This is from the january/February issue of Mother jones magazine.  to
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kelly


   Billing Us Softly

   by Jeffrey Klein

   Microsoft's business has grown so spectacularly that its operations
   base in Redmond, Washington, is now housed in two "campuses," the
   second even more well endowed than the first. At both, casually
   dressed employees, looking like successful young professors, hum
   about. Walking past perfectly groomed grounds through a spacious lobby
   to their private offices, these programmers can pick up the colorful
   1997 financial report. Microsoft's digital masterminds may be
   insulated from ordinary financial stress, but not from the sense of
   menace that pervades their leader's mind. Right at the front of the
   report is a worried black-and-white photo of chairman and CEO Bill
   Gates. His overview statement contrasts starkly with both the tranquil
   setting and the spectacular revenue numbers.

   "Like any time in our 23-year history we have great opportunities but
   face a number of threats," he warns. "Competitors are battling with us
   on many fronts." But he is determined to brave these myriad threats in
   order to "help make the 'Web lifestyle' a reality." It is a lifestyle,
   he explains, "in which people take advantage of the Internet to lead
   more informed and productive lives, and have more fun."

   A relative latecomer to the Internet, Gates envisioned its market
   potential in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead: "The day has almost
   arrived when you can easily conduct business, study, explore the world
   and its cultures, call up great entertainment, make friends, go to
   neighborly markets, and show pictures to distant relatives...without
   leaving your desk or your armchair.... Your network connection...will
   be your passport into a new, 'mediated' way of life."

   Now the ever expanding Web is as endlessly fascinated with Gates as he
   is with it. His wealth so strains the imagination that rendering all
   those zeros comprehensible has become a favorite Web pastime. The
   Internet teems with sites devoted to Microsoft, including several with
   up-to-the-minute calculations of how many 747 jets Gates' holdings
   would fill if converted into dollar bills (304) or how much cash he
   could shell out to every American ($137) or what a Lamborghini is
   worth to him in terms relative to the average wage earner (63 cents).
   Underlying this fascination is a dim memory from high school history:
   Wasn't there something bad about kings?

   Bill Gates' voracity seems undiminished-if anything, his prosperity
   has made him even hungrier for control. Gates claims that he only
   wants to make our digital lives faster, simpler, and fun; he'll be the
   neutral middleman who helps satisfy our wishes just by pumping
   electronic wriggles into our workplaces and homes. But if the mediator
   is the message, we're in big trouble. Neither his colleagues nor his
   competitors pair Gates with images of neutrality. The mere mention of
   his name conjures dread.

   As monomaniacal as Gates seems, his dominance is not an anomaly, but a
   foreseeable consequence of the new technological era. Most consumers
   want an invisible standard under the hood of all their new machines.
   We are willing to spend billions in return for effortless access to
   the bits and bytes that have suddenly become so important. As Gates
   points out, Microsoft does make things faster. Cheaper. Friendlier.
   His software increases productivity. His Web browser lets your
   fingertips call up more information than you could ever want to know.

   Still, the Justice Department and Ralph Nader rightly wonder if
   consumers really have a choice of brands left. Microsoft's success in
   standardizing software has highlighted the company's monopolistic
   drives. Silicon Valley, where I worked as a journalist for eight
   years, is filled with software geniuses who wrote code for a better
   mousetrap only to discover that market share and a war chest regularly
   trump innovation. Obviously Microsoft is now using its whopping 90
   percent market share of operating systems to foist its Internet
   Explorer on consumers. But since Microsoft is giving away this browser
   for free, by "bundling" it with its Windows desktop software, it's
   difficult to imagine angry consumers rallying around the cause,
   claiming they're being ill-served.

   Many Americans are nonetheless watching the Justice Department's
   antitrust suit. Their real question is whether Bill Gates is more
   powerful than our government. Microsoft's indignant response to the
   suit leaves us uncomfortably wondering whether or not national
   governments retain the power even to slap the wrist of brazen
   corporations.

   Of course, greedy visionaries with a gift for vertical integration are
   older than Windows. John D. Rockefeller, and his Standard Oil monopoly
   (one of the monsters that antitrust law was created to slay), once
   threatened civil society because he controlled the sale of a physical
   commodity that people and governments had no choice but to consume.
   Bill Gates is striving for monopolistic power over strings of symbols.
   How do we confront the fact that our physical needs-commerce, goods,
   services-have become inextricably intertwined with new ethereal
   desires?

   Everyone at Microsoft is dedicated to the manipulation of those
   desires. The company deliberately hires bright young people straight
   out of college. They're well prepared to provide what the company
   craves but are not yet formed as adults. A job at Microsoft basically
   means graduating to a richer "campus." Marooned on a bucolic island
   without any other culture, their personal and professional lives
   become almost indistinguishable. A star programmer is like a young
   doctor being socialized through an internship or a young lawyer
   seeking partnership. Perhaps the main difference is that the medical
   and legal professions have traditions, however debased. During the
   decade following the invention of the PC, the absence of any such
   tradition seemed appealing, particularly since the digital pioneers
   were emanating from the counterculture.

