A little OT-ish
A SPECTER IS haunting the computer industry: the specter of competition.
With apologies to Marx and Engels for bastardizing their line on communism,
one can't help but notice that the technology industry has become considerably
more lively of late than anyone had a right to expect.
Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that we would by now be in the
early stages of a 1,000-year reign of the Wintel duopoly. As far as the eye
could see, the computing ecosystem would be nothing but ever-more sprawling
and ill-behaved Windows operating systems running on successively bigger,
hotter and noisier Intel chips.
These days, though, both Intel and Microsoft are scrambling to pay the piper
for years of design entropy. Further, Bill Gates's company is dealing with a
list of subtle and not-so-subtle threats: Linux, naturally, but also Apple and
Google; each appears to have something up its sleeve. As a result, it's hard
to know what the tech world will look like 18 or so months from now. It's the
first time in a long time this has been the case.
Suddenly, the tech world has gotten interesting again.
IT IS STRIKING the manner in which both Intel and Microsoft are being forced
to detour off the more-is-more strategy that worked for them for so many
years. Intel knows now that it can't just keep designing faster, bigger chips
and then selling them to customers on their speed. For one, speed isn't
selling anymore. Worse, the chips were getting so hot they could serve
double-duty as welding torches.
Intel's new design direction, which it emphasized again last week, stresses
cool operation and low power consumption, especially for laptops. You hear the
same message from Intel rival AMD.
For its part, Microsoft has spent years making the Window operating system
bigger, absorbing into it -- and thus removing as a competitive threat -- any
new ideas that came down the pike. During the 1990s, that involved a very big
thing: Web browsers.
Now, though, Windows has become so large and unwieldy that it is a constant
target for spammers, hackers and other bad guys. As it moves to its new
operating system, called Vista, Microsoft is abandoning its doctrine of
featurism in favor of code that is stable and does what it is supposed to do.
In fact, Vista's one promised big new feature -- a revised file system for
storing information -- has been canned.
But if Microsoft is treading water on new features, that opens up the door
to others. Google engineers, freed from the imperative under which their
Microsoft counterparts must labor -- always needing to leverage Windows into
some new corner of the world -- have been running rings around Microsoft,
innovation-wise.
Thanks to Apple, next year promises to be an auspicious one. The company
will begin selling Macintoshes that are based on Intel chips. If Steve Jobs is
going to go through all the trouble of rewriting his operating system for the
Intel architecture, why wouldn't he go all the way and finally sell the Mac
operating system for the hundreds of millions of Intel-based PCs out there?
Now that would be a real dust-up: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs mano a mano for
the very heart of the modern computing experience, just like in the good old
primordial days of the industry. While Mr. Jobs says his company has no plans
to enter the operating-system market by selling shrink-wrapped Mac software,
he was making similar-sounding denials before he made the big switch to Intel
chips earlier this year.
ALTHOUGH THIS NEW liveliness brought by the likes of Apple or Google to the
tech world is heartening, they don't deserve all the moon-eyed swooning they
are getting from critics for their efforts.
A few weeks ago, Google introduced a mapping program that allowed users to
"fly" around a 3D-globe constructed from satellite images. Several
commentators were so thrilled by Google Maps they wondered if it might raise
the environmental awareness of the whole planet. We would, after all, be
reminded of how we all dwell on Spaceship Earth, the argument went.
Maybe, but far more likely is that it will be used by Wal-Mart to show
customers the stores nearest their homes.
Google, lest we forget, is an advertising company, not a software company.
It will offer a product if there is some way to turn it into search-based
advertising. If you get a Gmail message from a friend about his new mortgage,
you'll probably see refinancing ads somewhere on your screen.
This new frisky competitiveness also doesn't mean that the world's antitrust
police should put away their briefcases. (In the thick of the recent Microsoft
antitrust battle, the subtext of any commentary extolling competition in the
computer industry was the notion that regulators should leave well enough
alone.)
But Microsoft, Intel and the rest have a power in the modern economy that
the Dutch East India Company would have envied. A little competition among
regulators to keep the companies honest could hardly be a bad thing.
AI
