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.

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.

In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans’ They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Paterson “[took] ‘a ride on’ Kildall’s operating system, appropriated the ‘look and feel’ of [Kildall's] CP/M operating system, and copied much of his operating system interface from CP/M.”

The story of how Bill Gates came to acquire an operating system is well known. In 1980, Kildall’s Digital Research provided the operating system for a wide range of microcomputers, and was established as the industry standard. IBM had approached Microsoft, then a tiny software company in the Seattle area, to provide a BASIC run-time for its first micro, the IBM PC. Gates offered to provide IBM an operating system too, even though he didn’t have one at the time. This required a hasty purchase.

Microsoft turned to Tim Paterson, whose garage operation Seattle Computer Products was selling a CP/M clone called 86-DOS. This had been developed under the code name QDOS (for “quick and dirty operating system”), and SCP sold it alongside an add-in CPU card. Microsoft turned this into the hugely successful DOS franchise.

(The oft-told story of Kildall spurning IBM to fly his plane is deeply misleading. It was IBM’s distribution and pricing of CP/M, which in the end was one of three operating systems offered with the first IBM PC, that ensured MS-DOS captured the market.)

Paterson brought the case against Evans in March 2005, as we reported here, claiming that Evans’ defamatory chapter caused him “great pain and mental anguish”.

Evans was puzzled that the chapter drew a defamation suit as it merely “recapitulate[d] and state[d] what 11, 12, 15 other books [said] and there [was] no public outcry, no public corrections, no website corrections, no criticism in reviews [that any of the accounts were erroneous”.

Taking a dim view of lawsuits designed to curb the First Amendment rights of journalists, Judge Thomas Zilly found that Paterson’s lawsuit failed on several important counts. In US law, Zilly pointed out, “truth is an absolute defense to a claim of defamation”.

Judge Zilly said Paterson falsely claimed Evans credited Kildall as the “inventor” of DOS, weakening his case. At the same time, the Judge found, Evans had faithfully recorded Paterson’s denial of Kildall’s view that QDOS “ripped off” CP/M.

The Judge also agreed that Paterson copied CP/M’s API, including the first 36 functions and the parameter passing mechanism, although Paterson renamed several of these. Kildall’s “Read Sequential” function became “Sequential Read”, for example, while “Read Random” became “Random Read”.

(DR came to regret not suing Microsoft “very early on”. For his part, Paterson was to plead that his operating system of choice, Kildall’s CP/M-86, was at the time unavailable for products based on Intel’s 8086 that he wanted to sell, necessitating the hasty clone).

Finally, Judge Zilly concluded that Evans acted without malice, and castigated the plaintiffs for introducing irrelevancies into court, including the claim that Kildall was an alcoholic.

“Plaintiffs fail to provide any evidence regarding ’serious doubts’ about the accuracy of the Kildall chapter. Instead, a careful review of the Lefer notes… provides a research picture tellingly close to the substance of the final chapter.”

And with that, the case was dismissed.

The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall’s Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists – only with far superior technology. DRI’s roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft’s Windows finally emerged as a standard.

But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man.

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.)

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.

For example companies were being urged to “share” IP that would prove valuable (even life saving) to them in the future. (There’s a new book Wikinomics, that preaches this, with little discrimination). Or projects were being rushed through with little cost/benefit analysis – or consideration of the consequences – because they fulfilled the evangelists’ buzzwords.

The cult-within-the-organisation is a fascinating subject – one that we’ll be reading about aplenty in the management columns, and eventually on sociology courses for years to come. A more detailed examination of this cult/religion is beyond the scope of this article, but I’ll highlight two very relevant characteristics.

This group of people looks cultish for several reasons. (I first observed the cult-like properties of the web utopians several years ago, reporting on what was the forerunner to the Web 2.0 conference.)

It’s a consensus culture that brooks no disagreement – except from the top-down, ironically enough – and reacts to criticism as if being personally attacked.

They also speak their own language: a strangulated and weirdly dehumanized collection of buzzwords: “nodes”, “community”, and “conversation”, for example, have had the life flogged out of them. But most of all, the blog and wiki evangelists give the impression that they have arrived, fully formed, with no recollection of history or economics prior to 2003.

For the Emergent People, everything is new again!

As we know, if we ignore history, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. If we disregard basic economics, we’re at the mercy of people who pay just a little bit more attention. This came to mind reading the latest submission from the legal departments of the ten US States to the ongoing antitrust regulation process against Microsoft.

