Philip Toynbee famously observed that if you dropped an atom bomb on Twickenham during the Varsity match, the prospects for fascism in Britain would be set back by two generations. An analogous thought struck me watching coverage of the D6 'All Things Digital' conference last week. A neutron bomb would have wiped out the entire high commands of the US technology and media industries - while usefully leaving the premises intact.
D6 was this year's version of the annual media-tech gabfest organised by Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's veteran technology commentator, and his partner in sentimentality, Kara Swisher. The event took place at the Four Seasons Aviara Resort just outside San Diego, where attendees enjoy 'casual elegance in a breathtaking location accented by wildlife and wildflowers' for a conference fee just a tad short of the GNP of Rwanda.
Mossberg and Swisher engulf their guests in bonhomie and respectful obeisance. Every so often, one of them asks a cheeky question. If the guest responds with a frank answer, they fall about in grateful glee while the audience hoots in appreciation. Thus Rupert Murdoch (who, coincidentally, is now Mossberg's employer) was asked if he had anything to do with the New York Post's decision to endorse Barack Obama. 'Yeah,' he drawled laconically. Cue paroxysms.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's High Command, received the same treatment, with one softball question after another. 'Was Vista a mistake?' Not at all, replied Gates. 'We have a culture that's very much about "We need to do better". Vista's given us more opportunities to exercise our culture.' Laugh? I nearly died.
It was left to a member of the audience, technology publisher Tim O'Reilly, to ask a searching question. Did Microsoft 'have any really big, hairy, audacious goal' any more? Watching Gates waffle said everything one needed to know about how incoherent and middle-aged his company has become. He didn't have an answer because there isn't one. Microsoft has become the IBM de nos jours. Or, rather, the IBM of three decades ago - a company in the throes of losing an empire and having difficulty finding a new role.
Later, in a discussion about Google's dominance of search, Gates actually said: 'Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.' The irony must have been obvious to at least some of the audience - those who remembered that the D6 conference coincided with the 10th anniversary of the US government's landmark anti-trust case against Microsoft, in which the company was convicted of abusing its monopoly control of the operating systems market to wipe out Netscape, the company that invented the first commercial browser.
Microsoft ought to have been broken up as a result, but the conglomerate-friendly Bush administration, distracted - not to say deranged - by 9/11, shrank back from inflicting the obvious remedy and Gates and Ballmer lived to fight another day. Their browser, Internet Explorer, eventually gained 98 per cent of the market and - in the absence of competition - remained stagnant for half a decade. Most computer users were effectively dependent on an insecure, ageing and increasingly obsolescent product just as the web was being transformed by new technologies. It makes Gates's new-found aversion to monopolies look, well, a bit rich.
But here's another irony. In its death throes, Netscape released the code of its browser into the public domain and created the Mozilla Foundation to foster open-source development of the code. In due course, the Mozilla community released Firefox, a terrific open-source browser that knocked spots off Internet Explorer and has already captured nearly 30 per cent of the market in Europe. It also drove Microsoft finally to upgrade Internet Explorer in an attempt to halt the erosion in its market share.
I think the erosion will continue. Version 3 of Firefox is due soon and downloads of the beta and earlier versions are running at 125 million a day. The foundation plans to host a worldwide 'Download Day' following the official release of Firefox 3. The number of total unique downloads will be submitted for evaluation and potential inclusion in the Guinness World Records. If they succeed, will the Firefox developers be invited to 'All Things Digital' next year? Don't hold your breath: the WSJ doesn't do open source.
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