In mission number nine of the Terran “episode” of “Starcraft,” the much-anticipated real-time strategy release from Blizzard Entertainment, Kerrigan must survive. Her death equaled my defeat. I had to start over.

I considered sampling another episode — how about those Zerg and Protoss missions? I knew that “Starcraft” had been getting high marks from hard-core gamers for its imaginative creation of three unique races whose widely varying capabilities imposed radically different strategic imperatives. But I couldn’t leave Kerrigan’s body in a pool of her own blood, either. I desperately wanted to know what was going to happen to the Terrans. A major drama had been unfolding between the rebel forces of Arcturus Mensk and the ruthless, tyrannical Confederacy. I had to be there to see it through. The Confederacy was clearly evil, but I was beginning to have my suspicions about this Mensk character, too.

I was hooked — not by the twitch of a finger but by a dramatic story, one created entirely by the game itself, without depending on reference to some classic science-fiction movie or book.

Judged purely as a game, “Starcraft” isn’t quite the acme of the genre that some fans and reviewers have made it out to be. It lacks the micromanagement intricacies of the robot-war maelstrom that is “Total Annihilation.” The graphics, while stunning, aren’t quite as pleasing to the eye as the historically based “Age of Empires.” But nothing I’ve seen comes as close to integrating a story line with cinematic values into a computer game as well as “Starcraft.” As a game, “Starcraft” is merely great; as a science fiction experience, “Starcraft” is sublime.

“Starcraft” is proof of what attention to production values coupled with artistry at every level — programming, animation, writing, even “direction” — can achieve. Ever since computer games began to stake their claim to the entertainment dollar, a vocal minority of critics has complained that obsessive attention to graphics has entailed a marked decline in the actual quality of game play. And more often than not, the critics were correct: More attention — and more of your computer’s resources — had been devoted to making something look cool, or to creating a 30-second movie clip, than to making the game work as a game. The history of computer gaming is littered with ill-advised attempts to apply cinematic conceits that end up looking clunky and stupid. Anyone remember “Johnny Mnemonic”?

But now, gamers have the right to be euphoric as they anticipate what is yet to come in the wake of games like “Starcraft.” For one thing, new computers are now powerful enough that there really aren’t any trade-offs in terms of allocating computer resources. “Starcraft” has video segments as compelling as anything a science fiction fan might see on “Deep Space Nine” or “Babylon 5,” but they don’t get in the way of the actual game. Furthermore, a major game release of the “Starcraft” sort isn’t the product of just a couple of geeks hacking away at code in the wee hours. A game-developing “studio” such as Blizzard Entertainment employs the talents of a legion of writers, sound engineers, voice actors, coders, graphic designers and, of course, marketing specialists.

In “Starcraft’s” case, none of them appear to be amateurs. From the thousands of words of historical background provided on each race in the “Starcraft” manual to the delightfully “Blade Runner”-esque techno sounds that accompany each click of the mouse, every note rings true. One is almost tempted to cry: Bring on the “Starcraft” novellas, the movie, the television pilot! If “Mortal Kombat” could become a film, what are we waiting for? Arnold Schwarzenegger as Arcturus Mensk? It could happen.

Except it doesn’t really need to. The game is already here. It’s got a plot, it’s interactive and it’s open-ended. Who needs TV or even Hollywood? For me, the power of “Starcraft’s” narrative is such that I haven’t yet dared pick up the alien mantle and start my diabolic efforts to massacre all Terran marines — even if, as a reviewer, I feel somewhat obliged to. So sue me. “Starcraft’s” designers put a great deal of care into setting up a story line that requires individual mastery of each mission before delivering a sequence of dramatic payoffs. I’ve bought into it. I plan to slog my way through.

