No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently in trouble with antitrust regulators – they’re at different stages of IBM-style thirty years legal epics – that’s just the ticket for them both.

Google’s failure to dent the Microsoft monopoly will simply notch up another failure for Linux (whose fans are quite happy to work for The Man, as long as it’s not the Man from Redmond) – and it’ll do nothing for consumers. How so? Because the computing problems we’ll have tomorrow will still be the same ones we have today.

An overlooked court case in Seattle has helped restore the reputation of the late computer pioneer Gary Kildall.

Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft’s MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry.

But history has overlooked the contribution of Kildall, who Evans justifiably described as “the true founder of the personal computer revolution and the father of PC software” in a book published three years ago.
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While Bill Gates now holds a lucrative monopoly on digital images, his successors don’t see the same prosperous future for the digital word. Microsoft is withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitisation project and will cease to scan books, the company said on Friday. It’s abandoning its Live Book Search venture – a curious decision, since it effectively hands the future of the book to arch-rival Google.

Why? Because the Open Content Alliance is out of money – and Microsoft was by far the biggest financial backer.

Brewster Kahle, whose Internet Archive project is a key OCA member, admitted the financial impact of Microsoft’s withdrawal was “significant” and that the Alliance now needed fresh resources to keep the scanners running. The initial $10m was almost completely exhausted.

Google differs from the impoverished Alliance in that it doesn’t ask for permission from copyright holders; it simply instructs its stormtroopers – the participating libraries – to rev their machines and start copying.

For this, the ad giant has received lawsuits in the US and France from authors and publishers. Google has fought back using sock puppets of its own. Stanford Law School’s anti-copyright centre has been helping out the Google cause – and received a $2m thank you in return.

(Curiously, “anti-corruption campaigner” Professor Lessig omits this relationship in his own, verbose declaration of interests – a taste of things to come, perhaps.)

Yet the policy will be brutally effective, with Google holding a monopoly on the printed word in book form.

Microsoft says it will donate the books digitised by Live Book Search to the copyright holders. Meanwhile, Google will surely never see a monopoly fall into its lap quite so easily. The future of digital books is now entirely in its hands.

(But perhaps not the future of books – given how superior paper technology is to digital. As Simon Jenkins wrote recently, the physical book just looks better all the time.)

One IT Manager, bemoaning his lot to me, recently compared the rise of Web 2.0 enthusiasts to the problem the Police has with Freemasons. The blog and wiki evangelists within are not as secretive, of course, but they’re equally cult-like: speaking their own language, and using the populist rhetoric of “empowerment” for relentless self-advancement.

He couldn’t care less that employees were “wasting” time on Facebook – that was a “problem” for their line managers to deal with, and not an IT issue. (Why should IT be blamed if staff played with Rubik’s Cubes all day?) He had always encouraged people to try new software, so long as it remained within the firewall. The real problem, he thought, was that the Web 2.0 cult is loyal to what’s perceived to be good for the greater “Hive Mind”, not the organisation.

This resulted in staff with conflicting agendas.

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For all but three of the past 17 years, Microsoft has been involved in antitrust litigation with government agencies. That’s enough to wear anyone down. But as Europe’s highest appeals court delivered its judgement on Monday, I did notice some ennui – not from dogged old hacks, but from a new generation of pundits.

Take this example from former teenage dot.commer Benjamin Cohen – who was six when FTC first trained its lawyers on Redmond. After taking a pop at the at “anti-Microsoft lobby”, he declared on the Channel 4 News website:

The judgement is based on an old case and in many ways an old world – where Microsoft really was the dominant player in information technology

Stop kicking the kindly old man in the Windows outfit, he said.

It’s hard for it to have too much relevance today.

You’d think from this brilliant piece of insight, that there is hardly anyone left who uses Microsoft Windows or Office. Maybe, like the Acorn Archimedes, it’s a hobbyist system lovingly kept alive by a few, devoted enthusiasts! Benji even sounded slightly resentful at being torn away from Facebook (or Sadville) for a few minutes, to write about this piece of computer history.

