What's Wrong with IT

By Crispin Sartwell

There are, we might say, two rival ideas about what personal computing is. One is liberatory. According to it, the PC and the internet make possible a huge new variety of and access to information: a wide-open exchange of ideas and art, an infinitely large network of communication that both brings people together and preserves their differences.

The other idea is that information technologies can make people ever more controllable in the interests of state and corporate power, that surveillance of communication and expression can be made perfect, and that people can be made to pay for products because there are no useful alternatives. It envisions a world monoculture of a customized consumerism for each demographic: regulated, perfectly predictable, infinitely profitable.

The problem with monopolies is, indeed, the problem of monoculture, in all senses of the term. If farmers over a large area only grow one crop, it becomes vulnerable to disease; it exhausts the soil; growers become complacent, forget how to grow other things, and get stuck in a set of problems that could be fairly easily resolved by flexibility, agility, and variety. Sameness is dullness: boredom and stupidity both.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with Microsoft.

Dan Geer, the chief technology officer at AtStake, a computer security firm, was fired recently after co-authoring a report saying that the dominance of the Windows operating system was a security problem: that the very fact that it appears on the vast majority of desktops leads to a situation in which viruses and worms spread exponentially across the internet. And the complexity of the system - the fact that it comes bundled with an internet browser and office software, for example - makes the whole computer vulnerable to attack through a single channel.

I am no computer wiz, and I myself use Windows and Internet Explorer. But sometimes it seems that the systems are so full of bugs and the internet so full of viruses that attack them that my computer is more or less useless. The same is true of the system at the college where I work, which is often brought low for significant periods of time by the same problems.

AtStake immediately apologized to Microsoft - one of its clients - and got rid of Geer. And this itself is a demonstration of the problem. The shortcomings Geer and his co-authors enumerated are obvious, but you can't mention them without paying a hideous price. The emperor has no clothes, but he's got a guillotine

At each turn in the software saga, Microsoft has won, not by designing a better product, but by making the business and marketing decisions that crushed opposition and even criticism. Initially, Windows was an overly-complex copy of the Mac OS, but it brought the Mac OS to heel by licensing arrangements and enforced compatibility. It has done a similar job on WordPerfect and Netscape, and at the moment you had better deal with Microsoft as you develop software, or be prepared to be cast out into irrelevance and penury.

One hopeful aspect of the Microsoft vision of information technology, chilling though it may be, is that it provokes reaction. People not only see the practical problems of Windows monoculture; they resent it and do things to undermine it. Mac has been down, but is definitely not out. Various firms who work with Linux - a free shareware program - believe they are close to developing inexpensive operating systems that will be realistic alternatives. Sun Microsystems recently announced a new series of applications - including a desktop - that run in a Java environment. Teenage Davids express their disaffection by throwing viruses at the Microsoft goliath, or sharing art, information, and programs freely over the net.

And so the battle of the two visions of information technologies rages on, as a company called SCO claims to own Linux, the government prosecutes teenagers for distributing viruses, and the recording industry sues grandmothers for downloading songs.

I'm not sure, finally, that any virus or Linux product can bring Microsoft down. But the bigger Microsoft becomes, the likelier it is to collapse under the weight of its own wealth, power, greed, complacency, and arrogance.

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Crispin Sartwell's most recent book is "End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History." Reach him at c.sartwell@verizon.net