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SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.
IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly. 2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold. 3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.
2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.
3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.
MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.
Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.
Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:
“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”
RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)
In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.
ELSEWHERE:
ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.
After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.
So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:
“Money. It’s not everything.”
“Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”
“Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”
“There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”
“Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”
“Is that fourth car really necessary?”
“Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”
“Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”
“You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”
(Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)
IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.
TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a few attempts to correct some commonly-believed but untrue “facts”:
THE FINE PRINT (in the masthead of the women’s bodybuilding magazine Oxygen, no relation to the women’s cable channel and website of the same name): “Oxygen reserves the right to reject any advertisement without reason.”
At last, someone strikes a blow for rational arguments in advertising!
JUNK E-MAIL OF THE WEEK: “The domain: www.miscmedia.com, is ranked #68919 out of 400118 domains in the WebsMostLinked.com database.”
Alllrigghhttt! This month, we’re gonna try to make it all the way up to #67324!
THE MAILBAG (via Nick Bauroth): “Enough with the baby-boomers already! Can’t you find something else to blame for your shortcomings? And no, yuppies and fratboys are not acceptable substitutes.”
Actually, when I criticize others it’s for the sake of criticizing others, not out of misplaced blame or jealousy or any other excuses.
And as for any “shortcomings,” they’re just about all my doing (or the doing of specific, deep-rooted, influences upon my individual personal/career development).
I come, after all, from the same age group and race/gender status, in the same metro region, as folks who’ve gone on to win Pulitzers and Emmys, get elected to public office, record triple-platinum albums, and/or threaten to permanently stifle all present and future competition in the software industry.
IN OTHER NEWS: It may be the end of the company Seattle’s landmark Smith Tower was named after.
MONDAY: Never mind Never Mind Nirvana.
THE FIRST TIME Life magazine died, it was mourned far and wide on TV newscasts and in other publications’ commentary pages as symbolizing the end of an era.
This time, its second demise is hardly noticed outside the mag industry.
The old Life was a huge glossy that came out every week for a paltry price. (The original 1936 cover price was 10 cents; subscription rates at its 1972 end were little higher.) It was supported by ads–big, slick, colorful ads for brand-name consumer products ranging from cars to Campbell’s soup; ads aimed at mass-market middle-class households with little regard for the details of demographic market segmentation.
Five years after the weekly’s end, Time Inc. bosses figured the Life name still held a cachet among readers. So they relaunched it as a monthly. They charged more for it the second time around, but it basically kept to the same format–photo-heavy stories and features about assorted general-interest topics (movie stars, animals, science, history, uplifting-human-interest stuff, etc.).
Time Inc. killed the old Life because TV had taken mass-marketing ad dollars away from magazines. AOL-Time Warner is killing the current Life, effective with the current issue, because the entirety of the advertising business (even broadcast) has gone to niche marketing as its gospel.
Life still had a steady circulation around 1.7 million. It was still turning a small profit. But AOL-TW’s ad sales team was finding the mag an increasingly difficult sell to ad agencies.
The company could promote Money as reaching an audience of middle-managers, Fortune as reaching top executives, Sports Illustrated as reaching young-adult males, and In Style as reaching young-adult females.
But who reads Life? A little bit of everybody? Companies don’t want to sell to a little bit of everybody. They want to sell condensed soup to grandmas, dry soup to college kids, ready-to-heat soup to upper-middle-class moms, microwaveable soup to busy singles, vegan soups to vegans, and boxes of soup ingredients to weekend chefs.
So Life will again become a heritage of photojournalism and a word in the names of AOL-TW’s Time-Life Books and Time-Life Music.
It didn’t have to be this way, and it still doesn’t.
AOL-TW could always reinvent the title again, in this or some future year. The next time, they could downplay the feature-y material and emphasize a harder, more immediate brand of photojournalism, telling compelling stories to a readership that could cut across the demographic boundaries, allowing marketers to reach beyond their increasingly boxed-in little niches.
Could it happen? As they say in the photojournalism trade, let’s see what develops.
TOMORROW: A few things you think you know, but which are wrong.
BILL GATES MAY DICTATE Seattle’s currently ascendant “Attitude” problem.
But it’s Gates’s ex-partner, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who’s been remaking the city’s look–whether we like it or not.
