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A dead opossum in my garden box is one thing and the future of Microsoft is yet another... Wait! No, on second thought, it's the same damned thing.
One Dead Opossum
by Del Miller
July 1, 2001
Yesterday afternoon I was shuffling papers about when my peripheral vision caught movement on the lawn outside my office window. It was a large, drunken opossum, or in any event he looked drunk. He staggered badly as he weaved painfully across the yard and he didn't look like he was feeling at all well - to be expected, I suppose, for any strictly nocturnal animal found performing a slow-motion slalom across my yard in broad daylight. Though he weaved this way and that, it soon became apparent that the r.m.s. of his course was taking him unavoidably, albeit slowly, straight at me, and I felt that peculiar sort of discomfort one always feels whenever diseased marsupials approach. I felt I should do something responsible about this lost, sickly, waddling creature, but my formative training left me no clue as to what that might be.
With growing unease I searched my memory for a relevant experience, some decisive and certain direction to be taken in event of opossum attack, but nothing came to mind that seemed likely to avert the inexorable march of this opossumish guided missile. I could only think of vague, flapping, foolish maneuvers; fleeting images of the Three Stooges working the levers of an equally preposterous sketch.
Though barely able to walk, this greasy looking proto-rodent managed to trundle right up to my very window, where I watched as he just...fell down, quite literally, on his chin in the ivy in the garden box, not two feet below the window sill, and there he laid still. I leaned out the window and could have reached down and touched him - if indeed I felt in the least way moved to touch a plainly diseased possum with the oily, unkempt look of a Brylcreamed wood rat. All of this seemed odd to me, but then things often do.
And so, this morning greets me with a glorious, unignorable, front-row view of a dead opossum. He lays there still, with precisely the sort of regal majesty one would uniquely expect from a deceased, flyblown opossum. It's that trademark opossum smirk, all pale-gummed and pointy-toothed, that does it, methinks.
There is something portentous about this opossum thing. I mean, why me? Why my yard? And even more curious, why the beeline for my window, my very garden box in fact? Why an opossum? Why not a creature a wee bit more noble or romantic or at least newsworthy; like an eagle falling out of the sky? How can I tell this tale in dignified prose? I suspect there would be more postmortem nobility and literary potential in the messy demise of a two-toed sloth than in the waddling, terminal vertigo of this so recently addled opossum. He's certainly no albatross; Coleridge has nothing to fear from me. Opossums in the Mist? Nope, doesn't quite work either.
I do not recall seeing a numbered line item on my monthly utility bill labeled "Dead Opossum Removal." I intuit therefore that a call to city hall about this matter would not be directed promptly to the appropriate agency for immediate, radio-dispatch. I guess I shall I have to bury him. It was, after all, my window at which he sung his final song. He would have wanted it that way.
If you have ever sat for any length of time in close proximity to a dead opossum, you will no doubt be aware of how difficult it is to ignore one. I try to concentrate on my reading, - an article about Microsoft and its plans to dominate every last particle of the technological world - but in my mind I can only see the image of an unwanted, diseased, creature of the night lumbering unstoppably toward me.
And occasionally, I think about the opossum.
Shoo Opossum! Shoo!
Sorry, but there's something about the recent Microsoft product introduction that prompts revulsion in a way I've never quite felt before. It's that helpless feeling of sheer inevitability that Microsoft will conquer all - like watching a sick opossum waddling toward me and somehow knowing that, come the morning, it will be lying in my garden box, ground zero for a cloud of black flies.
Regardless of the merit, utility or value of Microsoft's latest product, it is, after all, Microsoft Windows and whatever targeted market segments will undoubtedly fall, Microsoft's drummed-up protocols will become the de facto standard, the IT establishment will sign off without a question and the world will simply accept the new regime as if the new Microsoft rules were carved in stone and carried down from some burnt and smoking mountaintop. The impact will be so enormous that no matter how I try to hide from the Microsoft omnipresence, by cloaking myself in the Apple world, for instance, I know that every move I make will be adversely affected by decisions in Redmond.
