Lost Highway page 3

The rise of the Internet, Gates freely admits, caught Microsoft off-guard and now challenges its primacy. Most analysts will tell you that the Net threatens Microsoft because it can render the company's stranglehold on PC operating systems irrelevant. Once you're plugged into the Net it doesn't much matter whether you're using a Windows PC, a Mac or a toaster oven.

That may well be true. But the Net challenges Microsoft on an even deeper level, at the root of its total-control ideology. This is a company -- as chronicled in Fred Moody's absorbing book "I Sing the Body Electronic" -- where "vague" is a stinging insult and where the worst thing you can say about something is that it is "random." "Under Microsoft's present value structure," Moody writes, "the sole measure of a person's worth [is] his or her ability to think analytically."

Such a culture works fine when you're producing structures of code -- spreadsheets, word processors, whatever. Microsoft's peculiar institutional genius, Moody makes clear, lies in constantly challenging its analytical engineering mindset with the relentless demands of its ship-early, upgrade-often business strategy. The will-to-control collides with the pressure-to-ship, leaving employees with a deep sense of failure even as they're reaping untold riches in stock options. But the Microsoft ethos starts to unravel in an anarchic, communication-based environment like the Internet -- where "vague" is a fact of life and "random," more often than not, is cool. You can't rely on a seize-ground-early strategy when the ground is always moving under your feet.

The networked future will demand that companies abandon strategies of control and accept uncertainty.

Reading between the lines of "The Road Ahead," you get the sense that Gates, like many other corporate leaders, can't wait for the Internet to slow down and calm down -- to become less random. But that's just not the way it's going to be.

The Net -- today's Internet, tomorrow's "highway" and the far future's whatever -- is infinitely more complex than any single piece of software, even one as overgrown and bug-ridden as Microsoft Word. It will not stand still long enough for a company like Microsoft to put a product through enough upgrades to "get it right." It will never be perfected; even its bugs will have bugs.

To thrive in such an environment will require an ability to build systems that are more like self-regulating biological entities than mathematically precise formulas. (Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control" offers a good roadmap to this future.) Long-term market share will at best be a byproduct of luck, not planning. (Netscape, take note.) And those who stop long enough to troubleshoot by hand will find that the world has raced by them in the time it takes to track down one nettlesome General Protection Fault.

This is the aspect of the networked future that Gates' book ignores, for all its ritual mouthing of business school-mantras about flexibility and adaptation. Gates' "road ahead" is straight and flat, and it promises to put you in the driver's seat at work and at home. The road most of us will experience will be more of a bumpy roller-coaster ride -- fun for many, most likely, but neither smooth nor manageable, and certainly not under anyone's control.

As we careen down this path, we will find some solacing entertainment in the unfolding saga of the Gates House. Gates' plan for a wired-to-the-max "home of the future" -- rigged with centrally controlled music, "smart" lighting and video-wall entertainment -- looks sumptuous, if a little antiseptic, in the demo on the "Road Ahead" CD-ROM. But does anyone really expect it to work? It's a bug-fest just waiting for Gates' first dinner party, whose guests will doubtless learn the hard way that the absolute control promised by the computer industry is and always has been a myth.

Buyers of "The Road Ahead" don't have to wait as long. They can just load up the CD-ROM and click their way to its "Ask Bill" page, where Gates answers questions about the future. The video, which can often be balky on a CD-ROM, works just fine. It's the grammar that's buggy. "How will new technologies effect the home?" "How will the information highway effect social interaction?" In question after question, "effect" keeps appearing where "affect" should.

You can just see the proofreaders rolling their heads: "We spell-checked it!" But spell-check doesn't work when you've mistaken one properly spelled word for another. For Bill Gates, his colleagues and his acolytes, language -- like so much else that's human -- may just be too random.