Just as Web 2.0 has been a gift to Rupert Murdoch, it’s also a PR gift for Microsoft. Now Microsoft is turning this mood music to its competitive advantage.

Microsoft, you’ll recall, agreed to a gentle program of regulatory oversight in the US five years ago. Now that program is up for renewal, Microsoft says it doesn’t need to any more oversight. Why not? Because of the software as a service revolution!

The war of words has been ongoing for some time. Marco Iansiti from Harvard Business School has been making the 2.0-case for Microsoft. Two experts, John Kwoka and Ronald Alepin, have been deployed to rebut it on behalf of the Ten States.

On November 6, both parties filed an update.

Microsoft filed a supplemental written by Iansiti: you can download it here [PDF 660kb, 12pp]. It’s a must-read.

“The Internet as an alternative platform is ubiquitous,” he claims. Microsoft also adds that the pace of innovation since 2002 has risen – and Web 2.0 is proof.

(Yes, all those lame excuses for websites that are mercilessly lampooned by Uncov, are actually bleeding edge innovation. Fancy that! )

According to Iansiti, Google, Salesforce.com, Mozilla and Tim 2.0′Reilly’s mighty army of JavaScript-typing, buzzword-spouting monkeys are all cited as proof that Microsoft doesn’t need to be regulated at all.

But if Microsoft prevails, then even the small fissures opened up by the “Seattlement” may soon close the door on new opportunities, the States Fear.

“The ‘Internet Platform’ … does not even exist, much less constitute for the foreseeable future a practical or viable alternative to the desktop platform,” responds Alepin, in a filing made the same day.[PDF, 223kb, 32pp]

(Props to IDG’s Greg Keizer -the only reporter to follow the arguments).

Such worries aren’t shared by the Web 2.0 cultists however – they either don’t have any worry cells in their heads, or their worry cells are fully preoccupied with persecution fantasies about the dying record industry, or telecoms companies.

These evangelists think that Microsoft is dead, dying – or at the very least, irrelevant. This utopian optimism has affected others, too. CNET blogger Matt Asay voiced similar thoughts in a recent Open Season podcast here. Listening to Matt, Microsoft belonged to a distant era, such was the magical power today of “open source”. He didn’t really care how it was regulated.

( This is an odd position to take. One of the small concessions Redmond was forced to make was to agree to document and license its protocols. It’s a tiny crack in the monolith, and it has permitted a small number of MS-compatible open source companies to spring up. Zimbra, for example, was acquired by Yahoo! for an improbable $350m. Zimbra’s is a rock-solid open source email service, but its inflated valuation is because it also offers a very limited Exchange-compatible client. )

Nor does the happy-go-lucky Digg crowd, many of whom weren’t born when the first FTC investigation began in 1991.

Who are you kidding?

Not to labour the point, here are some inconvenient facts.

OS innovation has never been slower: Windows and Mac users have never had to wait longer between OS releases. They’ve never been unhappier, either: many users of the latest incarnations of these operating systems – Vista and Leopard – feel like abused guinea pigs. And Microsoft and Apple? Never wealthier, thank you very much.

So this is what the 2.0 revolution looks like: a concentration of power with the people who had it already.

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.

It’s Microsoft’s game

Firstly, the proportion of national wealth that goes to Microsoft is higher than ever. More people have Windows PCs at home, and as more countries acquire more PCs, so the dependence on Microsoft software grows. As a measure of how much, look at the earnings. Microsoft earned $36bn in 2004, and is projected to earn $63bn in FY 2009. Some “declining relevance”.

In addition, Microsoft now has the desktop computing franchise for as long as it wants it – because its rivals have given up and gone home, or carefully avoid competing too hard with it. This is a hard truth for many people to accept.

Linux has failed to compete on the desktop because it isn’t up to the task of being a consumer operating system, and Apple avoids competing because its focus is on digital media, and the Mac is a nice little earner as it is. Why should it rock the boat?

These days, Steve Jobs is a director at Disney – and Apple isn’t even called “Apple Computer” any more.

Even with Mark Shuttleworth’s benevolence, Ubuntu is still a long way from providing the ordinary user from a drop-in Windows replacement.

And Microsoft has countered the threat of the institutional adoption of Linux, particularly in emerging markets, by lowering the price. Few could would have predicted a few years ago that China and India would go Windows. Few anticipated Western public sector bodies continuing to pay large license fees to Redmond. But a slightly lower license cost, and the more abstract notion of “software freedom”, weren’t enough to win the day for F/OSS.