And with every new press release from Redmond I sense that the monopoly Microsoft has cast around the personal computer market will now be cemented across the entire internet and deep within the entertainment world to boot. The Federal Government has tried and, so far, failed to even slow down the Windows juggernaut, and if they can't do it, then who can? Messrs. Balmer and Gates know that they are invincible.
Windows XP is the latest opossum at my window, its .NET initiative being simply a giant Trojan horse into the internet and its Windows Media Player a blatant land-grab into the entertainment business and all of it a frightful reach into our collective pockets. The .NET scheme seems to me to be such a horrendously bad idea, from the standpoint of security not to mention cost to the user, that I can't fathom anyone, business, consumer or government, buying into it. But buy into it they will - like they always have. I feel like I'm watching a horror flick, shouting at the on-screen characters not to open the door that hides the monster, knowing full well that they will do just that. It's inevitable.
...or is it?
The Power Company is Your Friend
This time just might be different, because .NET is, quite frankly, a sick opossum - and Microsoft knows it. The company would have been perfectly happy continuing to sell user licenses on a non-expiring basis and making money hand over fist like they have for twenty years; but times are changing. Microsoft isn't unveiling the .NET strategy because it is a particularly grand idea, they're doing it because the realities of the market and of Wall Street give them no choice. Microsoft's enormous market cap is due to the fact that it has always expanded - always grown through increasingly larger share of an ever burgeoning market for computers. Those days are just about over.
Microsoft has achieved such an overwhelming presence in the PC world that there are no further worlds to conquer on the desktop. Most people who need computers already have them and most of them already have all the Microsoft products they can use. Without new computer sales there are no new operating system sales and the marginal advantage of more features just isn't enough to persuade most people to shell out hard earned money for a new version of Microsoft Office unless they are simply forced to. And sure enough, Microsoft is now preparing to force them to upgrade via a subscription model for software.
Despite Microsoft's feeble arguments to the contrary, the subscription ploy will absolutely cost users much more than the previous model - that's Microsoft's whole point, to make more money from a non-expanding customer base. Simple math dictates that user's have to pay more, and this in turn will surely change customer attitudes. More importantly, subscription services forge a different relationship between buyers and sellers. Buyers will no longer be paying for a product when they feel they need it, they will pay when Microsoft warns them that their air supply will be cut off if they don't make their payments on time. Microsoft will no longer be a vendor, it will be a utility, like the power company, and a monopolistic one at that; and people just don't form nor do they maintain loyalties to utilities. Rather, people curse the utility every time they have to make a payment and with every payment comes another reason to consider alternatives.
Will this be enough to cause Microsoft's customer base to jump ship in droves? Probably not, but it does set the stage for other developments that very possibly will.
In Microsoft We Trust
Consider the following developments:
- The Pentagon now considers the most likely threat from external enemies to be, not an attack with missiles or bombs, but a massive cyberattack against the military and civilian data networks and against the economic infrastructure of the United States.
- In October of 2000, a cyberattack against Microsoft resulted in "someone" gaining access to early but fundamental source code to Windows XP. Nobody knows for sure who has that code now, but there is a strong suspicion that it is in the hands of a foreign government - and a not particularly friendly one at that. Unlike open source software, the closed nature of Microsoft software provides no independent review process to locate and repair flaws in security - a cracker with the source code has the keys to Windows.
- Microsoft's Passport, a critical component of the .NET scheme is positioned to be a secure environment for the storage of critical data such as user's credit card numbers, social security ID's and the like. This information is to be stored on Microsoft's network - a network with a terrible record against intrusion and attack. It is clear to me that a Passport account will someday be mandatory to use a Windows based computer.
- Hailstorm is the new Windows model for total interoperability between computers and networks, based on the model of internet messaging. The inevitable consequence is a massive multiplication in the number of intrustion avenues, built on a system with no real history of security.
