Computing in the real world
SEARCH FOR: IN:
Guest  Level 00    Register Log in

Columns

Prolog:

Tim Danton [PC Pro]
Tim Danton endows Gates with Churchillian properties as he plants his flag in the Bill debate.

PC Pro deputy editor David Fearon probably shakes his head at my stupidity twice a day, but this time there was what I suspect to be a muttered obscenity for good measure. The reason? Bill Gates.

The new issue is, after all, our Bill Gates leaving special, to mark his full-time departure from Microsoft this summer. And which version of PC Pro you might go out and choose to buy quite possibly reflects how you feel about Microsoft's founder. With one cover declaring: "Farewell and thank you?" And the other saying, "Goodbye and good riddance?", it's a fair reflection of Bill's divisive nature.

Now, on a personal level, I've no real reason to feel affection for Bill Gates. I've asked Microsoft on numerous occasions for an interview with the great man and got nowhere, despite the fact PC Pro has long been the most influential IT title in the UK. Perhaps this isn't Bill's fault, as his time is much sought after and I wouldn't be surprised if there was someone in Redmond employed full time to manage his diary (if only there was software that could do the job). But the fact he's always preferred to answer anodyne questions from the mainstream press rather than face our inevitably more probing queries has been a persistent source of irritation.

Which is why I was a little surprised to find myself leaping to Bill's defence in our in-office debate. There's no denying that Microsoft has used aggressive tactics to reach its dominant position, but the point of particular contention was my argument that Microsoft had created standards at a time when the IT industry desperately needed them.

Admittedly, my choice
 
 
ADVERTISEMENT
of the word "standards" was like a red flag to a particularly violent bull. Only in version eight of Internet Explorer are we seeing Microsoft fully embrace the standards its rivals have followed for years, and you only need to glance at the ongoing furious debate between the open-source community and Microsoft over its attempt to get OOXML standardised to realise that its new-found openness continues to be met with cynicism.

But Microsoft did provide a common platform that not only allowed Bill and friends to become immensely rich - sorry, I mean to create commercially successful programs - but also companies such as Adobe, Sage and Symantec. And let's not forget all the system manufacturers that have risen to become world forces thanks to the ubiquity of the Windows platform: Acer, Dell, HP, Sony and Toshiba have a lot to be thankful for.

It's like, as I briefly attempted to persuade David before he dismissed me as a demented fool and wandered away, the beginnings of a country. As we've seen in virtually every country where western powers have tried to impose democracy, it rarely works. You need something closer to an oligarchy - or, you could argue, a dictatorship - to actually get results. Unless there's an established culture, established rules, all the pontificating and long-winded debates that inevitably come from a parliament get you nowhere extremely slowly.

Consider the UK's parliament. The only reason democracy works in this country is because we've got centuries worth of laws as a foundation. If any of our parties were left to create a system from scratch, I hate to think what the end result would be, and the nature of the power vacuum in the process. We'd need a Churchill-esque figure to take charge and make decisions. Even wrong ones.

And that's what happened in the world of computing. Bill Gates rose to a position of power and he, as the figurehead, made decisions. The end result was Windows being rolled out on to millions of PCs around the world using closed code, while Office, helped by its programmers' intimate knowledge of that code, became the standard choice for companies around the world. There's no point in creating spreadsheets no other company can read.

Continued....


Related News
Related Reviews
Related Columns