Joseph K - my guy

Published 12 March 2001

World War 3.0: Microsoft and its enemies Ken Auletta Profile Books, 438pp, £17.99 ISBN 186197390X The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age Pekka Himanen Secker & Warburg, 233pp, £12

As the Washington judiciary closed in on Microsoft, Ken Auletta asked Bill Gates whether he sometimes felt like Joseph K, accused of crimes he did not understand. "I don't know Joseph K, sorry," replied Gates. Auletta explained he was the hero of Franz Kafka's The Trial. "He sounds like my kind of guy!" said Gates. Two points emerge from this. First, for all his privileged background, wealth and expensive education, you cannot assume that Gates will be alert even to the most obvious cultural references. Having spoken at length to the man, I can confirm that this is the case. Second, Auletta's Joseph K parallel is exact. Gates has never understood the crimes of which he stands accused.

The charge, pursued with increasing rigour by the United States Department of Justice, is that Microsoft abused its monopoly power. Crucially, it attempted, almost successfully, to destroy Netscape, whose Navigator web browser was seen as a fundamental threat to Microsoft's overwhelming grip on the personal computer market. Such action, argued government lawyers, was a clear breach of antitrust legislation.

Reading Auletta's exhaustive account of the trial and its aftermath, it becomes clear that Gates does not understand this for two reasons. First, like many US industrial barons before him, he seems to view antitrust laws as an affront to the American way, a federal punishment for individual success. Second, he is constantly aware that, in the computer business, competition can emerge from nowhere. It was Microsoft, after all, that outwitted the seemingly impregnable IBM. Daily, in his mind, Gates faces a vast cohort of known potential enemies (such as Sun Microsystems, AOL Time Warner, Linux, even AT&T) and an even vaster cohort of unknown enemies - the nerds and hackers who might, at any moment, emerge with something better, faster and less crash-prone than Windows. In such an environment, reason Gates and many others, the government is wasting its time trying to break Microsoft's monopoly. The market, at any moment, is likely to do a better job.

The first point is simply wrong - antitrust laws are what make capitalism work for the greater good. The second point is arguable - it is quite possible that the frenetic world of information technology does, indeed, create a new form of competitive environment. But either way, Gates's conviction that he was a victim of a conspiracy between government and his competitors led him and his legal team into a catastrophic miscalculation. They went, in company parlance, "hardcore", treating the trial and prosecution evidence with contempt. Gates's appallingly shifty video deposition was a disaster, convincing the world and, most importantly, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that he was hiding something. Torn apart by David Boies - regarded as the greatest trial lawyer in America - they lost on almost every count. A subsequent attempt to negotiate a deal failed; now we await the appeal and, ultimately, the possible break-up of Microsoft.

As Auletta shows in World War 3.0, all of this could have been avoided if Microsoft had been just a little less hardcore before the legal proceedings got under way. The government was looking for a settlement. But Microsoft was - and this theme crops up again and again in the book - immature. Confronted with a row about how it was playing the game, the firm's response was to take home the ball. This was a company attitude that began as a personal one. Gates's parents, "thinking their son immature and an underachiever", sent him to a psychiatrist when he was 11. Perhaps this is what led to his obsession with computers. Certainly, the life of a software writer can result in a childlike narrowness of focus. "We don't hire well-rounded people here," I was told by one Microsoft executive when I visited the company in Seattle.

But computer nerds compensate for their narrowness of focus by the breadth of their vision. They are a brotherhood intent upon changing the world for the better. Unfortunately, the trial affirmed for the general public what the nerds had known all along. Gates and Microsoft were not part of the brotherhood. Their software was not ushering in a new world order, it was business as usual. The trial made the company, in Auletta's words, "a less cool place to work", and resulted in a serious brain drain of top executives. Now, assuming Microsoft survives intact, it has to rebuild its image as the benignly clever gatekeeper of the information age. If you want to know how this happened, Auletta's thorough, conscientious, fair-minded and generally readable book is the place to start.

To learn more about the ideology of the information age, you should also read Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic. The book is introduced by Linus Torvalds, the Finnish software writer who created Linux, the operating system that now represents the most serious challenge to Microsoft's Windows. In fact, "created" is not quite right. Torvalds is a hacker, in the best, non-destructive sense of the word, rather than a businessman. From the beginning, Linux was conceived as an open system. Its "source code" is available to anybody who wants to tinker with it (a good deal of the Microsoft issue hinges on its refusal to release its source code). As a result of this unpaid tinkering by thousands of hackers, Linux has become a spectacularly stable system - although, probably for the same reason, it is not yet sufficiently user-friendly to attract the average computer user.

This open ideal, in which nobody owns anything and people work unpaid, becomes in Himanen's book a new model for work. Good hacking - as opposed to what Himanen calls "cracking" - is a form of intensive, creative play. Historically, he locates it as a move away from the masochistic Protestant work ethic and back to something like the pre-Reformation idea of work as an almost casual aspect of a life lived in the light of a higher truth - salvation in Catholicism, freedom in the information age. Gates's betrayal was that, having started out as a hacker, he became a full-blooded Protestant. In Microsoft, "the profit motive has taken precedence over passion".

I think there is a general truth here. Information technology is changing work patterns, and much of what Himanen says about the peculiar nature of information technology is accurate. But the picture he paints is bleaker than he realises. The hacker ideology is anarchic and, as a result, it offers nothing to those excluded from the new technology by inclination or inability. Furthermore, its love of the dissemination of information makes it inimical to the transmission of knowledge. By what standards are we to judge this flood of information? The hacker, being too radically anti-authoritarian, cannot say.

The game is given away by Manuel Castells in his epilogue to the book: "Cultural expression," he writes, "becomes patterned around the kaleidoscope of a global, electronic hypertext." Or, to put it another way, in the new world, nobody will recognise the name of Joseph K.

Bryan Appleyard's Brave New Worlds: genetics and the human experience is published by HarperCollins (£8.99)

Post this article to