Allen’s projects have been the subject of three public votes. Two of them, about the Seattle Commons scheme, led to citywide “no” votes against building a big city park in the middle of industrial land he wanted to turn into condos. (He’s going ahead with the condo-izations anyway.) The third vote, on public subsidies for his Kingdome-replacing football stadium, was a statewide plebescite in which “no” votes in Seattle (and Eastern Washington) were outnumbered by “yes” votes in the ‘burbs.
An NY Times piece a couple weeks ago (no longer on the paper’s website, except for a $2.50 fee) spent 1,600 words doting on how Allen, “who bounces around from being the second- to the fourth-richest person on the planet,” is plopping one “world class” structure down after another throughout the greater downtown Seattle area (the Union Station remodel and its adjacent new office buildings, the Cinerama Theater restoration, the waterfront sculpture park) and the UW campus (the Suzallo Library and Henry Gallery additions).
And in three weeks (by which time Allen’s Portland Trailblazers will have either won or lost the National Basketball Association championship), Allen’s most expensive and monumental structure opens–the Experience Music Project.
Known unofficially in its early planning stages as “the Jimi Hendrix museum” (before Allen and the Hendrix estate parted ways), EMP remains a quarter-billion-buck tribute to Allen’s love of the rock guitarist who left Seattle at 18, and subsequently and repeatedly expressed his disdain for it; only to get posthumously enshrined as the favorite “local musician” of a generation of modern-day geek Medicis.
One could talk about how such a huge sum of dough could’ve been used to build housing and/or transportation solutions, support more street-level arts projects, or save any number of development-threatened properties in town and in the exurbs.
But that’s moot now. Allen wanted to do this. If he hadn’t wanted to do this, he would most likely have instead put that money into his software and cable-TV investment portfolio.
EMP is here. And it will attract tourists, employ people, provide a locus for regional public-school music-ed programs (those that haven’t been destroyed totally by budget cuts), and give some support, publicity, and occasional gigs to living area musicians.
And it gives pundits such as myself plenty of sarcastic-remark fodder.
(My own current idea of what it looks like: A belly dancer lying on her side.)
TOMORROW: Why the Seattle International Film Festival was, and is, the pre-Microsoft Seattle’s favorite “arts” event.
METALLICA, those late-’80s champions of politically-progressive heavy metal, are among the bands playing next month’s grand opening weekend for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
This means one of the first personal-computer zillionaires is hiring a band that’s just become known as the chief party-poopers of the digital-music-distribution revolution.
For those just tuning in, a little history:
Napster’s own servers don’t hold or download any MP3s. Instead, they provide links, searches, and a standard downloading protocol for thousands of individual users’ own sites. You’re not downloading a song from Napster; you’re just using Napster to find the song on another individual’s server and to download it from there.
The aging band, which hasn’t had many new hits lately but still has an avid cult following, agreed to put its name and populist reputation on the line in the most aggressive kill-Napster campaign to date.
This gave the industry a convenient front group for its actions. The band could claim it was working on behalf of “artists’ rights;” even though the industry’s moving in other forums (including proposed copyright-law revisions) to stifle artists rights and redefine all releases as “works for hire” to be owned by the labels in perpituity.
(Yes, in both cases it’s the little Napster enterprise that’s getting sued.)
Even if Napster is forced out of business by this or any subsequent industry suits, its principle of decentralized file-serving and file-searching is here, probably to stay.
Other outfits, even smaller and less suable than Napster, can (and are) expanding upon the concept and making new software tools for anonymous, authority-free, intellectual-property-be-damned file trading.
These tools wouldn’t be used just for hit music but for files of all types–software code, porn, movies, political documents certain governments around the world want to keep from their citizens, drug recipes, conspiracy theories, Scully-and-Mulder sex stories, etc. etc.
Metallica, meanwhile, has taken a lot of heat from fans and ex-fans over its new-found public image as stooges for the RIAA’s showbiz weasels. So far, they’re not backing down.
So it’s only appropriate they’re playing for Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft–and former owner of Ticketmaster.
MONDAY: The “in” typeface for 2000.
YESTERDAY, we talked a little about the irony some clueless big-media outlets continue to find in the fact that symbols of Bohemian hipness have become the driving forces of so many marketing campaigns.
