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Kill Fair
"This is a great time to think," Dave Winer says. He's right. And he gives us perfect food for thought with three questions: Do big corporations have a role as technology goes forward? If so, what is their role? What would you be willing to give up to have open and fair competition in all aspects of technology? What do you think? I think I'll give us an introduction to the Matter of Metaphor. Because whether we like it or not, we think in metaphorical terms. And what we've had, since before the beginning of this case, is a conflict between two different ways of thinking that use almost identical vocabularies. So we talk about two different subjects while making sense only of one. This is why Microsoft lost the case. It's also why it will win on appeal. Metaphors matter. In fact, nothing matters more, because metaphors are the magma from which our mountains of words extrude. Metaphors make meaning. They are what allow us to start sentences we don't know how we'll finish, and to finish sentences we don't remember how we started. They are what allow us forget the words another person speaks or writes yet to remember what they mean. Let's take a modest example. Let's take the subect of life. If we define life literally, we might say it's a stable open biological system that supports volitional activity. Or a sequence of sentient behaviors. Or a period of existence. Or an animating force released by genetic fortuities. But we speak of life by none of those definitions. In fact, we don't use definitions at all. We use metaphors. In particular, travel. Look again at Dave's first question: "Do big corporations have a role as technology goes forward?" There are two metaphors expressing this sentence. I'll skip the first, but you can see it in the word role. The second speaks for the metaphor life is a journey. We understand life almost entirely in terms of travel:
There are other metaphors for life: garden, food, burden, etc. But life is a journeyis a conceptual metaphor of the first order. Journeyis an inescapably formative metaphorical concept for life. We cannot help thinking and talking in terms of it. Go ahead: try talking about life without using travel language. You might succeed, but you might not make sense, for the simple reason that everybody uses the same metaphor. When Dave says "goes forward," we all know exactly what he means. My point is, he's not just talking about technology. He's also talking about life. But we agree about life. We don't agree about competition, and that's why we have trouble making sense of Microsoft. When the Feds talk about "competition" and "competitiveness," they are using a conceptual metaphor. And it's not the one Microsoft uses. Or at least not the only one. If you watch Microsoft closely, or work with them (as many of us have), you discover that Microsoft is not a just competitive company. It's a combative one. There's a huge difference:
These metaphors conceive "competition" and "competitiveness" very differently. But here's the problem: they use nearly identical vocabularies. By both metaphors, companies "attack," "defend," "flank," "command," "dominate," "control," "retrench" and so on. Competitive companies express those terms strictly — and consciously — as metaphors. Combative companies mean them literally. The difference is both subtle and absolute:
In civilized cultures, business is not governed by rules of war. The "competitiveness" about which business law speaks does not comprehend the right of one company to "cut off the air supply" of another -- unless, of course, it is "fair." In The Trial, Microsoft labored to convince Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that its markets -- especially that benign new winners-are-all world we call the Internet -- were battlefields, and that every competitor's very existence was under constant threat. Microsoft failed because Judge Jackson, like the legal system that employs him, conceives competition in terms of sports, not war. There was no way Jackson could buy Microsoft's argument. There are rules for competition, especially between monopolies and less advantaged companies. Microsoft broke them. Now Judge Jackson's wants to break Microsoft. Literally. It's a death penalty. Judge Jackson isn't being King Solomon here. He wants to behead the damn thing. Chop it in two. Or three. Or giblets, who cares. They bullied weaker companies in the marketplace. They attempted corporacide on Netscape. Worst of all, they fouled his court with lies and baseless denials of obvious facts. And he's right, of course. One of the trial's most ludicrous moments came when Robert Muglia, a Microsoft executive, attempted to spin a Bill Gates email away from exactly what it said, which was that he was "hardcore about NOT supporting" a hunk of Java technology. When Jackson had heard enough, he yelled "No! and "Stop!" at the witness. "By asking the judge to swallow such absurdities as Muglia's testimony," wrote Joe Nocera in Fortune, "Microsoft instead gave Jackson an excuse to swallow nothing." So he didn't. So imagine you're Microsoft for a moment. This is a life-or-death matter. It has been clear since Day Zero that winning with Jackson was a lost cause. You're a combative company. You can't beat the proscecution -- they do have a strong antitrust case, at least by their own terms. But you can beat Jackson, by having his judgement overturned on appeal. See, Judge Jackson doesn't have the final power to execute Microsoft, which belongs to the appeals court or the Supreme Court. He does, however, have the power to save Microsoft, if he makes enough mistakes. So use Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy. Stay on the defensive, dodge constantly, and look for the other guy to make mistakes. Better yet, invite them. The prosecution has more than the burden of proof here; they have the burden of their own