As the FSJ [aka Forbes' Daniel Lyons] wrote recently:

You’ve lost. You’ve had sixteen years to try and build a desktop operating system, and you still can’t get your shit together. Nobody wants your software. It’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s yours.

All of which makes Apple’s position all the more frustrating. For a small premium it offers a substantially better and more secure experience than Windows. When ordinary users and businesses have the chance to use it, they like what they see. They’ll typically opt for Windows, however, with consumers put off by the perceived price difference and the Mac’s niche status, while enteprises are wary of lock-in to a single hardware vendor – especially with Apple dropping the “Computer”.

… and Apple won’t play

Yet Apple could remedy both if it embarked on a carefully selective licensing program, and permitted chosen OEMs to offer the Mac in more diverse forms. The company has never been in a position to do so before. Today, it can: in the last quarter Apple earned $2.53bn from computer sales, while $2.17bn came from iPod and music and phone products – and this before selling 1m iPhones.

It isn’t hard to envisage Mac OS X reaching 25 per cent market share – which would address the last remaining reason for choosing Windows: there’s more good specialist software written for it. But Apple won’t allow it. With the Mac it’s not a case of “can’t compete”, but “won’t compete”.

But ahh, you say – what about some great paradigm shift? Twenty years ago the PC wrenched control of the industry from IBM and other big vertically integrated companies, and handed it to Microsoft and Intel. What Nick Carr calls “The Big Switch” may make expensive desktop computers redundant. Just as Marc Andressen promised to make Windows “a poorly debugged device driver layer”, Google’s service bureau model of computing promises to make a PC an off-line backup, for those rare moments when the network goes down.

Well, we were here before with thin clients, and today it’s called SaaS, or software as a service – and each time the economics are compelling. This time there’s evidence of some steak behind the sizzle: Salesforce is a great example of businesses doing more work in a bureau model. But to think of one model entirely superseding another is quite wrong: IBM is still here, and the unique flexibility of the PC means it will be around for a very long time too.

In addition, the sheer inefficiency of the browser-based “Web 2.0″ environment (Yahoo! 2.0-ified Mail Beta brings a dual core PC to its knees) pretty much guarantees you need some hefty hardware. So for the foreseeable future, SaaS services will be another application you run on your PC.

And once you’ve got a PC, you’ve got Windows. Now what?

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.

In the first instance Microsoft had primed a public relations campaign to warn of the dire consequences posed by these bogus incompatibilities. In the second instance, and times must be tough up there, Microsoft avoided using its public relations professionals to tell us that the genuine incompatibilities were harmless.

Are you still with us? If you’re feeling bewildered, your confusion is understandable.

The first instance refers to incompatibilities between Microsoft’s Windows 386, 3.x and Windows 95 products and DR-DOS. This was an operating system developed by Digital Research, and later acquired by Novell, which was 100 per cent compatible with Microsoft’s MS-DOS. Thanks to citizens in Iowa, who are pursuing a consumer class action lawsuit against Microsoft, these ancient malpractices are being aired once again, and Microsoft executives have been on the stand in Des Moines defending the company’s conduct.

Microsoft wanted users to believe that interoperability between DR-DOS and Windows was problematic.

The second instance refers to incompatibilities between Windows Vista and next-generation High Definition DVDs, BluRay and HD-DVD. The incompatibilities are deliberate, and part of the specification Microsoft gave hardware manufacturers so they could design Vista-compatible hardware. Just before Christmas, Peter Gutmann published a technical analysis of the Vista incompatibilities, listed some of the potential security and stability threats they posed, and some of the situations where they might cause real harm.

In this instance, while Microsoft has gone to great lengths to booby-trap its software to disable functionality when certain media discs are being played, and to degrade performance when it finds what it thinks is counterfeit media, or “unauthorized” copying — it wants us to believe this will not have serious consequences for users.

(Until Vista is tested in real world conditions, we won’t know for sure if Gutmann’s claims are alarmist and Microsoft is telling the truth, or not — or somewhere in between.)

We’ll deal with the most topical first.

Gutmann analysed the hardware specifications and declared several problem areas. When “premium content” was being played some functionality was deliberately disabled, specifically video I/O. Vista uses “tilt bits” to detect fluctuations in voltage and severely degrade the operation of the computer. He also said the specification posed problems for programmers developing free software device drivers, and would make the Vista-compatible hardware more expensive than it should be. Finally, Gutmann described catastrophic consequences for users who discovered their driver had been “revoked”.

