Dumber people can run Windows

YOU WOULD THINK that by now major corporations - especially major corporations who have spent a lot of time in court having their email entered as exhibits A through ZZZZZZ - would have some sense about what they commit to electrons. Yet this week the Register leaked yet another memo from Microsoft ( Here) on the subject of Linux.*

The gist seems to be that Microsoft is about to go into full-compete mode against Linux, and hopes to have a report soon to show that Windows is actually cheaper. The tone of the message - aggressive, upbeat, full of internal jargon, us-against-them - reminds me of nothing more than the 1994 letter sent by a Scientology insider outlining the organization's plans for dealing with the criticism it was attracting on the Net ( here).

If you don't remember Microsoft's earlier memos ( on the subject of Linux, they essentially verified that the company thought of open source software as a genuine threat to its business, and surfaced in the anti-trust trial.

Now, the paranoid explanation is that *of course* Microsoft knows its memos are being leaked, and it's doing it deliberately in order to make itself look like less of a monopoly. Or to put the frighteners on. On the other hand, the company is genuinely rabid about believing that Windows-with-everything is the best way for everyone to live.

The thing is there are situations in which Linux can be an expensive choice. Obviously these do not include embedded applications and situations in which someone sets up a server for a client and it sits there spitting out mail or files or wooden nickels or whatever without intervention. In a situation like that, many small businesses say that Linux is indeed the much cheaper choice: more reliable, requiring lower hardware overheads, requiring less in the way of service and support, and more scalable. Fine.

The issue comes when you start to think about Linux as an alternative for the desktop. As networking consultant David Morton keeps telling me, for small businesses this can be a real problem if you need to be able to recruit temporary staff. Every temp in the country knows Word; how many know StarOffice? Then there are issues like the learning curve - can anyone doubt it's harder to get started with Linux? - and the much greater ease of finding software that does what you need under the dominant platform. Both those problems matter to home users and small businesses, those you might think would be most eager to save money on software, partly because they have limited resources for training or writing software to fill in the gaps left by the open source community (printer driver, anyone?), and partly because they have children who want to play GAMES.

To be fair, the learning curve difference can be exaggerated. For years now, my "choice" of operating system has been dominated by a) wanting to run a discontinued personal information manager called Ecco and the familiar CIX offline reader Ameol, neither of which has non-Windows versions; b) wanting to be able to review software for magazines; c) maximum reliability consistent with a) and b) above. I run Windows 2000. But I'm not happy about it: people complain about Linux documentation, but Windows 2000 support is all either written for technically illiterate end users or technically guruate system administrators. If you get to a really difficult topic in the help, it tells you to consult your network administrator. Hey, that's me! I am certainly willing to believe that as you become more advanced technically the system of commands and predictable responses makes UNIX-like systems ultimately easier to manage ( here). I want Linux to succeed. I think it's genuinely important that we have an alternative, not just to Windows but to the regime of proprietary, closed software that has taken over the world since Bill Gates wrote his famous 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists, and called hobbyists copying Altair BASIC "thieves". Computers are the most versatile tool ever invented by humans, and yet most of them sit there as more or less closed boxes, increasingly inaccessible to end users. But for every Linux user I know who swears it does everything a computer user could ever want and Microsoft is crap I know two people who've tried it and make the sign of the cross when you say its name.

So, there are two responses to this leaked memo. One is to laugh as incredulously as people laughed when the paper diaper manufacturers claimed that their products contribute less to environmental damage than cloth ones ( See Here). The other is to remember that the paper diaper manufacturers convinced a lot of people and make Linux better. FAST.

*I USE THE term Linux because that's what Microsoft called it in the leaked memo and because it's short. But as Richard Stallman ( here) points out, a large percentage of what's distributed as Linux is software developed as part of the GNU project, which began years before Torvalds posted the first version of his kernel online.

Stallman feels - with some justice - that the operating system should more properly be referred to as GNU/Linux. µ

Previous Columns
2001 in review
Care in the community
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
net.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.