Every time I watch lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice trying to tell Microsoft Corp. how to write politically correct personal computer software, my thoughts take a reactionary turn.
I start to remember how around the holidays my father used to crack open our walnuts, pecans and acorns.
My old man would place each nut on a footlong 2-by-4 board with a nut-size hollow worn into the center over years of use.
Then he’d clobber each nut with the back of the steel-hard plastic handset from our trusty old Bell Telephone Co. phone.
Ma Bell made those phones to last, because the deal we all had with the phone company was that the telephones were supplied along with the phone service. In the unlikely event that you ever broke one of those phones, Bell was obligated to replace it. So the phones were made strong enough to drive nails and crack nuts.
Official Washington, of course, fixed this product that used to work as part of its antitrust regulation. The Bell system was split into seven regional companies (called Baby Bells). While AT&T kept long distance, the manufacture and sale of telephones was turned over to any company that cared to play.
I may be in a reactionary mode today, but I still am not enough of a troglodyte to overlook the fact that the telephone service we enjoy today is orders of magnitude better than the scratchy and costly calls that came over my Pop’s case-hardened handset.
But try to crack a walnut with your new fiber-optic 900 Mhz walk-around touch-tone telephone and you’ll have a $200 pile of plastic shards to teach you the lesson that there are trade-offs for every rule that gets made. How much money have you wasted since the Bell breakup buying junky plastic phones that last about as long as the latest Ameritech rate cut?
So, as we watch Assistant Atty. Gen. Joel Klein and his trust-busters tell Microsoft that it needs to let others make the Internet parts of its Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems, it’s worth keeping my father’s on-line, interactive, multimedia nutcracker in mind.
On today’s computer scene, bundled Internet software plays a role akin to the one that those unbreakable telephones once played. Now Klein says such bundling must go the way of the bulletproof handset and be parceled out to others.
The potential for mischief becomes ever more obvious as we start to see that the absolute crux of Microsoft’s plans for Windows 98 is to integrate the Internet into the operating system as the very heart of how a personal computer does its stuff.
Consider the move to incorporate software called Microsoft Outlook Express into Windows 98 as perhaps the key part of how a modern Pentium will communicate with its users and with the great network of computer networks called the Internet.
This includes using the operating system for keeping your address book, reading and sending e-mail, reading Internet newsgroups and, of course, Web browsing.
This is where the operating system starts sounding like Ma Bell’s all-around utility nutcracker/phones of yore.
Outlook Express is designed to work using the same underlying rock-solid techniques that make the World Wide Web work. It is a scheme every bit as integrated as the hardened plastic, cloth-covered wires and sturdy nuts and bolts that held the old phones together.
The Outlook Express e-mail gets written in the same HTML (hyper text markup language) as Web pages. This means that you can incorporate things like pictures, sound, film clips and other features into e-mail that you now can send only as plain text.
To do this, Windows 98 includes Front Pad, a special version of Microsoft’s Web page authoring software called Front Page. This lets users start turning out things like multimedia documents and e-mail from the very moment they first load the new operating system into their computers.
Front Pad, in turn, is part of the Microsoft Internet Explorer, MSIE, which the trust-buster Klein says Microsoft should not be allowed to include in Windows 98.
It’s very easy to see the government’s side in the argument, of course.
Microsoft is, indeed, talking about controlling every aspect of using a personal computer, from finding files on your hard drive to faxing stuff to your boss to grazing through Web sites through giving and getting e-mail through buying products on-line and even watching television in one window while doing other stuff elsewhere on the screen.
So it looks very much like we’re on the verge of turning Microsoft’s personal computer operating system into a rock-solid, stable and unbreakable fixture of our lives. But it arrives just in time for the feds to say they’re going to fix it.
If experience is to be our guide, we can take comfort from the lesson of Ma Bell’s phone and know that whatever we get in the end will work pretty good no matter how much Microsoft hollers. We’ll still have a bodacious personal computer operating system.
But will it crack nuts?
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicago.tribune.com/go/askjim or e-mail jcoates@ameritech.net. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago 60611.