Rather than address questions from Gutmann himself, or from the technical press and analysts, Dave Marsh, Microsoft’s lead program manager for video chose his own questions to answer, and passed them along to a colleague, who posted them on his blog.

Naturally these include several answers to questions Gutmann didn’t ask, but avoiding the press by selecting awestruck bloggers instead is Microsoft’s preferred way of dodging hard questions these days: at CES this month, Gates would only be interviewed by bloggers.

“Gates seems really relaxed unlike in many other interviews I have seen,” noted a blogger after watching one of these grillings, conducted by … a former Microsoft marketing guy.

Gutmann hadn’t asked whether Vista’s “content protection requirements apply equally to the Consumer Electronics industry supplied player devices such as an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player”, but Marsh answers anyway. From then on, it’s a mixed bag.

Marsh agrees that Vista’s DRM taxes the CPU. He dodges the issue of Vista’s specs making hardware more expensive by saying that integrating DRM onto the chip in volumes will eventually bring the price down. (That’s a “yes”, then).

He agrees that S/PDIF, component video and audio are degraded, but says they are already in Windows XP and invoked when requested – and he passes the blame onto Hollywood. He refutes Gutmann’s claim that playing back protected content degrades the rest of Vista video output. (Gutmann cited the hypothetical case where medical images would be displayed in lower than optimal resolution when a protected High Definition DVD was being played at the same time – although if your radiographer is watching Porkys III Hi-Def Edition while looking at your scans, we suggest you find a new radiographer).

Marsh confirms that “tilt bits” will cause problems, but he ducks the question of what circumstances will cause tilt bits to be set, and throws the responsibility back on to the hardware vendors. He writes:

“It is pure speculation to say that things like voltage fluctuations might cause a driver to think it is under attack from a hacker. It is up to a graphics IHV to determine what they regard as an attack. Even if such an event did cause playback to stop, the user could just press ‘play’ again and carry on watching the movie (after the driver has re-initialized, which takes about a second).”

And… then what? Wait for another tilt bit reset, we guess, from speculative causes.

That sure sounds like a fun evening in!

And we throw Marsh’s reply to the F/OSS drivers issue open to you. Marsh asks,

“Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?” And Marsh answers… “No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.” Gutmann, who isn’t named in Marsh’s ventriloquist routine, isn’t impressed.

“Saying ‘we were only following orders’ has historically proven not to be a very good excuse,” he told the BBC News Online website. “If you have got the protection measures there, the impulse is to use the most stringent ones at your disposal.”

We’ll deal with events taking place in freezing Iowa in a more detail in a follow-up tomorrow, but the basic facts are as follows. The case has been a replay of Caldera vs Microsoft, with evidence brought in from other investigations. Caldera had inherited DR-DOS from Novell. Suit was filed in July 1996, and discovery continued throughout 1998 and 1999, with a serious of unfavourable judgements against Microsoft, one of which expanded the scope of the lawsuit. Microsoft settled just a week before it was due to go to court in January, paying Caldera $275m in damages. The Register covered the trial in detail at the time (list of links here, juiciest quotes (http://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/20/microsoft_on_trial/) here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/05/24/unsealed_caldera_documents_expose_ms/).)

As with Internet Explorer, and Windows XP, Microsoft had failed to add new features to MS-DOS for several years. Microsoft adopted several tactics to destroy DR-DOS, the most damaging of which was tying PC makers into secret per-processor license agreements, which meant that they paid for Microsoft’s MS-DOS whether they shipped it with the PC or not, foreclosing the most important route to market.

But as DR-DOS matured, and Novell developed an alternative retail channel for the product, Microsoft adopted a campaign of disinformation. With the growing popularity of Microsoft’s Windows 3, which ran on top of either DOS, Microsoft wanted users to think that performance would degrade if using Windows with Novell’s rival product.

The formidable talents of Waggener Edstrom were enlisted. Microsoft’s DOS product manager Richard Freedman took the campaign to the press, vowing to “FUD DR DOS with every editorial contact made,” and to “develop key DR DOS FUD points for all press tours”.

“We’ll basically be covering all the key editors … We recommend that we ‘informally’ plant the bug of FUD in their ears. ‘Have you heard about problems with DR DOS?’ ‘That security feature is a neat idea and, gosh, such a feature would be great, but it’s just too easily circumvented.’ ‘Gee, it’s unfortunate that DR DOS can’t be loaded high all the time. MS-DOS 5.0 can.’ We’ll do this very tactfully. ‘If Digital Research came to Microsoft for help making DR DOS work with Windows, would Microsoft help them? Maybe not?’”

