I’m assuming you’re even more sick of reading about Comdex than I am of attending it. Really, the only useful activity I saw there was when a colleague convinced one of Microsoft’s zombies to let her use his PC (which was displaying some weird NT-will-save-your-life animation) to search the local shopping listings via Yahoo. So this column isn’t about Comdex so much as an attempt to make sense of detritus with which I was barraged during the show.
Chicago was the center of the high-tech world last week, and the view from the center was ugly, especially the vista over which Microsoft has control. I’ll dispense with making fun of the billionaire first. When Bill Gates wasn’t cringing while Windows 98 was crashing during his keynote address Monday morning, he was on CNN laughing – literally laughing – at every question Lou Dobbs lobbed at him. Gates must be the most media-trained public figure on the planet. His mechanical laughter, his inability to utter a syllable that isn’t part of an Official Microsoft Message, his discovery of sweaters that look like medical experiments gone horribly wrong, his insistence on claiming smugly that Microsoft is scared of its competitors, all add up to someone who does not appear to be human anymore. Note to the folks who are getting fat checks for turning Gates into an automaton: Let Bill be Bill!
Speaking of automatons, Gates’ company is spewing so many Orwellian slogans (“Windows Is the Part of the Machine That Is Human”) that no one will be surprised when Gates claims a trademark on the term 1984. Throughout Comdex’s assorted Microsoft-is-good pavilions and the company’s own inescapable advertising and marketing presentations, the continuous message was about the Windows “family” of products, as if programs that crash daily, refuse to acknowledge non-Redmond-approved formats and overwrite competing vendors’ files on the desktop are behaving in a manner anyone would accept from a family member. If my kids were as unreliable, expensive and secretive as the members of the Windows family, I’d disown them.
Read those Microsoft slogans:
“Windows Was Not Made For Computers. Windows Was Made for People.”
“Windows Helps People and Machines Understand Each Other.”
“Windows 98 Works Better. Windows 98 Plays Better.”
You may find these slogans similar to statements made by people who succumb to cults. If Microsoft continues to grow, the legions of Windows programmers may be equaled by a new group of IT professionals: Windows deprogrammers.
An enormous banner at McCormick Place read: “Learning with Windows – Working with Windows – Living with Windows.” Living with Windows? It’s bad enough it’s taken over my PC. Why would I invite Bill Gates to live with me? Can’t he afford his own place? Throughout Comdex, I was confronted by people in Microsoft shirts who appeared as if they would explode like the robots in Westworld if I took them off-message. In the TomorrowLand pavilion, under a banner that read “The Future, It’s Closer Than You Think,” one wide-eyed Microserf assured me that real soon now I’d be able to watch TV on my PC and shop at the supermarket with my personal digital assistant. When I asked why I might want to engage in either of those absurd activities, I was treated as if I were an infidel who needed to be converted. In the minutes that followed, the Redmond raver said things such as “easier manageability of mission-critical data” and “you’d feel differently if you saw our one-on-one demos.” He also said “boundless” half a dozen times. He was trying to sell me the idea that Microsoft knew what I wanted in every aspect of my life better than I did. It sickened me.
Speaking of sickening, Apple Computer’s recent behavior shows the company’s continuing ability to engage in activities so idiotic that its real news gets lost. Despite the appearance of Intuit having abandoned the company (no new Mac version of Quicken this year), the Cupertino claque should be overjoyed: It has posted two consecutive profitable quarters, a recent International Data Corporation report suggests that the company’s market share may be growing (only 4 percent, but growing nonetheless) and the ad campaign for the latest G3s finally emphasizes product power. Of course the company’s disgusting treatment of the Dalai Lama suggests that anyone who still thinks that Apple is special and can play by loftier rules than its competition may also be in need of some deprogramming.
The story is simple: Apple used the image of the Dalai Lama to sell computers, pulled the ads in Asia to keep from offending the Chinese government thus spoiling their market in China, then lied about it. The South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong daily that broke the story, quoted Vincent Lum, Apple’s Asia-Pacific marketing director, as saying the company abandoned the Tibetan leader for more “easily recognizable figures” and the campaign would be “sticking to those who are well-known” in Asia. (That’s like Nike removing the image of Michael Jordan from an American ad campaign and replacing him with Milan Kundera.) Those who are well-known apparently include forced Apple shill Amelia Earhart, who never set foot in Asia, although her plane did crash there. When Steve Jobs talks about how his company “thinks different” and supports rebels, he is lying. Apple is as morally bankrupt as nearly every other multinational. This doesn’t make it worse than, say, Nike, but it does make Apple even more hypocritical.
Apple is a relatively small company, so it doesn’t do as much damage as Microsoft’s Orwellian pretensions. But Apple isn’t an alternative to Microsoft, any more than Pepsi is an alternative to Coke. It’s the same sugar water; the only thing different is the can. And now that Microsoft’s investment is, in part, what keeps Apple alive, our choices in this arena appear, once again, to be dwindling.
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Do you think there’s any different between Microsoft and Apple? (views@vineyard.com) Tell us!