But it is worth pointing out that no one is required to play each mission episode, or even sit through a single video clip. Contemporary computer games revel in permitting multiple approaches to game interaction. Not only does “Starcraft,” like all state-of-the-art, real-time strategy games, provide numerous options — single-player, multiplayer, missions with set objectives, wide-open skirmishes and so on — but Blizzard, following the lead of id software, creator of “Quake” and “Doom,” has made sure to include software tools such as map and campaign editors that allow game players to create their own scenarios.

Certainly, if the scenarios provided proved to be boring or unchallenging, I’d be happy to grow my own. But for now, I really must find out how the future of the galaxy is going to play out, as the designers of “Starcraft” have intended. Commander Kerrigan will live again. Death to the Protoss!

But my suspicions grew after I arrived at the doors of Transmeta, a one-story, low-slung stucco-roofed office building with impenetrably dark floor-to-ceiling windows. The trees dotting the parking lot looked much older than my dogeared map. Had the building been constructed around the trees? Or had these trees been shipped in, fully grown — a minor detail of state-of-the-art landscaping practice? I’d seen it happen before.

As I wandered around the Transmeta building sizing up the trees, I reflected that I was acting just a bit paranoid. But with good reason, I reassured myself, as I glanced over my shoulder, half-expecting to see Thomas Pynchon lurking about. Think about it: The very name Transmeta — a combination of Latin and Greek words that together could mean “above the beyond” or “across the next level ” — connotes a meaninglessness so vast it might be profound. Or maybe not.

Once upon a time, only a Pynchon would have dared such silliness. And only a Pynchon could have conjured up the Transmeta scenario: A start-up company backed in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen attracts international attention by hiring one of the most famous programmers in the world — free-software hero Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system. Then it refuses to say a single word about what he or the rest of the company is cooking up behind closed doors.

The story of Transmeta is laced with the kind of satirical geek humor that was once safely confined between the covers of novels by Pynchon or Neal Stephenson but is now irresistibly infecting the real-life operating system of Silicon Valley. The Web page for Transmeta says only: “This web page is not here yet.” If you peek at the source code for the page, hoping for illumination, you’re informed, “There are no secret messages in the source code to this Web page.” In a particularly Pynchonesque stroke of ironic bravado, Transmeta even paid good money two years ago to a San Mateo consultant for the construction of a “corporate identity package.” Apparently it’s not easy, in the late ’90s, to be a cipher. Even secrecy needs a branding campaign.

So what is Transmeta — a company that makes the words “low profile” seem brassily exhibitionist — up to? The consensus is that the hardware engineers and software programmers at Transmeta are “top-notch” and “incredibly bright.” “They’ve got an unbelievably dense crop of talent,” says EE Times technology columnist Alexander Wolfe. But no one seems to know what all these brilliant minds are doing. All roads to Transmeta lead straight to zipped lips sealed by nondisclosure agreements.

“They have been incredibly secretive,” says Nathan Brookwood, chief chip analyst for Dataquest. “They’re not talking, haven’t been talking, and they’ve been at it for over a year, almost two years. You’d think they would have something by now.”

“I’ve known [Transmeta CEO and founder] Dave Ditzel for 15 years,” says independent chip designer John Wharton, “and I still don’t have the foggiest notion what they are doing. I’ve asked Dave, and he just smiles and says, come on down, sign an NDA and I’ll tell you.”

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Despite the fact that hardly anybody who hasn’t signed an NDA can say an intelligent word about Transmeta, many technology watchers on the Net believe the company is up to “something wonderful” — something that will change the computing world.

After all, Transmeta hired Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is the epitome of programming “cool.” Therefore, Transmeta is cool.

“For a start-up, Transmeta has unusually high popularity,” says Unix consultant Tim Berger. “This is partly due to Linus’ popularity and his
freely available operating system. Linux rules. I think the general perception is that something different is brewing at Transmeta, something far more interesting than the average start-up,” says Berger. “This perception is probably a reality.”