Today, a little more about why hip (or rather, a highly specific image of hip) fits so well with corporate agendas.
What marketers like to show off as hip is an updated version of the old Rugged Individualist archtype from an earlier age of corporate largess. The corporate hipster is faster, spryer, sexier, more fashionable, more energetic, and more athletic than ordinary people. He or she (and, yes, it’s often a she, at least in ads) has no use for limits, boundaries, rules, or regulations. He or she either sneers or patronizes with kitsch anything old-fashioned, such as thrift, moderation, caution, humility, or cooperation.
He or she is unjustly scorned by all those pathetic squares–not because he or she’s a weirdo but because he or she’s just so darned superior.
It’s exactly the image admired by certain Wall St. corporate raiders and tech-biz bullies and sweatshop moguls.
Our Oregon neighbors at Nike are continuing to lose invaluable PR goodwill by their insistence on doing as little as absolutely possible for the workers at overseas subcontractors they get their merchandise from. It’s gotten, or will eventually get, to the point that the company will lose more money from its intransigent stance than it will save by treating its manufacturing as something to be done as cheaply as possible, so as to put more money into advertising.
Justice for subcontract workers is antithetical to the whole Nike corporate culture. It brings to mind square ’50s-esque mental images like security, stability, teamwork, providing for family, and industry. It sees itself as a hyper-aggressive design and marketing company for the globalized, post-industrial era. It doesn’t actually make anything and doesn’t want to. Making things, having visible factories or directly employing manufacturing workers in North America, is too Organization-Man ’50s.
By contrast, everything Nike’s associated its name and logo with involves images of individual hustlers, strivers, and go-getters. Even Nike endorsers who play team sports are always depicted individually, as lone-wolf superheroes, forever young, never shown with spouses or other adult encumbrances.
Many in the Way-New Left get this.
As described in a recent Nation cover story, politically-minded students across many U.S. campuses are moving beyond the smug self-aggrandizement of “identity politics” and are actively embracing such old-Left ideals as social justice and working-class solidarity.
They’re pushing for their colleges to enact fair-employment policies for their own workers and for the workers of the colleges’ suppliers, including the suppliers of athletic equipment.
Nike, natch, has been decidedly less than cooperative.
But then, being known for cooperation is like getting the “Plays Well With Others” line check-marked on your report card.
It’s just so square.
TOMORROW: The coolest product fad of the year, those hi-tech scooters.
HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture–whatever you call it, it’s been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.
But not everybody’s caught on.
Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that’s apparently gone too far beyond the boarders’ in-crowd toward amainstream markets.
(These aren’t the exact words he used. I won’t embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)
Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days–to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.
Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.
Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you’re identifying yourself by what you don’t buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.
Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)
Perhaps a new tactic’s needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.
I don’t know what that would be–maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn’t possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.
Oops–sorry. That was already tried.
Some people called it “grunge.”
TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.
AFTER LAST MONDAY’S PIECE about potential non-antitrust challenges to Microsoft’s thumbscrews on the computing world, a couple of kind readers sent emails proposing another possible reason MS’s day in the sun might be approaching its natural end: “Open Source”-type software, best exemplified by the Linux operating system.
MS rules the roost in shrinkwrapped, copyrighted software, created by centralized staffs and shipped as compiled, unalterable code. But, open-source advocates claim, that ain’t the only way software has to be made.
At its heart, open-source is a return to the way software used to be made before there was any real money in it. Programmers worked on one project for one user at a time; they freely exchanged tips and ideas and even whole pieces of code. When this was done for the pure thrill of discovery, as opposed to work on the clock, it was the original (non-criminal) definition of “computer hacking.”
Today, Linux and other open-source warez have a growing and fervent following among folks who earn their livings tinkering with computers and their networks. People who know how computers work and want to make them work their best.
But consumers, and businesses too small to have a staff computer expert, aren’t supposed to want something you have to heavily customize. They’re supposed to want something that starts working out of the box, that does what it’s supposed to do without bugs or complications.
The catch is that shrinkwrapped software (particularly if it’s from Microsoft) seldom lives up to these goals.
Software, by its very nature, is complex and complicated. The more its makers try to make it “user friendly,” the more elaborate its under-the-hood workings have to be.
