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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Write free software -- and write it off your tax bill? ___________________ Search barnesandnoble.com for books about Microsoft ___________________ T A B L E__T A L K You're always online and it's not even part of your job: Internet addicts discuss their obsession in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Pod people By Janelle Brown Peapod, the online grocery service, sounds great -- but can it deliver? (12/17/98) Boon or boondoggle? By Nicholas Confessore The E-Rate subsidizes Net access for schools and libraries -- and your telephone company wants to kill it (12/16/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Bill Gates and Bill Clinton -- prisoners of Lawyer World (12/15/98) Internet censure-ship By Janelle Brown Can the Censure and Move On Web site make a difference? (12/14/98) Information theory and practice By Matthew DeBord Once, "information" didn't exist -- now it's everywhere. How'd that happen? (12/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

------ How does the software giant spin its own history in its reference products? BY KARLIN LILLINGTON | Back in 1991, Gore Vidal declared: "The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No first world country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent." That quotation can be found, ironically and conveniently enough, on Microsoft's Bookshelf 98 CD-ROM, a reference collection packed with 10 works including a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, atlas and a curious work called the People's Chronology -- "a concise chronicle of world events from 3 million B.C. to 1997, and the people who shaped them." Microsoft's reference products present themselves as objective repositories of information and are used as such by millions of people all over the world. Indeed, its vastly popular Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia has rapidly become a major scholastic resource for students assigned those forgettable grade-school essays on Vasco de Gama, the Declaration of Independence, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or the secret lives of raccoons. Like the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Book, what Encarta says is what children and many, many adults take to be God's truth. Yet in their own small ways, Bookshelf and Encarta are also exhibit A for the worrying trend Vidal identified. As Microsoft's hand in the creation and distribution of content continues to grow -- via overt projects like MSNBC and the Microsoft Network, along with the subtler influences the company wields through Windows itself -- it's instructive to look at how the company tells its own story in its reference works. What kind of self-benefiting spin do we find in its ostensibly objective "information products"? How does Microsoft write about Microsoft? First off, it's not shy about itself. Microsoft glories in one of the longest entries for a corporate entity in Encarta, and the longest for a technology company -- longer than venerable IBM. CEO Bill Gates gets even more verbiage under his own entry. To be fair, if Microsoft gives itself the lion's share of coverage, its entry also chronicles the charges of monopolistic business practices brought against it. All the way through June 1998, that is -- conveniently, the point at which Microsoft had a significant win, when a federal appeals court said it could go right ahead and bundle Internet Explorer with Windows 95. Microsoft proves it understands that old rule for winning friends and influencing people: always leave 'em on an upbeat note. N E X T_ P A G E .|. For Microsoft's competitors, history ends in 1993