Linux rules because to millions of geeks it represents an alternative to the Windows way of doing things, the Bill Gates stranglehold over the computing world. Transmeta is basking in Torvalds’ reflected grandeur — and not wholly without reason. Many Transmeta programmers are active on Linux-related mailing lists and newsgroups. Transmeta has even taken over the job of hosting the Web site where updates of the core source code of Linux — the kernel — are made available for download. Torvalds has also made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t have accepted the job at Transmeta if he hadn’t been guaranteed the right to continue working on Linux.

Some Linux devotees hope, then, that somehow Transmeta might be able to do for hardware what Linux is doing for software. Together, Transmeta and Torvalds could free the world from the “Wintel duopoly” — the domination of the entire computing industry by Microsoft and Intel.

No wonder then, that a shock went through the Linux community when the news spread across the Net on April 1 that Microsoft had bought Transmeta. Sure, most readers quickly realized the prank was an April Fool’s joke, but the underlying anxiety still rang true. What was Torvalds doing in the cruel world of Silicon Valley, where dreams are bought and sold every day via stock swaps, and the goal of many a start-up is simply to become successful enough to be bought by Microsoft?

After all, Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is a major investor in Transmeta. One worried Linux fan even theorized a “nightmare scenario” in which Transmeta is actually controlled by Allen, and Gates had asked his old high school buddy to make Torvalds “an offer he can’t refuse.”

Sounds crazy, huh? Torvalds seemed to think so.

“Where do people find these rumors?” he posted to Usenet. “Paul Allen is a stockholder, and he just happens to be one of the ones you find when you do a search for [Transmeta] on the Net. But ‘controlled by’? Not even close.”

Most likely there is no nefarious, Redmond-hatched plan to neutralize Torvalds’ threat to Microsoftian world domination by locking him up in a hush-hush start-up thousands of miles from his native Finland.
There are certainly plenty of reasons why a company working on a dramatically new chip might covet Torvalds’ expertise. As chip designer Wharton observes, it’s increasingly impossible to separate the worlds of hardware and software. Plugging into the Linux community could give any new hardware product a leg up on its competitors.

At the very least, Transmeta has reaped massive publicity benefits simply by hiring Torvalds. Michael Learmonth, a reporter for the San Jose Metro who wrote a major feature on Torvalds a year ago, recalls that Transmeta executives seemed very “excited” at the prospect of a cover story on Torvalds. But after much deliberation, they would only allow the following information to be released about Linus’ role at Transmeta: “Linus Torvalds works for Transmeta. Transmeta is a corporation located in Santa Clara.”

“It seemed to me that they were trying to generate a little bit of heat just because they had a big name in Linus Torvalds,” says Learmonth. “They knew that it was getting notice.”

And notice carries market value — regardless of what Transmeta’s business turns out to be. Suppose Transmeta does announce a new product, and then immediately decides to go public and offer stock for sale. The scene is straight out of a wacky Silicon Valley novel: A horde of free-software fanatics rushes to buy the stock, making Transmeta employees and investors instant millions.

If the story of Transmeta proves anything, it is that fiction and reality are merging fast out there on Freedom Circle.

Or are they? We won’t know for sure anytime soon. In an e-mail message, Transmeta CEO Ditzel predicted that Transmeta wouldn’t announce a product for at least a year, and told me that “your readership might find our product plans a bit mundane.” He noted that “we had a major change in direction a few months ago, and that has slowed us down a bit.”

Slowed us down from what? Ditzel wouldn’t say anything more.

Ditzel has a stellar reputation in the chip business. Formerly the director of Sun’s Sparc Laboratories, two decades ago he was one of the earliest proponents of the RISC architecture for chip design — a major breakthrough in computing. To this day, the Sparc workstation is one of the few alternatives to the Wintel duopoly — leading some Transmeta observers to wonder if he’s plotting another major chip breakthrough.