Instead of trying to fit their business fuctions around what, say, MS Office allows them to do, it makes increasing sense for more and more small businesses to turn to consultants who can whip together a system that works right for them, built around more-or-less interchangable open-source parts.
For certain common business or institutional functions (payrolls, points-of-sale, inventories), enterprising companies could slap together applications from open-sourced parts and sell them on CD-ROMs with service contracts included.
And in the consumer arena, the first big (semi-) open-source application is on the way. The next edition of Netscape Navigator, currently in early beta versions, was developed with input from “The Mozilla Project,” a group of outside programmers and users who were given access to the program’s source code and encouraged to suggest and create new features and other improvements.
So far, early beta-users’ reports indicate a lot of work still needs to be done to turn the next Navigator from a ragtag assemblage of separately-thought-up parts into a unified, smoothly-running whole.
This shows one of the problems with open-source software, and with large-scale programming in general–it’s a vast, vast undertaking, with many people working on different pieces of the puzzle, each of which has the theoretical potential to crash any other piece.
Knowledgeable open-source hackers know this, and test any outside code they bring into their own projects to make sure everything plays well with others.
And that’s fine on customized applications for specific business environments.
But Navigator isn’t that. With its web browsing, e-mailing, and handling of upteen Web-based data formats, it’s one of the most complex consumer software packages around. (The help files for Navigator’s Mac version state that it “writes more files to more places than any other Mac application.”)
On a one-size-fits-all big applications suite like Navigator, it’s generally been considered helpful to have one (or at least a few) people in charge to hold the whole thing together.
Whether Netscape’s tech staff (or what’s left of it after AOL’s buy-and-purge) can turn a thousand open-sourced subroutines into one professional package (albeit one given away free without warranty and with little tech support) remains a challenge to be faced.
Beyond all this lies a bigger consumer-software issue: Without Microsoft imposing its will, will everything fragment into a hundred incompatible standards?
Alas, Babel-lovers, no. Thanks to the Net, there’s too much at stake in inter-platform readability for any future post-MS computer world to go back to the early days of MS-DOS and TRS-DOS and ProDOS and CP/M.
IN RELATED NEWS: A broken-up Microsoft wouldn’t be able to finish its gazillion-dollar project to turn the Net into a Windows-only space. Yay!
TOMORROW:It’s still square to be hip.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YOU DON’T HAVE to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
But apparently you have to be a Republican to be willing to publicly express such weariness.
Today’s case in point: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a new book by card-carrying Weekly Standard essayist David Brooks.
Brooks’s official point is to skewer the ever-pandered-to upscale ex-radicals and their younger brethern, whom Brooks collectively brands as “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians,” engaged in a united lifelong cult of self-congratulation.
His real point, natch, is to himself pander to his own audience. Brooks depicts Those Nasty Liberals as today’s version of Spiro Agnew’s “effette snobs,” so as to let his conservative readers smugly imagine themselves as at least relatively populistic and unpretentious in comparison.
Nevertheless, Brooks does have a few points left-of-center folk should ponder.
Like Tom Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, Brooks chronicles how marketers and the media took ’60s-generation “identity politics” and successfully took all the politics out, leaving pure demographic target marketing. Advertisers re-defined political activism as something the special people of the special generation used to do, something that helped make them so gosh-darned special and hence deserving of some really special consumer products.
But the ads and the TV human-interest pieces and the newspaper columns lavishing praise beyond praise upon the Generation That Thinks It’s God always depict activism as an activity of a past, never-to-be-repeated Golden Age. Speaking out today, on behalf of anything more threatening than the right to the very freshest produce, is considered so beyond-the-pale as to be unmentionable.
“But,” you say, “activism’s come back, perhaps stronger than ever, thanks to the Way-New Left, as shown at the WTO and IMF protests.”
(Well, maybe you’d say it a little more conversationally than that, but you catch my drift.)
Yeah, but the Way-New Left’s threatening already to get trapped in many of the same mistakes that doomed the old New Left to effective irrelevance.
Some of the noisier, more easily caricaturable elements of the new protest movement are too easily tempted by oversimplistic us-vs.-them platitudes (vegan vs. carnivore, hip vs. square, raver vs. jock, neopagan vs. Christian, etc.). The very sort of see-how-special-we-are identity ploys that so easily devolve into mere ad slogans. (“Some people want to change the world. We just want to change your oil.”)