rules. If they break enough of them, the final ruling goes to the defendant, whose innocence is presumed -- also by the rules. Indeed, Microsoft attorneys have said for some time that they expect to win on appeal. And their offers to settle have never come far enough to please the government. Why? Because they were never serious. Because Microsoft expected to win on appeal anyway. And they will. They're fighting for their lives, and they do know the rules. And make no mistake. Microsoft's life is different than most other companies out there. They're one of the few companies on Earth that's too big and too clear about its itentity to ever think about selling out to somebody else. They have no exit strategy, and never did. But this isn't story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about Netscape. The case against Microsoft turned mostly on Microsoft's behavior toward Netscape, whose air supply Microsoft famously wished to cut off. Netscape, and the Feds, had a case. But nobody gives Netscape sufficient credit for choking itself. And nobody gives the press credit for covering "The Browser War" as anything other than a sports event. Which it wasn't. At the first Netscape conference in 1996, Jim Clark responded angrily to a question about "polarizing" remarks made by Netscape people. "They're out to kill us!" he yelled. "That has a polarizing effect!" Indeed, it does. But Netscape hardly played the innocent here. This new market never looked like a playing field. Not for a minute. Here's how it looked to me on December 11, 1995, a few days after Microsoft announced its internet strategy --
I learn from the papers that the desktop world has fallen under the iron grip of the most wealthy and powerful warlord in the galaxy. With boundless greed for money and control, Bill Gates of Microsoft now seeks to extend his evil empire across all of cyberspace. The galaxy's only hope is a small but popular rebel force called Netscape. Led by a young pilot (Marc Andreessen as Luke Skywalker), a noble elder (Jim Clark as Obi-wan Kanobe) and a cocky veteran (Jim Barksdale as Han Solo), Netscape's mission is joined by the crafty and resourceful Java People from Sun. Heavy with portent, the headlines tromp across the pages (cue the Death Star music -- dum dum dum, dum da dum, dum da dummm)... The mind's eye conjures a vision of The Emperor, deep in the half-built Death Star of Microsoft's new Internet Strategy, looking across space at the Rebel fleet, his face twisted with contempt. "Your puny forces cannot win against this fully operational battle station!" he growls. But the rebels are confident. "In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain," Marc Andreessen says. "What Microsoft just did was move into our terrain." And Microsoft knows its strengths. December 7th, The Wall Street Journal writes, Bill Gates "issued a thinly veiled warning to Netscape and other upstarts that included a reference to the Pearl Harbor attack on the same date in 1941." Exciting stuff. But is there really a war going on? Should there be? Clearly, both Microsoft and Netscape were engaged in combat here. And at first Netscape fought brilliantly. Its adoption of LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) instantly undermined Microsoft's plans to organize the networked world around its own proprietary directory. For a good year after Microsoft's December '95 announcement, Netscape looked like it could do no wrong. It was too fast, too smart, too plugged into the hacker community that made the Net in the first place. It was a sports car being chased up a mountain road by a tractor trailer. It held the lead as long as it drove hard, fast and smart. But somewhere along the way, Netscape got fixated with the truck in the rear view mirror. That's where they were looking when they drove off the cliff. Why? Here are a few reasons, none of which have shit to do with Microsoft --
I know that last point a little too well, since I paid for that damn browser the whole time they charged for it, and I never got useful tech support. One time a tech support person told me that the browser "didn't matter" to the company because all it cared about was server software. Microsoft's decision to make the browser free was a brilliant chess move that was utterly lost on Netscape, which was unwilling to make a reciprocal sacrifice. To be fair, maybe it was unable. In late '95, most of its revenues came from selling the browser. But if they had continued to lead, the threat would have been small and the difference would have been a value-add worth the money they charged for it. But when Netscape started to lose the war, they decided to invoke the Rules. They moved over to the sports metaphor. This whole thing was about a playing field, not a battlefield. It was about fairness. And here we are, asking Dave's second question: What would you be willing to give up to have open and fair competition in all aspects of technology? Easy, the war metaphor. But to do that, we need to bring in the rulemakers and the referees. Do we want that? I don't think so. I also don't think it matters as much as it did in 1996. Because we're beginning to realize that what makes the Net so valuable is that it can't be described by either sports or war metaphors. When we use them, we miss what the Net really is. It's us. It's our environment. And we're building it ourselves. Together. It's the only way. We cannot do it if we are, as Whitman put it, "demented with the mania of owning things." Both sports and war are about victory and defeat over property. Whether it's land, a trophy, money or bragging rights, it's still property. It's something only one party can claim. There's room for all kinds of business in this new world. But only if we learn and prove, over and over, that most civilizing of principles: that the greatest goods are ours, not mine alone.
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