By their own admission, as evidenced by job postings to Usenet newsgroups, Transmeta is a “fabless semiconductor corporation” that plans one day to ship “a revolutionary new product.” “Fabless” means that Transmeta doesn’t have a fabricating plant — it just designs chips. Allen’s Wired World site adds another nibblet of information: Transmeta is supposedly working on “Alternative VLSI engines for multimedia PCs.” This, however, like Transmeta’s own name, is so vague a description as to be useless. VLSI (“very large scale integration”) refers to chips with thousands of electronic components — in other words, just about any chip on the market. And any new PC is a multimedia PC.

EE Times columnist Wolfe says that Transmeta has had several changes of direction: “Initially, industry scuttlebutt had them doing a PowerPC clone. Then it was a Java processor. Now, they may be planning a media chip which can tie into network-computing environments.”

There is some hard evidence that Transmeta is working on chip designs for graphics processing. Transmeta is a member of VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, as well as AGP-IF, the Accelerated Graphics Port Implementers Forum. Then there’s a reference at the Elpin Systems Web site suggesting that Transmeta “makes things that go faster.” Elpin’s president, Larry Coffey, refused comment, citing an NDA, but Elpin’s main business is manufacturing test equipment for graphics hardware.

Both Brookwood of Dataquest and Wharton believe that Transmeta must be working on a chip that is in some way compatible with the “x86 architecture” that is at the heart of all IBM-compatible PCs. As Brookwood notes, this is a $23 billion-a-year market, 80 percent of which is controlled by Transmeta’s neighbor, Intel.

“Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that was where the money was, x86 is where the money is, ” says Brookwood.

The available evidence, then, suggests that Transmeta is working on some kind of superfast video processing chip that will plug into IBM-compatible PCs.

One senses Pynchon suddenly becoming bored. A chip that provides speedy video processing isn’t exactly “revolutionary,” nor is it the kind of breakthrough that will galvanize millions. Why the elaborate secrecy?

Of course, all this could be clever disinformation meant to distract avid Web surfers from Transmeta’s secret plan to turn Silicon Valley on its head and topple Intel by pioneering a dramatically new chip architecture. Wharton himself, an Intel veteran, has dreamed of such a breakthrough. The key, says Wharton, would be devising some kind of superfast new chip that would allow for dramatic performance gains with new programs, but at the same time be able to run all your old Windows “x86″ programs.

“The sort of thing I would do if I was in Dave’s shoes would be to design a processor that can run existing x86 programs somehow, though perhaps suboptimally,” says Wharton, “and then have a native mode where it runs the program with balls-to-the-walls optimum performance. These two designs aren’t incompatible.”

Such an approach might explain the hiring of Torvalds. Suppose you created a new ultrafast graphics chip, Wharton surmises, “and you were able to use the Linux community to port Unix operating systems and compilers to this new architecture. Instantly you would have access to the entire body of Unix software that is out there. If you are throwing a new chip out on the market, it would make immense strategic sense to involve the Linux community in your efforts.”

Even more intriguingly, Wharton suggests that the approach he outlines would mean that the very name Transmeta would actually be “perfectly reasonable.”

“What are the qualities of this approach to processor design?” asks Wharton. “You start with a meta architecture that’s at a meta level compared to the programs that you are trying to run and then you take your existing programs and translate them into the existing meta architecture on the fly.”

I asked Dave Ditzel what the name Transmeta signified.

“The name Transmeta has no particular meaning,” answered Ditzel. “When you register a company, you need a name that isn’t in use. It’s surprisingly hard to find one. We just took prefixes and suffixes and combined them until we got a name that was unique.”

Oh well. Never mind. Of course, if I were running in paranoid mode, wouldn’t I expect Ditzel to say exactly that? We’ll just have to wait and see.

But for how long? Transmeta was founded in late 1995. It received upward of $12 million in capital in 1997. Michael Learmonth, the San Jose Metro reporter, recalls that a Transmeta executive suggested they were on the verge of a major announcement — almost a year ago. Three years is a long time for a start-up in Silicon Valley to go without bringing a product to market. As Dataquest analyst Brookwood notes, “The last company that was this secretive was MicroUnity [which promised a breakthrough "media processor chip"]. And they spent an enormous amount of money and produced nothing.”