So, for this and all future generations, a few words of reminder:
Politics isn’t about being, it’s about doing.
Politics isn’t always fun or thrilling or even sexy. If hedonistic thrills are what you’re after, consumer-materialism will always provide those more consistently.
Politics isn’t always hip. A lot of it has to do with improving the lives of whole classes of people who’ve never lived in college towns or been to a single punk concert.
TOMORROW: Mount St. Helens, still a boomin’ favorite after twenty years.
EVERY NOW AND THEN, for at least the past five years, somebody’s come along proclaiming the End of the Personal Computer.
Nowadays, such punditry often comes under the guise of Microsoft antitrust-case commentary.
The big antitrust cases of the past, these commentators tend to note, found their resolutions just as their affected industries were changing. Standard Oil was broken up just as the automobile was starting to turn petroleum from a grease-and-heating-fuel commodity into a major fulcrum of world economies. AT&T allowed itself to be split as new technologies enabled new communications services to explode. IBM’s antitrust case dissolved as first minicomputers, then PCs, put a wrench in the old mainframe empire.
Similarly, these pundits claim, the Internet’s throwing a curve at the old local-machine-centered business model that’s been central to Microsoft’s complicated schemes.
MS used to have a slogan on the floor of its main reception area: “Each day brings us closer to a computer on every desktop.” Each of those computers, the floor didn’t say but could have, would be expected to run an MS operating platform and applications programs. The whole world would do everything in the “One Microsoft Way,” as implied by the company’s mailing address.
But the Net doesn’t work that way, say these commentators. And Microsoft can’t make it work that way, despite such attempts as Internet Explorer, MSN, Advanced Windows Services, and the decidedly non-cross-platform MS version of the Java programming language.
At least for now, the Internet (or at least most of the stuff transmitted through it) doesn’t care what your OS or your hardware configuration is. Companies that come up with new Net data formats (Real Networks, Macromedia, Netscape, even MS) are expected by Net users to make their formats readable, if not writable, on Macs and Unix boxes as well as Windows.
And even the long-delayed dream of a “network computer,” a semi-dumb terminal that would easily access the Net but do little else on its own, has finally found a smidgen of success via devices like the I-Opener.
The catch behind all this talk is that MS has been busily anticipating how to respond to these changes, and to force its dominant status into any new computing era. It owns WebTV. It’s pushed cut-down Windows variants as OS’s for semi-dumb access devices. It’s tried to promote Windows-first or Windows-only Web applications for everything from online gaming to online banking.
And, oh-yeah, it’s tried to force IE and MSN onto a not-always-grateful computer world.
Any final antitrust remedy that really works will have to address the fact that the computing scene is changing, but hasn’t completely changed yet. It’d have to tru to make sure MS, or any multiple MS successors, couldn’t force-feed us all a Windows-only (or MS-Office-only) Internet.
IN OTHER NEWS: Wheel of Fortune just had a week of “Wheel of Fortune.com Sweepstakes” episodes; essentially a big infomercial for the show’s website. The show’s set was strewn with the logos of the site’s assorted corporate sponsors, rendered on walls of video monitors. Despite the high-tech pretensions, it looked just like the logo-decorated sets of old ’50s game shows, as shown in the movie Quiz Show. The more things change….
TOMORROW: Does a library have to be “world class”?
MISCROSOFT HAS BEHAVED LIKE A WORM for so long, I wouldn’t be surprised if splitting it in two would just turn it into two worms.
The U.S. and 19 state governments imposed just about the harshest penalty (oops, “remedy”) they could think of to stop MS’s legacy of misdeeds. But the result could just leave the computer world with two Great Crippers of Young Adults. MS-1 would continue trying to force everything in the computing world (and hence in the world as a whole) around Windows. MS-2 would try to force everything around the Office applications package and Internet Explorer.
The traditional operating principle of most companies is to try to make money by selling stuff. The operating principle of newfangled Internet companies is to spend money building market share, hoping your competitors will run out of cash doing this before you do, leaving you at the top of the heap when the expected Big Consolidation phase of the industry starts (soon?).
The operating principle of a classic monopoly, however, is like that of a military power–to hold and expand its strongholds, to strategically isolate and vanquish real and perceived enemies, and to blanket the Home Front with fervent propaganda campaigns designed to bolster civilian morale and silence dissent.
It doesn’t take an umpteen-volume Findings of Fact report to figure out MS has behaved just this way.
And it continues to do so; probably out of hard-to-break habit.
For a company that wants to be the undisputable fulcrum of anything and everything involving the emerging info-economy, MS sure acts like an old-fashioned centralized, linear industrial company. Like GM in the ’60s, it has little apparent awareness of what’s wrong with it and few internal means toward finding out.
Instead, it treats all outside criticism of itself as resulting from either rivals’ sour-grapes attitudes or “perception” problems among the critics. Inside the Redmond fortress, everything the company has ever done has always been right.
(So much for the idea that “wired” companies are gonna automatically be more attentive and public-responsive than old factory-age companies.)
Meanwhile, one of the most astute commentaries about the whole affair comes from one Thomas Wetzel. “Microsoft is not the enemy,” he writes; “it is merely a clue. Its operating system only does that which the culture as a whole appears to do to us everyday.”
It’s widely acknowledged that IBM won the Age of Mainframes because its sales force did a better job of hob-nobbing with business leaders, even though other companies had better technologies and services. Similarly, Wetzel argues, Microsoft and the Windows platform give business what it really wants–not quality, not reliability, but a single clearly-defined path to follow, with no confusing options to consider.
Just like the principle in the name of that other broken-up monopoly, Standard Oil.
TOMORROW: Electric cars are coming, for sure this time maybe!
PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.
And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.
Today’s case study: American Psycho.
Folks who’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.
Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn’t end; it just stopped.
Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman’s crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.
And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book’s psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.
Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who’d apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel’s chief character isn’t always a “hero.” The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).
When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.
But Ellis’s thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates. 2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get. 3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date). 4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her. Repeat step 1.
1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.
2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.
3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date).
4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.
Repeat step 1.
The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book’s explicit violence, both to ensure an “R” rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.
She’s made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.
Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.
TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?
SOME SHORTS TODAY:
WITH THE STEADY demographic cleansing going on in central Seattle, the city’s remaining non-millionaires (i.e., most of us) have increasingly sought refuge from high prices at the glorious Children’s Hospital Thrift Store.
But soon, that will no longer be an option. At least not at its current convenient 3rd Ave. location.
You know the drill by now: Condo developers are taking over and razing the half-block containing the store, along with the gloriously unpretentious Palmer’s eatery-drinkery next door.
The store’s suburban branches will remain, as will its online shopping site, for those who need bargains but have Net access.
The store’s also being immortalized in Lost in Seattle, an ambitious online map site containing “3,000 Seattle shops and buildings.” (The site’s still in beta form and already way out of date.)
TONIGHT’S THE FIRST “First Thursday” gallery crawl in Pioneer Square that won’t include anything at the now-deserted Jem Studios-Galleries, now being refitted for dot-com offices. I’ll miss the four-story party atmosphere, the mix of serious and less-than-serious works in every genre from semirealistic painting to abstract sculpture to video-enhanced live performance, and the camaraderie of hundreds of creators and gawkers sharing the feeling of creative empowerment.
I won’t miss the permanent paint stains on some of my best clothes, a remembrance of the final Jem exhibition night when I sat too close to a performance-art piece that devolved into a coed naked body-paint wrestling match. (The things you can do in a space when you don’t care about getting a cleaning deposit back….)
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Haven’t had this dept. in a while, but will promise to get back to it every so often. This time, it’s Jones Soda Whoopass Energy Drink. Tastes a little better than the better-known Red Bull brand (that favorite of waiters, bartenders, and late-night software coders).
The locally-made Jones product also pays homage to the Asian origin of this beverage genre, with a manga-style cartoon street-fighter mascot, and a name that sounds as if it had been coined by Japanese English-as-a-second-language speakers. (The company’s website also promises, “It makes your pee super yellow thanks to all the vitamin B6!”)
(It’s absolutely no relation to another product, an employee-motivation novelty toy called “A Can of Whoop Ass.”)
TOMORROW: Modern art as capitalist tool.