On Friday the Des Moines court heard this piece of testimony. It’s a video from an FTC hearing from 1993, and in the dock was Phil Barrett from Microsoft. It makes for an interesting comparison with the offering from Dave Marsh, above.

Question: Mr. Barrett, you were just asked if you had any knowledge of any Microsoft effort to produce any incompatibility between OS/2 or DR-DOS and Microsoft Windows. How do you define incompatibility within that context? What was your understanding of what you meant by that?

Answer: To prevent the products from working together.

Question: Would you consider an incompatibility something that popped up in, say, a nonfatal error message when there was no error that was being detected by that software?

Answer: No, I would not call that incompatibility.

Question: How would you make the distinction between the two?

Answer: Well, there was nothing done explicitly to prevent Windows from running on that operating system.

Question: Mr. Barrett, you were just asked if you had any knowledge of any Microsoft effort to produce any incompatibility between OS/2 or DR-DOS and Microsoft Windows. How do you define incompatibility within that context? What was your understanding of what you meant by that?

Answer: To prevent the products from working together.

Question: Would you consider an incompatibility something that popped up in, say, a nonfatal error message when there was no error that was being detected by that software?

Answer: No, I would not call that incompatibility.

Question: How would you make the distinction between the two?

Answer: Well, there was nothing done explicitly to prevent Windows from running on that operating system. That’s what is meant by incompatibility. It’s simply a message. If we played a tune, that wouldn’t be an incompatibility. That’s what is meant by incompatibility. It’s simply a message. If we played a tune, that wouldn’t be an incompatibility.

Just fancy that!

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.

Microsoft calls these vows “Windows Principles”, or “Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition”, and they reiterate many of the pledges made in 1995, 2002 and 2004.

“Through the set of voluntary Windows principles that we are announcing and adopting today, we’re taking a principled, transparent and accountable approach to the future of our operating system,” said Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith.

Some of these “principles” are familiar – others are plain strange.

Pledges you may have heard before include a promise to permit OEMs to choose their own desktop icons and remove Microsoft’s, and not to retalitate against OEMs. These were part of the 2002 Settlement.

There are promises to document its server APIs (made in 2004), and license its IP on a “fair” royalty basis (2002).

Then come the strange vows.

Microsoft will not prevent anyone from installing their own software, it says, nor will Windows “block access to any lawful Web site or impose any fee for reaching any non-Microsoft web site.” As far as we can remember, not one of these transgressions has ever happened. What Microsoft has been found guilty of in the past, however, is preventing already-installed software from running as it should (DR-DOS); and blocking access to third-party browsers (Opera). But in the latter case, it was MSN that was doing the blocking – not Windows.

“We want the developer community to know that it is free to develop, support and promote products that compete with any part of Windows,” says Microsoft.

Two months ago Microsoft and the Department of Justice agreed to renew the monitoring period, which was due to expire next year, for an additional two years.

Microsoft admitted that its documentation program “needed a reboot”. The EU is currently fining Microsoft.

“One day at a time, Lord,” said Smith.

No he didn’t – we made that bit up.

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.

WinFS Team’s Quentin Clark wrote on Friday that Microsoft would not be releasing WinFS as a plug-in for Windows XP or Windows Vista.

“These changes do mean that we are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release. With most of our effort now working towards productizing mature aspects of the WinFS project into SQL and ADO.NET, we do not need to deliver a separate WinFS offering.”

WinFS was already a depleted version of what Microsoft announced in 2001. Then, the idea was to base raw, native Windows I/O on an SQL database. Existing file systems, such as NTFS, would act as plug-ins. However this ambitious goal was first scaled back in 2003 abandoned in 2004, when Microsoft announced it would be built on top of NTFS after all. What we’d assumed was an acronym for “Windows File System” was actually the less committal “Windows Future Storage”.

A year later WinFS was formally ‘decoupled‘ from Longhorn – meaning it wouldn’t ship at the same time as Longhorn itself. Instead it would be an “out-of-band add-on pack”.

The ambition, if realized, certainly had its merits. Basic I/O semantics haven’t changed for thirty years, despite Microsoft’s attempts in the early 1990s to introduce abstraction (in the form of streams) to its Office files. As a consequence, systems conceived in the 1970s, such as Pick OS and IBM’s AS/400 minicomputer can boast more advanced, database-like features.

It’s partly as a consequence of this that today most data resides in proprietary formats – and Microsoft still fights open formats (and protocols) with a zeal. And while the world wide web provides a unified namespace, of sorts, it’s one without transactional integrity or the other trappings of a well designed database.