But Wolfe disagrees with the hypothesis that Transmeta’s delays to market signify trouble.

“I think they’re proceeding with the deliberate caution that befits a company intent on being a player for the long haul,” says Wolfe. “Dave Ditzel won’t let his company crash and burn the way MicroUnity did. Indeed, that’s precisely the reason Transmeta’s game plan has shifted so many times … Ditzel’s sort of like a surfer, trying to catch just the right technology wave and ride it for all its worth.”

“If I was handicapping, I’d bet on Transmeta,” says Wolfe. “I expect them to succeed because they realize that incremental progress — taking one small step forward at a time — pays off much more handsomely than the promise of ‘revolution.’”

Except that, as least as proven by its job postings, Transmeta is promising revolution. And Linux geeks all over the world are praying for it. They’d do well to ask themselves the same question I asked in Transmeta’s parking lot. Are those trees for real?

Welcome to today’s foremost computing battleground: All the big guns are pointed at the user interface, and favorable “icon placement” is the order of the day. It’s a war wreaking havoc with the ideals of interface design, say specialists in human-computer interaction.

The user interface should be as helpful, easy to use and consumer-empowering as possible, they argue. But today, such goals conflict with economic imperatives. As the desktop increasingly becomes the gateway to the entire info-universe, corporate fortunes rise and fall according to the intricacies of interface layout and design. And no one understands this new reality better than Microsoft.

Endless, personalizable reconfigurability is a key part of the appeal of the modern graphical user interface’s desktop. The debut of Windows 95 sabotaged that ideal by littering the desktop with icons that were difficult to remove, and inserting garish “splash screens” that emblazon the Windows logo across every inch of monitor real estate. The truth, says one Windows watcher, is that Microsoft’s best interest lies in ensuring that everyone have the same, Microsoft-controlled experience.

“Microsoft’s strategy is not necessarily based on making [Windows] easy to use, or easy to reconfigure,” says David Karp, the author of “Windows Annoyances,” a book designed to help Windows users circumvent irritating Windows peculiarities. He cites Microsoft’s new “channel bar” — a guide to Web sites placed prominently on the desktop. “They want to give everybody the same experience because they are making deals with companies like Disney and NBC to sell spots on the channel bar. If people can easily change the channel bar, then it isn’t worth as much and they can’t make as much money.”

According to Ben Shneiderman, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, the struggle for control of the user interface is what fuels the conflict between Microsoft and its opponents.

“The tension is between those who believe that Microsoft should be allowed to control and get whatever it wants,” says Shneiderman, “and those who believe that Microsoft has become too powerful a force to be left to do as it wishes.”

In the “memorandum of the United States in Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction,” the Department of Justice alleges that in June 1996, Compaq attempted to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the default desktop. Microsoft swiftly threatened to terminate Compaq’s Windows 95 licenses, says the memorandum, and Compaq soon relented.

The Compaq incident has been widely reported. But the Justice Department’s court filings take the issue much further. The DOJ charges that “OEMs [original equipment manufacturers -- the computer hardware companies that license Windows 95 for installation in new computers] cannot remove folders or icons from the Windows desktop, cannot create icons or folders larger than those placed by Microsoft on the desktop, and cannot alter the boot-up sequence by, for instance, presenting an OEM-created screen or ‘shell’ that would highlight a choice of Internet browsers or the OEM’s own Internet offerings. Microsoft’s restrictions mean that virtually every new PC will present the same screens and the same set of Microsoft-dictated software — including Microsoft’s browser — to new users when they first turn the machine on, regardless of which OEM built it and what other choices that OEM wanted to make.”

And it only gets worse with Windows 98, says David Karp. A small icon for Internet Explorer is included in “every folder and every directory window” in Windows 98. “When clicked, it takes you directly to Microsoft’s Web site. And you can’t get rid of it. If nothing else, it’s just really ugly and distracting. As far as the user is concerned it’s an irritant, but as far as the competition is concerned, it is blatant.” (Netscape has a similar icon on its browser, but lacks the power to splatter it throughout an entire operating system.)