But the question of “how we deal with Microsoft” is more relevant than ever for two very important and reasons: the second follows from the first.
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Savour this irony.

Last week, we learned that incompatibilities Microsoft hadn’t written into its operating system posed a grave threat to users. Last week, we also learned that genuine incompatibilities Microsoft had deliberately written into its operating system posed no threat at all.
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Antitrust addict Microsoft has outlined a 12-Step Recovery Program, which it says will help prevent it from lapsing back into anti-competitive practices in the future.

The declaration follows three major “interventions” in fifteen years. A 1991 investigation by the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a Consent Decree signed in 1995. A 1997 investigation by the Department of Justice, joined by a number of US states the following year, resulted in a conviction and settlement in 2002. And just last month, the EU rejected Microsoft’s claim that it was complying with a 2004 antitrust settlement.
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Microsoft’s most ambitious software plan – to base Windows on a native database – has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for ‘Cairo’, which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft’s focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the “three pillars” of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.

Now it looks as if Windows on a database won’t take place until the next decade, and there are serious doubts it will ever happen at all.
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If William Henry Gates the Third’s philanthropic work leads to him being canonized one day as the first secular saint of our times, I won’t stand in the way of the celebrations. Geeks get things very out of proportion, and the value of saving even one life should be more apparent to everyone than the cost of a poorly written Windows USB stack. When Microsoft is criticized, while the practices of arms dealers, pharmaceutical companies and extraction cartels around the world are ignored, its reminds us that some nerds place a very low value on human life itself.

But if Gates is to be canonized as the man who invented the PC, and without whom our lives would be poorer – as he is this evening – then we should all be troubled, as it suggests we’re suffering from a terrible case of ignorance and amnesia. More troublingly, it raises the fair question – which we hope you can help answer – of what kind of qualifications one needs to have to earn the title ‘Henry Ford Of Our Times’.

Tonight the BBC discussed Bill’s legacy, and was effectively writing the first draft of his place in history. And in that painful BBC fashion of splitting the difference and losing the truth – there are two, but never more than two sides to every story – came to its conclusion. Bill Gates had been truly innovative in his earlier career, we learned, and while “someone would have invented the PC eventually” (we paraphrase), this incredible inventiveness could still be entered in mitigation when the final reckoning came.

So, Bill invented the PC? Even excusing for media hyperbole – and this is the kind of careless, but generous exaggeration you hear when someone has died (rather than relinquished the role of “Chief Software Architect”) we would like to put a few points on the record.
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trust settlement, and quoted Machiavelli to support its case for an extension to the monitoring program.

As of 1 February, over 700 issues remained outstanding out of over 1,000 submitted to the monitoring committee, which was set up to ensure Microsoft keeps to its word in the settlement to the long running anti-trust lawsuit. Microsoft was found guilty in 2000 of abusing its monopoly position, and a final decree issued in 2002.

The decree set up a monitoring program that’s due to expire next year. Now the DoJ wants to extend the compliance monitoring program for at least two years to 2009, and ideally to 2012 – by which time Windows Vista may or may not have been released.

The monitoring committee says Microsoft’s compliance is so inadequate that even Microsoft agrees it needs to be restarted. The software giant is keeping contractors in Bangalore busy as it races to complete protocol documentation which almost everyone agrees is useless, in time for a June deadline.

The DoJ quoted Machiavelli to describe Microsoft’s chaotic development procedures, which if you’re being charitable, explains its difficulties in explaining how its software works.

“He who has not first laid his foundations may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building,”

That’s a quote from Chapter eight of The Prince, titled “Concerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired Either By The Arms of Others, Or By Good Fortune”. That’s where Machiavelli cautions on how to avoid “inconstant and unstable things.”

Perhaps he was giving the Medici family advanced warning of the Windows USB stack.