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WHY BILL GATES STILL DOESN'T GET THE NET | PAGE 1, 2
"One thing "The Road Ahead" made clear and "Business @ the Speed of Thought" reinforces is that Microsoft's corporate culture is built on an ideology of mastery and control. In the one moment of epiphany in "The Road Ahead," Gates explained why he became infatuated with computers as a kid: "We could give this big machine orders and it would always obey." In his new book, Gates re-creates this adolescent domination fantasy in the executive boardroom -- where, thanks to the digitally enabled just-in-time flow of perfect information to their desktops, the corporate managers Gates profiles can now exercise precise control of their operations. The "digital nervous system" becomes a feedback-and-control loop that lets managers slice their bean-counts ever more finely and tune their organizations to a peak of responsiveness. Gates still loves big machines that follow orders -- only now the machines are organizations made up of human beings. And so something weird happens when Gates writes about the Internet: Though he pays lip service to the notion that the Net is a new, volatile business environment that keeps you on your toes, it's clear that what really attracts him about it is its promise of "information at your fingertips." To Gates, the Internet's value lies not in its capacity to surprise us but in its ability to organize us. At one point, Gates explains that Microsoft has a "culture of numbers" that prizes "straight math" over all else. Sure enough, the impulses coursing through Gates' "digital nervous system" are corporate numbers rather than human thoughts and feelings. The Internet can serve as a great big number crunching-and-moving tool, to be sure, but that is only one of its many faces and roles. Gates repeatedly mouths the cliché that the Internet and personal computers "empower the individual," but all the individuals he pictures are working safely behind a corporate firewall, exercising that individuality within the larger group-think of a business organization. Gates acknowledges that a "digital nervous system" needs to "extend outward to partners and customers," but he doesn't consider how the Net itself changes who those partners and customers are, what they might want and how they think of themselves and the company that's "extending outward" to them. What's missing from "Business @ the Speed of Thought" is any sense that the Net might be transforming more than just the speed at which information moves from point-of-sale to a vice president's desk -- that it might accelerate social and economic experiments lying far outside the org charts of the Fortune 500. One such experiment happened to bubble up from the Net to challenge Microsoft itself during the time Gates was writing his new book. And if Gates fully understood what's going on out there, he might well have a digital nervous breakdown. That the free Linux operating system and its open-source methodology represent a genuine threat to Microsoft is now widely acknowledged in the technology industry, even by some of Microsoft's own front-line engineers, who touted Linux's strengths in the widely leaked "Halloween memo." Many users are frustrated by the inefficiencies, rigidities and flaws Microsoft products are increasingly riddled with; many are attracted to Linux and other open-source products that provide ready access for software developers to fix and enhance them without waiting for Microsoft to call back with a patch or deliver a long-delayed upgrade. Tested in real-world conditions by guerrilla groups of coders working collaboratively across the Net, open-source software, proponents argue, offers faster and smarter development than Microsoft. It is, you might say, software "@ the speed of thought." The one person at Microsoft who doesn't seem to have received the bad news is Gates himself. Last week, he dismissed Linux with these words: "There has certainly been a lot of free software out there for the last 20 years. The main thing that has held that back is that because it's free software there's no central point of control. So what you see with Linux, and other things, is you get proliferations of different versions and everybody can go into the source code, and everybody does." To Gates, openness and lack of control is a bug; to free-software programmers, it's a feature. Only time will tell whether Gates' prediction of a confusing, splintered Babel in Linux's future proves accurate -- it's certainly a possibility. But that Linux's loose-reined approach can offer a valuable alternative to businesses today is beyond dispute. Microsoft's public responses to Linux have been all over the map. Sometimes it plays up Linux to bolster its position in its antitrust trial ("Competitors? Sure we've got competitors!"), and sometimes it plays down Linux to reassure Wall Street that Microsoft will continue to be a profit machine. There's just one thing Microsoft's top brass can't seem to do: carefully and openly evaluate the appeal of Linux's fundamentally different approach to developing and distributing software. The company's digital nervous system is failing to properly identify the threat -- perhaps because it comes in the unrecognizable guise of an idea rather than a corporation. To anyone with a reasonably long memory, Gates' pooh-poohing of Linux offers an overpowering whiff of déjà vu: The last time Microsoft dismissed a popular new technology as being good only for "the student and hobbyist market," as Gates is now describing Linux, it was the early '90s, and the technology in question was the Internet itself -- which, like Linux today, was "too hard to use," "didn't have a good graphic interface" and just didn't fit into Microsoft's vision. Just as "The Road Ahead" required drastic re-routing, don't be surprised if "Business @ the Speed of Thought" -- which today barely mentions Linux -- issues a second edition replete with revisions about the free software/open-source movement. If you must read "Business @ the Speed of Thought" today, be warned that its contents are even more stupefyingly bland than those of "The Road Ahead." Though the new book advocates a strategy of opening up inner corporate councils to the flow of information from the street, its language never strays from boardroom gray. Gates is widely regarded as someone who's passionate about new ideas in management, but that passion never cracks the plastic surface of his prose (the book is credited to Gates "with" Microsoft marketing exec Collins Hemingway). The closest "Business @ the Speed of Thought" comes to breaking a sweat is when Gates describes Microsoft's Herculean effort to turn its business in the direction of the Internet. By coincidence, the week that Gates' book hit the stores also saw the arrival on the Net of a funny, insightful manifesto against just the kind of impersonal corporate language in which "Business @ the Speed of Thought" speaks. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the work of a quartet of Internet provocateurs who argue that the Internet is rapidly transforming not just the speed but the tenor and content of business communications. (The "Cluetrain" name derives from a quote attributed to a "veteran of a firm now free-falling out of the Fortune 500": "The clue train stopped there four times a day for 10 years and they never took delivery.") The Net, the manifesto declares, makes new "conversations" possible among and between corporate employees and the general public -- and these conversations, conducted in "language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking" are inoculating us against the "hollow, flat, literally inhuman" language corporations use. "In just a few more years," the authors maintain, "the current homogenized 'voice' of business -- the sound of mission statements and brochures -- will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court. Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone. Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves." What the authors are saying is that the very voice Bill Gates uses in "Business @ the Speed of Thought" is being rendered obsolete by the technology he espouses. Though predictions of the demise of marketing-speak often prove to be wishful thinking, there's plenty of evidence out there to back the Cluetrain argument. For a crude but telling example, all you have to do is look at the reader comments about Gates' book on Amazon.com -- the kind of "Web lifestyle" company "Business @ the Speed of Thought" extols. The reviews are a mixed bag, from "excellent book" to "You'll find more original ideas on the wall of a barroom commode." They're full of misspellings, grammatical errors and non sequiturs. But there's a liveliness to the exchange among enthusiastic and pissed-off Net users. "Business @ the Speed of Thought" drones on for hundreds of pages without ever achieving that sense of engagement. On the info-glutted Net, attention is the scarcest commodity. That makes
boredom the ultimate business failure. E-mail Scott Rosenberg |
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