As far as the Department of Justice is concerned, Microsoft’s integration of Explorer with Windows is distinctly anti-competitive: Other companies, locked out of the user interface, are being denied the chance to strut their innovations.

Shneiderman agrees: “There are great benefits to a standard platform, but I feel that Netscape and other software providers are entitled to fair competition. Microsoft’s success with the operating system should not entitle it to push out innovators in Web browsing.”

“I want to have a choice about how I use my computer,” says Abbe Don, another specialist in user-interface design. “The whole thing to me is about consumer choice. It should be easy for me to put programs on and take them off, but Microsoft is making that increasingly not easy to do.”

“I think a mature approach from Microsoft would be more collaborative,” says Shneiderman, “and more cooperative with hardware vendors and vendors of related software products. They’ve got the operating system on all our desks — and I would be worried about having one company control too much of the technology that we depend on.”

To many observers, one of the most galling examples of Microsoft’s control isn’t even the default desktop — it’s that first screen shot that displays while the Windows operating system is booting up. (Users can replace the image by downloading a special Microsoft utility or hacking it by hand.)

“It’s an advertising issue,” says Don. “If I bought a Sony TV and saw a Sony logo on the screen before any other programming I would probably find that really annoying. And if there were other TV manufacturers who did it differently I would purchase a different TV, or weigh that in my choice.”

And there’s the rub. In 1998, in the PC market, there appears to be precious little choice, no matter how you weigh your preferences.

But even if Divx were already available — even if you could buy a special Divx player, hook it up to a phone line, purchase an encrypted digital video movie disc and pay the fee for watching your chosen movie, right now — the early adopters would still spit in disgust and festoon their Web pages with “No Divx” buttons. Early adopters hate Divx more than anyone else: They see it as a rival to their own digital video technology of choice, DVD (basically, a compact disc that plays video). And they have trumpeted their opposition across the Net ever since consumer electronics retailer Circuit City first announced Divx last September.

Circuit City says that it isn’t particularly interested in the early adopter market. The company is aiming for the mainstream, at the millions of video renters sick and tired of paying late fees because they’ve forgotten to return their VHS tapes on time. But in today’s information climate, consumer entertainment technology companies ignore avant-geek concerns at their peril. Early adopters have always excelled at spreading word of mouth and generating grass-roots excitement. And online communication amplifies word-of-mouth exponentially. If Divx crashes and burns, as many analysts predict, the Net will have helped shoot it down.

“Let’s stand together and fight Divx,” wrote one poster to the newsgroup alt.video.dvd. “Our efforts on our own have not led to success so far so it’s time to unite our efforts. If a considerable number of people join the Divx boycott it could work. But we have to act now — before it’s too late. I don’t want to wake up one day and find out that my favorite music CD is Divx encoded and that my favorite computer software contains the Divx virus.”

“DVD SHALL PREVAIL!!! DIVX MUST DIE!!!”

“I’m trying to get enough controversy stirred up where somebody at the studios somewhere will go, ‘This is like the abortion issue; let’s just not to do this,’” says Tim Kraemer, webmaster of the Tech Zone and the original organizer of International No-Divx Day. “I’m just encouraging everyone to do everything they can to actually stop this before it happens. Historically, consumers have always had a ‘we’re going to take it’ attitude. But we’ve got the Internet now. It’s easy to protest. We don’t have to type out letters and send out mail. The Internet gives you a place to scream and yell where people can hear you really quickly.”

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Not since the debut of New Coke has a product launch met with as much universal derision as Divx. There’s no shortage of explanations.

