COMMENTARY--Whenever I hear Microsoft execs--meaning Bill and Steve--say they'd take Windows off the market if the Nine States prevail in the antitrust case, I want to throw all my support behind the states.
Why? As any regular reader of this column could tell you, it's not that I hate Microsoft or Windows. It's just that I like the idea of starting over with a clean slate. Tossing out Windows would give Microsoft a chance to build a real OS for the 21st century, instead of an OS that is still, at its heart, the descendant of MS-DOS.
Starting over would let Microsoft get rid of the evil system registry, Windows' heart of darkness. A new operating system could also be designed from the ground up to be trustworthy. (The company would still have to bolt some trustworthiness onto Windows XP and its 2004 successor, code-named Longhorn, to meet Bill's 'trustworthiness' mandate.) More importantly, a new OS would allow Microsoft engineers to show what they are really capable of in a way they can't with Windows XP.
THE NEW OS might even benefit from some form of open development, in which Microsoft would seek industry and consumer input in design and implementation. What's preventing Microsoft from doing what Apple did with OS X--build a new operating system on top of open-source Unix and a collection of industry standards? That approach doesn't seem to have hurt Apple any, and has resulted in the very pleasant OS X.
Whether or not it takes the open development route, Microsoft would be following in Apple's footsteps in one important way: trashing one existing operating system and replacing it with a better one. That's what Apple did in 1984, when the Macintosh replaced the Apple II OS and architecture. What the Mac was to the Apple II, a new Microsoft operating system could be to Windows XP.
The likelihood that any of this will actually happen? Pretty close to zero, even if the states prevail in court, which is looking less and less likely. Bill and Steve can't really be serious about dumping Windows. Nor do I believe that, even in a worst case, they'd have any reason to.
BILL SAYS he'd have to dump Windows if his only other alternative was to decouple it from middleware like Internet Explorer and Media Player. That decoupling, he claims, is technically impossible. But of course Microsoft could remove those elements from Windows if it wanted to. The company could even create programming interfaces that would allow third-party middleware to plug right in as replacements.
In a recent newsletter, my colleague Charles Cooper told his subscribers that the world would be a better place if Explorer hadn't been integrated into Windows, because that effectively ended competition in the browser business.
"In the absence of a viable rival," Cooper wrote, "Internet Explorer has advanced only in fits and starts. Ever since America Online acquired Netscape in 1999, Microsoft hasn't really needed to exert itself to develop a killer Web browser."
But would opening the door to a profusion of Windows middleware really be such a good thing? The suggestion takes me back to the days when word processors were still battling one another. Back then, I had to know three or four different programs in order to have a reasonable chance of creating a document on the unfamiliar PC.
IS THAT WHAT WE WANT for the browser business? Or is settling on a standard a good thing--even if it means taking Netscape out of the market, the way Microsoft Word reduced WordPerfect to rubble?
And what would this "killer Web browser" be, anyway? Is there something IE is missing? Yes, you can add all sorts of features around the edges--as Netscape has done--but none of that adds up to "killer" for me. There are several small browsers out there, Opera being the best known. Do they have "killer" features the world has been denied?
In media players, where Microsoft and Real continue to battle it out, the result of that competition isn't incredibly different feature sets or vast improvements in quality--the two companies keep leapfrogging one another--but a requirement that we all have both a Windows player and a Real player on our desktops because they aren't compatible.
The real winner of that battle hasn't been either Microsoft or Real, but MP3, which has become a "people's standard" even as Microsoft and Real continue to duke it out.
What do you think? Do you want Microsoft to scrap Windows altogether and come up with something new? Do you think competition in the middleware market would be a good thing? TalkBack to me below!
