The Linux Extremist

In case you haven’t heard, Prime Minister Tony Blair has set a timetable for his leaving office. Well, OK, it’s highly unofficial and the Sun newspaper reported it; the full story is likely to be of lesser importance in that publication than the “Phew! Wot A Scorcher!” feature with a buxom model showing her assets in full along with an utterly false “come hither” stare.

All right, perhaps it’s not a certainty. However even if it is just informed conjecture, it is entirely possible that Blair will leave in not too long a timescale. It also appears likely that he is leaving (mostly) of his own accord.

This is proper, just and right. Things pass; fads, fancies, people, empires, all have their heyday and then fade out. In 1997, Blair was “da bomb” in so far as a man who speaks in a series of painful pauses could be. It seems laughable now, but people actually believed him when he said “things can only get better”. Even people like me, who never believed him, temporarily found his presence refreshing because the Tories’ time had come and gone; admittedly, for me, that sensation lasted all of five minutes. Still, all of Europe aspired to imitate him; during his first European Union summit in Holland, he managed to make the other Prime Ministers look like utter twonks by being the only leader that didn’t look thoroughly daft while riding a bicycle.

That golden period of his reign is long gone. There came a point where having a media-savvy Prime Minister turning out soundbytes became staid and dull; the falsehood at the heart of such an approach no longer sold. Blair at least has the dignity and self-awareness to realise that his hour has come and gone, and it is time to find a new role beyond the sunset of his career.

At a certain level, apparently Bill Gates understands the “way of all flesh” too. According to the Economist, he is obsessed with the fate of Digital Equipment Corporation, a giant that was reduced to nothing, and is very concerned that Microsoft doesn’t suffer a similar fate; that apparently was a reason why he appointed Ray Ozzie. A good choice, but probably too late.

Item: consider how Microsoft has been trying to diversify into everything from MP3 players into video games consoles. This is indicative of a company which is trying to find an additional revenue stream on top of a core business which could become dangerously vulnerable.

Item: consider how that core business, operating systems, has reached a point of absurdity. I find new evidence of this every single day. Yesterday, for example, I found out Internet Information Server 6 comes with a feature that limits the size of a download. Some fiddling can make it right, but for those who say, have to import a huge list of addresses for a mass mailing campaign, it is absolutely absurd. Microsoft apparently never thought of this. They also never realised that the cycle of making their operating system ever larger and building in more functionality was going to make it ever more difficult to debug and deploy.

Item: consider how Windows users are being bombarded with viruses and trojans, to the point that “zombie” PCs are a genuine internet menace. Yet we have little visibility on how Vista is going to be less vulnerable to this problem, on the contrary, it may be even worse.

All these factors in isolation would not be fatal; they only become so because Microsoft does not realise that they are problems at the heart of their business model, and they are not willing to face up to the truth. They lack the introspection to realise their hour of total dominance has passed. They want to keep hold of the days when they set the pace of the IT market, and the idea Mac OS challenging them was laughable and Linux on the desktop was the preserve of a few enthusiasts.

If they can embrace the idea that decline is inevitable, they may be able to salvage something. They need to understand that at some point, their stranglehold on the market will dissolve and to plan for it. Digital Equipment Corporation never did such planning; by the time they woke up, it was too late.

Is Ray Ozzie the man to plan for decline? It’s difficult to say as of yet; Microsoft is still far too much Bill Gates’ company to be anything other than full of arrogance and swagger. I have heard he is a thoughtful man; hopefully he has read his history. Speaking as someone who is something of an amateur historian, he seems to be inheriting a decayed throne, rather like the last Emperors of Byzantium, with its greatest days in the past, and the memories of previous glories only preserved in artifacts and rhetoric. The empire in this case could be rejuvenated through modesty and specialisation. If not, it will roll over the horizon of history and eventually, out of relevance.

If this seems a fatalistic point of view, I’d have to say, yes it is. To err is human, and anything built by man if it lasts long enough is bound to screw up to the point of no return. We can rail against it, be like Dylan Thomas and “rage against the dying of the light”, or accept it like Tony Blair; but no matter what, that hour will strike. It will be interesting to see what happens as that time approaches for Microsoft.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS