Apple’s operating system is old and creaky. Its “updates” have made the most meager of technical improvements. Meanwhile, Apple’s arch operating system rival, Microsoft, has released three versions of its widely popular Windows system and two major upgrades to its long-term strategic OS design dubbed Windows NT.

What’s really wrong with the current Macintosh OS? Critics typically focus on three problems:

• Unreliability. As it has been patched and glued together during the last five years, it has gone from a rock-solid, stable OS to a shaky platform whose users expect it to crash daily.
• Slowness. The Mac OS has grown to an unwieldy size of several million lines of program instructions.
• Legacy-burdened. Like Windows and, to some extent, Windows 95, it must continue to run programs designed for its earlier releases which were not nearly as capable as the present version.

Enter Be Labs. Its operating system, BeOS, is designed and engineered from the ground up to deal with many of the complexities of modern software development. It is blazingly fast. Even its pre-release versions crash less frequently than the five-year-old Mac OS. The fast-growing Mac clone maker, Power Computing, has already signed up to include the BeOS in their systems in early 1997 as a user-selectable alternative to the Mac OS.

It’s also sexy. And those who have known and followed Gassie over the years know that that quality is more important to him than almost anything else you could say about his company’s product.

Be started life as a hardware company; it was going to build and sell a super microcomputer — the BeBox — that gadgeteers would fall in love with. Gassie told me once, near the beginning of his Be experience, “You can make money selling new gadgets in this business; there are about 10,000 gadget freaks in this valley alone who will buy one of anything just to say they had one once.”

But Be has made a smooth transition from a hardware-only company to being the proprietor of the most sought-after operating system on the planet. And Apple has been paying attention, frequently visiting Be Labs and making little secret of wanting to get its R&D mitts on the BeOS for its future operating system. What it has not been paying is enough money to get Gassie’s attention. Yet.

Sources close to the negotiations that have been under way between the two companies for a couple of months say that money is the only stumbling block between them at this point. But the gap isn’t tiny. Apple reportedly opened discussions with an offer in the $130 million range. Be countered with a number closer to $500 million. Not bad for a company with 40 employees which has yet to ship a commercially-sold product. Apple insiders told me in the last week that a deal in $200 to 250 million range “or perhaps a hair more” would make economic sense for them.

Some press reports have indicated that another stumbling block is Gassie’s role in the event of an Apple acquisition, but normally reliable sources indicate that is not the case. Not only does Gassie not really want to return to Apple — “He’s not the kind of guy who wants to go back to anything,” one of them said — but Apple isn’t seriously interested in buying Be. Instead, it wants a non-exclusive license to the core of the BeOS code, known as the “microkernel.”

There is irony here. Gassie, as Apple’s chief of product development, staunchly opposed the licensing of the Macintosh OS — which he described as the company’s “family jewels” — and thereby played a major role in the slide into near oblivion the company has experienced over the past two or three years. Because the Mac OS was not available from third parties and other manufacturers, many customers were reluctant to adopt it even when it was regarded as the best operating system out there, which is no longer the case.

Does Apple need the BeOS? Some Apple sources say no, citing its own super-fast microkernel already running in Apple’s R&D labs. But the R&D group is in incredible disarray. Recent top-level management shakeups severely shook the confidence of many Apple engineers and some of the best have left the company. Having a new microkernel code alone is not enough without knowledgeable engineers to finish, extend, enhance, and maintain it.

Senior Apple executives know they must come up with a meaningful OS strategy. CEO Gil Amelio and his hand-picked R&D chief Ellen Hancock have promised an announcement on Jan. 7, the day the semi-annual Macintosh user love fest known as MacWorld Expo opens in San Francisco. It hardly seems possible that they can, by that time, sort out the R&D problems inside Apple, let alone make a convincing case for a proprietary operating system they have announced, delayed, changed and shifted position on so many times that all credibility has been lost. Be is their only hope if the Jan. 7 deadline is real.

Hancock, whose methodical, almost plodding style of R&D management is a stark and sometimes welcome contrast to her predecessors’ breakneck lurching and bumping about, has insisted publicly that Apple is talking to many different potential OS vendors. That may be true, but unless she’s prepared to hop onto IBM’s stalled OS/2 bandwagon — highly unlikely as OS/2 has about as much commercial viability as the old Mac OS — she will be forced to choose between Apple’s own work, a complete unknown and untried system that has no public exposure, and the BeOS. (Speculation about the possibility of Apple opting to team up with Apple founder Steve Jobs’ NextStep OS or Sun’s Solaris system ignore the fact that neither of those products runs on the PowerPC chip at the heart of all present and future Macintosh computers. There just isn’t time to wait for one of them to be ported to new silicon.)

Look for Apple and Be to announce a licensing deal — with terms perhaps still a bit vague — at MacWorld. Gassie will stride to the speaker’s rostrum, rub his thumb and forefinger together in a circular motion and talk about the sexy feel and appeal of the deal.

And then he’ll probably start planning a lucrative retirement.

Quote of the day

Internet Pig-Out

If you run an all-you-can-eat restaurant, the last thing in the world you want to see is a bus load of fat people pulling into your parking lot.

– David Rocker, president of Rocker Partners, a New York investment partnership that tracks the Internet market, referring to Internet users who go online and never get off. (From “An ‘All You Can Eat’ Price Is Clogging Internet Access,” in Tuesday’s New York Times)

Don’t get me wrong. The computer business is always busy obsoleting itself. In fact, that’s the only way it can survive. Most of the time when people ask me, “Should I buy a computer now or wait until the next whizzy thing comes out?” I smile and suggest that they buy the computer now. There is a cost associated with waiting: economists refer to it as opportunity cost. It takes into account the things you don’t do at all, or as well, while you wait for the technology to “settle down,” which, of course, it never does. Years ago, Ralph Nader wrote about “planned obsolescence” in the automobile industry. The computer makers must have learned that lesson and taken it to amazingly new heights.
This Christmas, though, the story is different.

if you are contemplating putting a Windows machine under the Yule tree, you may be sorry much earlier than you would have been in recent holiday seasons. The primary reasons for your disappointment will become evident less than 60 days after you’ve tossed the last of the shiny wrapping paper into the recycling bin and finally gotten your CD-ROM drive to work with that snazzy new game that your nephew gave you.

First, there’s the new MMX chip that will become a de facto standard on all the new Wintel machines manufactured starting in early 1997. By the end of the second quarter, they will be as ubiquitous as Pentium processor-based systems are today.

MMX is of primary interest if you’re planning to use your new Windows system to run games or multimedia applications. But as the desktop yields to more multimedia influences, the question of whether you plan to use any separate multimedia applications may become moot; your system will be multimedia in nature and you’ll want to have the best hardware
on which to run it.

In addition, Intel has further confused the issue by introducing MMX initially as a technology for enhancing the Pentium chip that won’t work, initially at least, with the Pentium’s more advanced big brother, the Pentium Pro. So you end up having to make a real Hobson’s choice between a moderately fast Pentium with MMX and a screaming fast Pentium Pro that lacks the MMX power for the first six months or so of 1997.

Second, there’s a hot new mass-storage technology called Digital Video Disk (DVD) looming on the horizon. Though this will initially be primarily available on Windows, it may well also affect Macintosh buyers by early 1997. DVD devices can mix and match audio, video and program content on a single platter that can store 17 gigabytes of stuff, roughly the equivalent of 27 of today’s CD-ROMs. But without a speedy processor and MMX support, DVD devices are going to be less than useful to most of us. A tremendous amount of the new, exciting content released in the second half of 1997 and well into 1998 will require DVD capability. Hollywood, Multimedia Gulch and dozens of worldwide hardware manufacturers have signed up to support this new technology and its promise is enormous — even though it has taken longer to reach the shelves than originally expected. Buying a new machine that lacks a DVD in 12 to 18 months will be as unthinkable as it would be today to buy a system without a CD-ROM.

Even if you are sitting there now thinking you don’t want or need these high-speed enhancements to your Windows World — that where you want to go today is quite attainable, thank you, with the 166MHz Pentium you saw yesterday for under $2,000 — you should reconsider. The inevitable result of the emergence of all this blazingly fast hardware in early 1997 will be to drive down the prices of today’s speed demons even further. So at the very least you’ll be money ahead if you wait until 6 to 10 weeks after Christmas ’96 to buy that shiny new smart box.

That argument is also the compelling reason not to rush out and buy a Macintosh to stash under the tree, either. There is less likelihood of Macintosh obsolescence than there is with Wintel systems and always has been. But Apple has already indicated it will be shipping new systems in early 1997 that will run at speeds in the 180 to 200MHz range. It plans to offer these systems at approximately the same prices as today’s 120 to 160MHz products — and you know what that will do to the prices of today’s machines.

There is one Christmas computer gift this year that you should consider, though. WebTV is one of the most exciting new technology ideas to come down the pike in a long time: a small box that sits on top of your TV, hooks up to your phone line and feeds the Web onto your tube. If you are thinking of giving someone their first computer under this year’s tree, think really hard about giving them WebTV instead. If you have a computer but you’ve longed to be able to experience the Web more conveniently than you can sitting in front of your computer screen in that straight-back chair, get this sucker!

Both Sony and Philips are offering WebTV boxes for sale for around $300 — all you need is a TV and an ordinary phone line. For an additional $70 or so, you can get an infrared keyboard (highly recommended) which will allow you to send e-mail from your TV more easily. Then you pay WebTV $20 a month for Internet service — pretty much the going rate today.

While there are certainly shortcomings in this debut release of the technology (screen designs of many Web sites don’t lend themselves well to the browser limitations of WebTV, and some navigational design is a little difficult to get used to if you’re an experienced user of a desktop machine), it is worth buying. Furthermore, it is almost self-correcting; when a new version of the browser or other software used in WebTV becomes available, you not only don’t have to worry about downloading it, you don’t even have to know about it. WebTV will automatically update your software when you log on to the Internet and it detects that you’re not using the latest and greatest stuff. They’ve already delivered the first quarterly upgrade, which includes RealAudio capability.

I know several people who have bought these boxes for relatives who have shown nearly allergic and paranoiac resistance to computers. All report that those family members have become fascinated users of the Web and e-mail, the two most frequently demanded uses of the Internet. If the stores don’t run out of these things before Christmas, I’ll be one surprised techno-dude.

Next year, let’s all go computer shopping together. It’s going to be a lot of fun then!

The battle is about making monstrously large things smaller and more manageable, about shattering monoliths into usable components. It’s about flexibility. Ultimately, it’s about freedom of choice. The victor will surely dominate desktop computing for the next two to five years.

I think you ought to have a say in this war, don’t you?

the battle centers around the concept of components. The basic idea — it’s been around a few years — is to break up overgrown programs into small, manageable pieces designed to play nicely with one another. Components know how to communicate with others, how to stay out of each other’s way and how to fit neatly into a single user interface that you’ll only need to learn once.

For example, instead of buying, installing and using a multi-megabyte word processor so you can write memos to your boss justifying the cost of the software, you would buy a stripped-down word processor “shell” and only add other components as needed. Features you rarely or never use — like footnotes, bibliographic citations, multiply-indented lists, and multi-column layouts — could be left on the shelf, rather than cluttering up your hard drive and gobbling up huge chunks of memory.

The war to dominate this field of software has three primary participants: ActiveX controls, promulgated by Microsoft; OpenDoc parts (and accompanying containers), favored by a consortium of other software companies, including Apple, IBM and Novell; and Java applets, the latest — and in some ways strongest — entrant, which is rapidly gaining wide support.

Here’s a quick guide to the combatants and the stakes.

The explosion of the World Wide Web has removed the largest obstacle to the spread of components: the lack of a clean distribution mechanism. Software delivery is probably second only to sex as an engine of Web commerce. Any company that doesn’t offer trial versions of its programs on the Web is already in serious trouble, even if it doesn’t know it yet. The day is not too far off when virtually all software will be sold, distributed, updated and tracked on the Web, whether on the Internet or over corporate intranets.