   In my limited contact with current and former Microsoft workers, I've
   noticed two conversational tendencies that can, unfortunately, be
   traced to the counterculture. They can be extremely aggressive
   thinkers, questioning basic assumptions about all politics, all
   communication, all social organization prior to the digital era. They
   are not simply parroting the Microsoft line when they mock the
   pathetic behemoth that is government for sticking its nose into
   postmodern commerce. But their brains also retain a whiny lobe, which,
   for example, repeatedly complains that their company is only one-sixth
   the size of IBM (its stock valuation is, in fact, more than 1.5 times
   higher) and therefore doesn't deserve to be on anyone's radar screen.

   These are the offspring of Bill Gates the outsider, Bill Gates the
   Harvard dropout, Bill Gates the high-tech David who slew the
   blue-suited, wing-tip-wearing Goliaths at IBM. Gates still looks
   uncomfortable in a suit. He is a hero of the nerds who sought to
   remake the corporate world into a more dress-down-everyday kind of
   place, where authority came from good ideas, not job titles. It was a
   crusade against mindless business practices, and Bill Gates won. But
   any hope of an alternative culture from which a more soulful way of
   conducting commerce might emerge is gone. Too many people at Microsoft
   are openly cynical about their careers, admitting they are there
   simply for the cash-and the cash-out.

   Greed in, greed out. The nascent Web lifestyle already hints that,
   without consciousness and countervailing forces, our failings will
   haunt us in this brave new world. The unencumbered flow of information
   over the Internet wires sounds amazing in principle, but its earliest
   culture contains too much of what the cynics have expected: junk
   e-mails (etherealized snake oil salesmen), rumors of conspiracy
   (etherealized superstitious villagers), and proliferating pornography.
   The public hasn't been crying out for Web sites devoted to the Bob's
   Big Boy in Burbank, California, yet here we are.

   In his chapter on "friction-free capitalism," Gates talks without
   irony about a more commercialized future: "In an unobtrusive way, the
   Internet will offer you the option to inquire about images you see. If
   you're watching a video of Top Gun and think that Tom Cruise's aviator
   sunglasses look really cool, you'll be able to pause the movie and
   learn about the glasses or even buy them on the spot." Gates is now
   pouring enormous resources into WebTV, which he believes will move
   products in hitherto unimaginable ways.

   Of course, Gates isn't overtly forcing his version of
   wanting-and-instantly-getting down our throats. We seem eager to
   swallow it. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a good model of the
   technological dystopia we should fear: Instead of social control
   enforced from the outside, Huxley envisioned a world enervated from
   within. We have spent much of the late 20th century guarding against a
   Fahrenheit 451-like state in which books are burned; meanwhile,
   Huxley's world, in which most people won't bother to read a book, may
   be slipping in the back door.

   By marketing to our worst parts-our childlike fascination with
   glittery technology, our desire for instant gratification, our
   vulnerability to planned obsolescence, our misguided notion that wave
   after wave of "information" is empowering rather than distracting-Bill
   Gates has been instrumental in making a mindless world attractive. As
   Gates blandly puts it: "Our goal is to allow people to get their work
   done in the easiest way possible, without thinking about the tools
   they're using."

   To the extent that the digital age makes the various transactions of
   daily life more convenient, opposition becomes virtually impossible.
   Resistance isn't futile, it's uncomfortable. Not having a computer
   network is a liability for many businesses. E-mails are more easily
   returned than phone calls. Requests for information from governments
   or corporations are more and more likely to be met with the response,
   "It's on our Web site." And so we acquiesce, bit by bit, to conducting
   our work lives in the ethereal world while we begin to find "fun" in
   the Web lifestyle that Bill Gates is eager to construct for us.

   Paradoxically, the empire through which Gates will sell convenience
   and placation is built upon dread. His fear of losing control of what
   he calls "the digital nervous system" keeps everyone around him
   running scared. Fear motivates the behavior that we document in our
   cover stories: his establishment of a Washington, D.C., lobbying force
   similar in scope and cunning to that of Philip Morris; his drive to
   infiltrate foreign markets, dominating the industry's anti-piracy
   campaign just to broaden Microsoft's market share; his need to collect
   data on the consumers who use his products ("the better to serve you
   with, my dear"); and his construction of an elaborate media campaign
   to neutralize the growing suspicions we harbor about Bill.

   In the sterile heart of Aldous Huxley's consumer dystopia, citizens
   were insulated from dread. At the end of the book, one of the 10
   Controllers of the world explains that, in a proper civilization,
   "what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the
   natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any
   temptations to resist."

   Is this where we want to go today?


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