- Smart Tags, another feature of Windows XP, involves the use of local code running data that is downloaded from poorly known sources. It poses all the security problems that macro viruses do except that it will be much easier to generate the damaging payload and even easier to download the data to the user's machine. While Microsoft has recently announced that it will drop Smart Tags from the initial release of XP, the wording of the statement makes it clear that the feature will resurface in Microsoft products when the timing suits Microsoft. When it does, it will be a security disaster waiting to happen.
- Microsoft's new registration protocol places unprecedented limits upon the users control of his own computer. Changes to software or hardware that have nothing to do with the company's software can now break the registration; requiring Microsoft's permission to re-register. This policy places the security of the enterprise at risk, and is a new burden upon businesses and consumers; and one with a hefty pricetag.
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it is obvious that Microsoft's .NET, taken together, will pose security problems unlike any the internet has ever faced and the ramifications are global, political and even military in scope. Such a scenario is not just theoretically possible but, in view of the complexity and the immature technologies involved, it is likely. The present day security problems of macro viruses, break-ins of Microsoft's internal network and the periodic cracks of corporate NT systems will pale in comparison to these future threats.
Should Microsoft find itself at the center of a network failure that shuts down much of the internet and compromises the security of entire nations, the company will no longer be seen as the idol of the technological world. Its reputation will be damaged irreparably.
And while we are talking about global concerns we should mention the impact that Microsoft's subscription model will have upon the world beyond the U.S. and Western Europe. Although the rest of the world represents the last untapped market for computer software, the computing reality in those countries is one based on very little available money. Consequently, the use of Microsoft products have benefitted from the availability of very cheap hardware and a cottage industry in purloined copies of Windows and Windows related applications.
Microsoft has been relentless in its efforts to search out and eliminate pirated copies of its software, although these efforts have had mixed results. In much of the world, relaxed enforcement of copyright laws has contributed to a bustling market in bootlegged versions of Windows and other Microsoft products - a situation that .NET is designed to eliminate. It is unlikely however, that the millions of users in the developing nations and other countries undergoing difficult economic times will simply hop on board the subscription model and suddenly pony up with the large amounts of cash necessary to run heavily centralized and policed systems. The result will be a flood of currently invisible Windows users switching to free alternatives such as Linux and FreeBSD. While this will not greatly impact Microsoft's revenues in the short run, the long term effect will be that the company's ability to grow with the developing nations is curtailed and Microsoft's influence upon the global computing environment will be greatly diminished.
Into the Garden Box
If there was one statement that explains the dominance of Microsoft in the computer market it is this: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." IT folks have for years hidden behind the company's indomitable name but .NET will move both Microsoft and IT into a position of unprecedented exposure and into a costly "utility" business model that will erode the confidence that management has always had in both Microsoft and their IT consultants. Even worse, the .NET concept moves this vulnerability into the consumer sector in a very real way, turning future security problems into very public events. Every failure, every misstep will further degrade Microsoft's authority and the company will eventually have to fight for every customer. The IT departments will become far more accountable for results and the new cry from business and government, and eventually the consumer market, will be, "What's our alternative?"
And yes, there will be alternatives, but it is interesting to note that the scenario painted above is not dependent on the competitive influence of Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD or any other conceivable rival - that's an altogether different subject. Neither do these predictions include legislative or judicial threats to Microsoft based on their monopolizing of the digital world, a very real possibility in the future. The long term threats to Microsoft are largely due to the simple economic realities of today's world and Microsoft's chosen plans to deal with them.
So, will Microsoft become a dead opossum in our garden box? No, at least
not anytime soon - in fact, it will probably remain the world's largest
software company for many years to come. But the Microsoft of the future
will be a different sort of animal than it is today, and the overwhelming
market successes in Microsoft's past will lead, ironically, to its greatly
diminished influence in the industry's future.
Copyright 2001, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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