The Empire strikes back
Chapter I: The nature of the beast

01-30-2.000

 

The rearming of Microsoft

Just when Judge Jackson and the prosecutors are trying to agree on how to carve up his company, Bill Gates is hard at work turning Windows into an even more serious, pervasive and rigid monopoly... thanks to the Internet.

Back when Gates stepped down as president, we speculated that he might be just getting down to the job of turning Windows into something more than an OS. We also wrote that Ballmer (Gates' alter  ego) had announced that Microsoft would launch some "next generation Windows services", NGWS... and we thought he was after replication the iTools idea, with Mac OS on both ends of the wire and exclusive services working between them.

And surprisingly we were right. That's just what they're preparing.

The thin point of the wedge

Windows 2000 is ready to be rolled to market. Not the consumer version, which will take some further sewing, but the successor to NT 4. A system that's been repeatedly cut down and still has more than 30 million lines of code and which is, speaking plainly, about the biggest monster you can house in a computer box. It won't be really finished in years, but it can already stand up. And they're rolling it out to defend its own market... and, mainly, to have it attack Linux's.

The stated goal of Windows 2000 is to break once and for all into the most delicate areas of enterprises, into those places that nor even the most imprudent had dared trust to anything other than Unix. That is the ecosystem in which the applications of Microsoft's remaining rivals live: Oracle and Computer Associates, for instance, brands unknown to the public but which earn their living by tending to the great corporations' most delicate needs like, for instance, controlling the balance of every account in a major bank. Nobody's using a Microsoft product there, nobody trusts them. And that's the first of Gate's goals: to plant Windows 2000 in those strongholds and steadily "incompatibilize" off his rivals, promoting instead succesive versions of the (still stinking) Microsoft SQL Server and sister applications. He wants the last slice of the pie.

Or in other words, he wants to starve Linux. That OS is making headway because it is far more stable than Linux, but it needs time till it gets to be as (comparatively) easy to use as NT... and most of all, to overcome the inertia of millions of system managers who'd rather drift along and blame NT for every trouble than recycle themselves to Linux. If Gates can contrive a product that's half decent, Linux will stay the toy of hackers and bleeding-edgers it started as.

DNA Panzer division

But the weapon Gates is now sharpening in order to achieve all this is a different one, and if it works it will bring even worse consequences (and the previous were bad enough for everyone with an appreciation for OS diversity and a distaste for monopolies).

Those NGWS (New generation Windows services) Gates is working on are no easy iTools. Wish they were. They are a system for integrating the different versions of Windows that make up the so-called Windows DNA (Distributed interNet Architecture). In essence, "Microsoft wants to create a Windows Internet platform with a range of related applications and services that suit it better than non-Windows Internet services". The quote comes from last week's The Economist, and its writing is almost gospel.

What Gates is readying is the annexation of Internet through a range of Windows-based applications and OSes which, by their own design, work better among themselves than with third-party products. Something as crude as not allowing third-party software full access to the software's functions. As crude as trying to monopolise the Internet. Unthinkable, they used to say just days ago, didn't they? Well, it's not. Not for Gates.

 
Chapter I: The nature of the beast - What Gates is working on
Chapter II: Gates' second monopoly - What he's aiming at
Chapter III: It ain't over till the fat lady sings - The not-so-bad news

 

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