First, and most important, Circuit City announced Divx just as the long awaited roll-out of a competing digital technology, DVD, finally began to materialize. For many home entertainment fans, DVD — an acronym for Digital Versatile Disc, or Digital Video Disc, whichever you prefer — promised a new age of movie owning and viewing pleasure. The format, theoretically, transcended the technological limitations of both videotape and laserdisc, as well as offering many new goodies, such as wide-screen viewing options.

Then came Divx — an “enhancement” to DVD that introduced a new business model to the world of video rental and sales. After consumers
buy a Divx disc (for a suggested retail price of $5) they
receive the right to watch it on their home Divx player (which needs a live modem connection to Divx billing headquarters) for an unlimited
number of times in the first 48 hours. You never have to return the disc — but if you want to watch it again, you’ve got to pay extra each time.

Divx’s arrival plunged the nascent DVD market into chaos. The first generation of DVD players won’t play Divx discs, and a number of key studios, including Fox, Paramount and Dreamworks (encouraged by large cash payments from Circuit City), suddenly announced support for the Divx standard without making clear any plans to begin releases on DVD. (On Monday, Paramount announced it would support both formats.)

“The impressions of the people on the Internet started out extremely hostile,” says Bill Hunt, editor of the Digital Bits, a Net-based DVD newsletter. Hunt, who participated in the first Circuit City conference call announcing the new technology, says that the transcript of the conference he posted on his Web site provoked “howls of anger.”

“People who had DVD players saw Divx as a threat,” says Hunt. “DVD had been billed as the next big convergence medium. People thought, hey, we’ve got one thing we can buy, and the price is coming down, and it’s going to be here a long time, and there won’t be a format war.”

“Our Web site is popular with early adopters and they went bonkers,” says David Elrich, a journalist who covers the consumer electronics business and contributes to a Web magazine that specializes in entertainment technology news. “We spent days just deleting foul posts from the forum. The vitriol was amazing. People just went ballistic.”

“It was a colossal marketing blunder,” says Elrich. “And what really irked the early adopters was the callousness of [Circuit City CEO] Richard Sharp at his initial press conference. It was almost like early adopters should expect to get burned and that’s the risk.”

Circuit City acknowledges that they missed the early-adopter boat.

“When we announced the product last September, that didn’t really fit with the early DVD adopter period — the person who is a videophile, who may have been a laserdisc collector, someone who is used to going out and buying and owning forever the movies that they want in the format they want,” says Josh Dare, a spokesman for Divx. “And here comes this interloper that is against the very precepts that they are all about — this is a rental type of a model, this is conditional access, you own the disc, but you don’t own the right to view it any time. This is a foreign concept to anyone, and this is something new, and I think that there was a great fear that if Divx took hold that it would override and get rid of DVD. Part of our mission is to not only educate people, but reassure those early adopters that we have no intention of trying to corner the market on DVD.”

But cornering the market is only part of the problem. The “conditional access” aspect of Divx is at least as inflammatory. Resentment against Divx isn’t confined to geeks watching dismayed as the value of their new home entertainment systems instantly depreciates. The Divx proposal cuts sharply against the consumer grain: It threatens the sense of ownership that consumers feel for the videotapes or laserdiscs they had previously bought, or even rented. With Divx, you don’t own anything — even after you’ve paid for it.

Divx, in other words, appeared to be a greedy attempt to wrest power away from the individual and back to the corporation. Even as Circuit City stressed, repeatedly, that there would be purchase options for Divx discs — lifetime viewing privileges for specific fees — distrust still ran deep. The consumer had lost control.

“It forces the consumers to change the way they consume,” says Hunt, the Digital Bits editor. “You can only play the movie in the way they let you play the movie. Consumers feel that if they shell out the money they want it to be theirs. The Divx model goes against every notion about how we consume goods in this country.”

Not entirely. As Kraemer observes, the Divx model just applies the software business model — where consumers technically do not own their software, but merely license it — to home entertainment. Across the entertainment spectrum, the very idea of consumer ownership is under assault.