Other driving forces behind the widely perceived need to adopt component software:

x Corporations can finally compromise between the efficiencies of standardization and the desire of individuals to be different. By adopting several different components that perform similar tasks, the corporation can allow users some flexibility without creating support nightmares.

x The so-called Network Computer (NC), which may well soon find a broad niche in corporate America, thrives on component software because it doesn’t store programs internally. It depends on the network for all of its intelligence. Components or applets are sent to the NC when they are needed. When the user closes them, they simply disappear from the local system and remain stored on the network.

x Software complexity and size have reached and exceeded the grasp of most users. Programs are now routinely delivered on CD-ROMs or on sets of a dozen or more floppy disks and demand upwards of 30 megabytes of disk capacity. They chew up four or more megabytes of memory when you run them. And they perform so many functions that they bewilder the average user. The old 80 to 20 rule holds here; 80 percent of the users of a program use 20 percent of its features. So why not make the other 80 percent of its features optional, but instantly accessible when they are needed?

You are — or should be — primarily interested in freedom of choice on your computer desktop. Getting locked into one manufacturer or one publisher or even one group of such companies is not in your long-term best interest. You already knew that, of course.

If Microsoft is allowed to win this war with its single-platform ActiveX technology, Windows programmers will gain a huge advantage — one that will effectively close off component software on the Web to non-Windows platforms.

Beyond this obvious concern are a couple of less-publicized issues that should give you pause. Maybe you don’t care if Bill Gates and Microsoft further strengthen their near-monopolistic grip on the personal computer desktops of the world. Maybe you even like Windows 95 or Windows NT well enough that you wouldn’t mind if all the other choices disappeared.

But you probably still care about security. And while that is a potential problem with any downloaded component, it is a huge problem with ActiveX. ActiveX components are far more prone to security breaches than either of the other two combatants in this desktop war for two reasons: First, they don’t live in a nice, secure, defined space, the way Java applets live in your Web browser. They are full programs that can do anything their designer wants them to do: provide a cute animation or transfer confidential information from your hard disk to your competitor’s marketing team. It appears, at least, that this problem is technically insurmountable with ActiveX components; their effects cannot be restricted. Second, ActiveX components don’t ask before they download; they are “active” in the sense that they just do their thing without the courtesy of asking your permission.

Microsoft has attempted to address these concerns by forming an alliance with VeriSign to provide a protection key with each ActiveX component. This enables browsers to download only those components that have passed someone’s inspection. That approach is not only unwieldy, it is, as others have also pointed out, insidious in its possible consequences.

OpenDoc had tons of promise when Apple introduced it three years ago. A number of major companies endorsed it. First Novell and later IBM were supposed to carry it over to Windows and OS/2. But that still hasn’t happened.

Although Apple continues to struggle valiantly to implement OpenDoc, I think it got blindsided by Java. (So were a lot of other people!) As a result, I think OpenDoc has become the first clear casualty of this war. I only include them as a combatant here because OpenDoc is the most mature of these technologies and enjoys the broadest formal support. (Though by the time you read this, Java may have surpassed OpenDoc in that regard.) It still has life and could surprise us, but it is definitely on the operating table.

At Salon, and in other aspects of my technical life, I’m betting on Java, despite my early enthusiasm for OpenDoc.

To paraphrase a New Age aphorism, “All you can do is all you can do, but all you can do might be enough if enough of us do it.” Here are a few tips for things we can all do to influence the outcome of this war in a direction that ultimately favors us instead of Them:

x Refuse to re-visit pages that use ActiveX components and write the Webmasters of those pages to tell them why you’re not coming back. The Web is a damned small space right now; I can tell you that at Salon we take reader comments extremely seriously, and so does any responsible site.
x Avoid visiting or subscribing to sites that cut special deals with Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer. It’s not that the browser itself isn’t useful or good. (It is; in some ways it’s better than Netscape Navigator.) But as long as sites are encouraged to form tight alliances with Microsoft, they will come under irresistible pressure (read “economics”) to adopt ActiveX controls. Just keep the camel’s nose out of the tent.
x Send e-mail to anyone and everyone at Microsoft and let them know of your concerns and of your mini-boycott.
x Enable Java in your browser so that developers will be encouraged to continue to explore the creation of useful Java applets. The low-grade scare about Java applet security has caused too many people to make a blanket decision to reject any applets from attempting to load into their browsers. This plays right into Microsoft’s hands, since ActiveX components won’t even bother to ask.
x If you’re a Webmaster, resist the temptation to put ActiveX controls on your site. Support Java.

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