy. Recently AOL apologized for releasing the name of a gay sailor to naval investigators. The temptation for AOL to make big bucks by selling your profile for profit may prove overwhelming.
Since AOL is assured of a prominent spot on the Windows 98 home page, it’s clear that if a Big Brother is to emerge, he will reside at AOL headquarters in Dulles, Va., and not Redmond, Wash.
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Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor and editor of Online Journalism Review at USC. E-mail: rscheer@aol.com