What’s happening with Divx suggests that the Internet may help the consumer fight back — by elevating word-of-mouth from the quaint status of over-the-fence gossip into a powerful market force. Early adopters just happen to be the kind of people most likely to set up Web pages and be active in Internet discussion forums — they get extra leverage from the Net. Just try surfing the Web searching for information on Divx: Aside from the official Divx site, the Net swarms with anti-Divx hatred. It’s hard to imagine a more effective disincentive to pulling out your credit card and buying a brand new piece of technology.

Rage has even transformed into direct action. Circuit City has announced that it will begin selling Divx players and discs in two test markets next month — San Francisco and Richmond, Va. On the Net, anti-Divx activists are holding regular discussions of strategy and tactics. There are plans to boycott Circuit City. There are flyers outlining the case against Divx that can be downloaded from the Web, printed out and distributed. There’s even talk of street protests, though that may be unrealistic. Sure, Americans take their consumption of entertainment commodities seriously, but will they be willing to march for their preferred format? Perhaps not.

But maybe they don’t need to. Maybe all they really need to do is get the word out. In the case of Divx, they’ve already established an impregnable beachhead in the information war over home entertainment.

Even Circuit City now admits that they have no
chance of gaining the support of the cutting-edge geeks. “By and large,” says Dare, “we’re going to have to go after the mass market without that jump-start that the early adopters may have given us.”

In today’s hotly competitive market, that jump-start may prove irreplaceable.

“It’s going to be a $100 million blood bath for Circuit City,” says consumer-electronics journalist Elrich, who believes that the active opposition of early adopters, mobilized on the Net, has doomed Divx — and may doom other products still unborn.

“The impact of the Web has not reached the highest level of corporate America,” says Elrich. “They simply don’t understand this thing, and they don’t get it. And this is particularly going to hurt them in the area of high technology. The Internet has given consumers empowerment that I think is still worrisome and scary to corporate executives. They don’t know how to handle it — who these people are, and what they are doing, and why they are so passionate.”

Ronin Ro, a hip-hop beat reporter who establishes undeniable investigative reporting street cred in “Have Gun Will Travel,” makes Knight’s claims of racist persecution seem, at best, laughable. The gory details of Knight’s reign of terror — the contract negotiations with a baseball bat, the back room torture, the in-house gang battles — are impossible to dismiss. Indeed, if only half of what Ro reports is true, he can be excused for nervously looking over his shoulder. Someday, the 6-foot-3, 300-pound Knight will be back on the street, and he’s not likely to think kindly of the author of “Have Gun Will Travel.”

Ro did his legwork. Reviewers are already rushing to laud “Have Gun Will Travel” as the “definitive” account of the rise and fall of gangsta rap, as seen through the prism of Death Row. Other reporters can only shake their heads in awe at Ro’s success in penetrating a scene where reporters are generally considered about as welcome as plague-bearing rats. But legwork alone isn’t enough. The book reads as if written in a hurry, and could have benefited from a careful edit. More time for reflection might have addressed the one major flaw of “Have Gun Will Travel”: its failure to provide perspective.

Ro almost gets there when he details how Sony, Interscope and the rest of the white-run record biz looked the other way at Knight’s behavior while the cash came rolling in. But he doesn’t draw the consequences. Sure, Knight was a murderous brute, and Death Row Records exemplified the gangsta rap lifestyle with more flair than most real gang bangers. But that just made the record label the most egregious flag bearer for a fundamentally corrupt industry. So what if Knight ripped off his own artists and physically abused them to boot? Treating artists like shit is standard practice in the music business. All Knight did was translate the same sorry old tactics of extortion, abuse and exploitation into flying fists and kicks.

The story of Death Row exerts lurid fascination because the details are so extravagant: They map all too closely to the lyrics of a Snoop Doggy Dog track. But none of it could have happened without the willing cooperation of big-name corporate accounting firms, lawyers and entertainment mega-corporations. Suge Knight is a symptom, not the disease. And in that respect, he is, indeed, the fall guy.