Yet at the time news of WinFS first leaked out, it even prompted antitrust concerns. Read how we broke the news, the fears it raised, and how the BeOS architects anticipated the problems Microsoft eventually ran into.

So how can Microsoft hope to vanquish Oracle now, if it can’t bundle a database with every copy of Windows?

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.

It’s a pity that in place of a pink-faced Microsoft employee called Robert Scoble – who told us at every opportunity that his paymaster was the most acute and most farsighted human being who ever lived – the BBC’s Newsnight couldn’t have called on former Times editor Sir Harold Evans to cast a more informed perspective.

For Evans may have set the record straight. When it’s dumbed down for public consumption, the story of Bill’s legacy to the world reads that “he made the cheap personal computer possible”. This took great courage and foresight, and it may have been years before the lightbulb lit up above anyone else – who may or may not have been up to the task of implementing it. Gates did this by pioneering a high volume, low royalty license for shrink wrap operating system software that ran on different kinds of computers. Only then did economies of scale kick in, and the price of computers fell from the many thousands to the low hundreds of dollars. This version of history is being solidified this weekend like quick drying cement.

The problem, as Evans explains in his book They Made America : From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, is that it isn’t true.

It was Gary Kildall who pioneered this model, even writing the operating system himself. CP/M was the high volume, low royalty shrink wrap OS that ran on all kinds of incompatible micros already, the day IBM called on Bill Gates to write a BASIC compiler for its first PC. When IBM called on Gates, he didn’t even have an operating system to sell, and scurried around to buy a cheap imitation of CP/M in a hurry, so he could fulfull the contract.

In the autumn of 1980, Bill’s unfamiliarity with his new purchase didn’t stop him proposing, in a story told by Stanford’s John Wharton who was Intel’s second point man for negotiations, a three way carve up of the market between IBM, Intel and Microsoft – then a company with 30 employees. If historians are to conclude that Bill “thought big”, they’ll be correct – but they may also conclude that he didn’t always “think legally”. Market carve ups are a violation of antitrust laws.

And if Gates’ innovation or courage was much in evidence over the next few years, then it kept itself very well hidden. At the same time as Gates was getting acquainted with his first OS purchase, Kildall’s Digital Research had already written its multitasking successor. It was not until twenty years later, with the role out of the NT-based Windows XP, that Microsoft could offer some of these features to consumers.

Bill’s particular brand of foresight is overlooked. He’s lauded for urging Apple to license its GUI because graphical interfaces were the future. As he wrote this, every personal computer available to the public, except the IBM PC, offered a graphical user interface. Bill’s 1995 book The Road Ahead describes a world of connected computers – connected through walled-garden behemoths like CompuServe and his own MSN Network – and doesn’t mention the internet once.

These are tedious cliches to most of you, but when the mass media lauds “stewardship”, then that implies some kind of technological foresight. It isn’t clear at all from a close reading of the record, and despite the protestation of pink-faced bloggers, that Gates was blessed with this gift.

But quit carping – aren’t computers cheap, now? And don’t we have Bill to thank for it, even if he was a bit of a stumbling opportunist?

We’ll simply point to another awkward matter of fact. Twenty years ago the personal computer in most people’s homes connected to the TV, could multitask, do colour and multimedia, and cost around $400. It’s taken Wintel twenty years to reach this price point.

And the PC still doesn’t do multimedia reliably.

We’re sticklers for awkward facts like these. Why they’re being ignored suggests two views on to why the mass media is rushing to canonize St Bill.

Is history being rewritten simply so we can confer sainthood on a modern business visionary? That we must find a Henry Ford for software, simply because there was a Henry Ford in an earlier age? This indicates a narrow and repetitive view of approaching history – and forecloses lots of other possible explanations for the way things are.

Or is history simply being ignored, with a sly and knowing wink to the sophisticated audience, so that we conclude that only a ruthless and amoral business practitioner can succeed in this business? That like OJ, or unlike Enron, it’s worth trying to get away with it? When Gary Kildall died, he was celebrated for the pleasure he took in life outside business and technology – quite unlike the monomaniacal Gates, who only in the past decade appears to have discovered there’s a world beyond the PC business, and may be overcompensating as a result.

The answer to either question is worse than the other. But when responsible media organizations who tonight are celebrating Gates achievements next turn to the thorny subject of business ethics, they may have a harder time convincing us that they’re sincere about the subject.

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.