At a professional level, I used to be in close contact with
Microsoft. Once upon a time (in the early '80s), their spreadsheet tool was called
Multiplan (inspired by the grand ancestor
VisiCalc). In the context of my initial contacts with Apple France executives
Jean-Louis Gassée and
Daniel Blériot, I was asked to produce a demonstration floppy (non-rigid disk) of Multiplan on the famous
Apple II computer. Shortly after, this primitive hardware/software tandem was replaced by the revolutionary
Macintosh and
Excel.
Several years later, I wrote stuff about Microsoft tools running on the Macintosh. This work must have been appreciated by the French branch of
Bill Gates's corporation, for they offered me a helicopter ride to a journalists' get-together in a fairy-tale castle near Chartres.
That was the time when computer users everywhere were delighted to discover that Microsoft's word-processing tool, named
Word, was totally (and no doubt deliberately) unprotected. That's to say, anybody could start using it freely on their PC or Macintosh. That was the ingenious marketing trick that got a whole planetary generation addicted to Word. It was the computing equivalent of free marijuana.
It could be said, retrospectively, that this pioneering epoch of personal computing was an essentially
macho affair. For reasons I can't explain, neither the managerial nor the technical levels of the PC revolution seemed to put the limelight upon any outstanding females.
Today, I find it ironical that Bill Gates's arch-enemy in the Old World is a brilliant 66-year-old Dutch woman,
Neelie Kroes.
In her powerful role as the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes doesn't want Europe to become a capitalistic jungle, where the strong devour the weak. In 2004 she set out to bust the Microsoft trust, by accusing the US corporation of failing to implement system-level interoperability, thereby condemning all competition. A European law court has just confirmed that Microsoft's fine of 497 million euros was justified.
Here in France, to verify that Microsoft is not yet playing the game in the sense implied by their European condemnation, you merely have to wander into a retail store and say that you want to purchase a PC without the Windows software. As a surprised salesman pointed out, that request sounds a little like wanting to buy an automobile without a motor. The analogy, though, is stupid. It's silly to try to compare computers with old-fashioned machines such as automobiles. The motor in an automobile (essentially
hardware) is not at all the equivalent of
software in the context of a computer. Somebody who wants to buy computing hardware without imposed software is more like a guy who wants to get married without having others choose his wife. But we no longer need such metaphors to get the message across. Today, almost everybody is aware that it's perfectly feasible to envisage buying a PC and installing Linux on it. So, to put it metaphorically, Bill Gates should pull his finger out.
This whole affair might, of course, turn out to be a non-problem... if Europeans were to wake up to themselves, and decide massively to buy magnificent Macs.
Way back in 1984, I wrote a book about the Macintosh, when this machine was as little known as the Internet concept. But it would be wrong to brand me as an elitist Mac cultist. Some of my best friends still use PCs. But this post is not for them.
Dyed-in-the-wool Macnuts are ordinary-looking folk who feel frustrated around noon if they haven't yet heard something new and spectacular from or about our Favorite Computer Company. For us, there's now a website [display] that enables us to view old images of Steve and hear exiting words that made us salivate with Apple lust back in the days when we were losing, for eternity, our consumer innocence.
