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call that a loft?
Sunday, August 12 2001
At around noon Gretchen and I rode along with her real estate agent friend to look at some "property," as we fear we might become a little too crowded in our present residence. The places we toured were two "loft" units in a freshly-remodeled clock factory near 12th Street and 7th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Back in the early part of this century, these large brick buildings housed the Ansonia Clock factory, then the largest clock factory in the world.
The condos were still under construction, so there was roughly-sawn drywall, exposed electrical wire, caulk smears, paint footprints, and blobs of spackle everywhere. The two places that interested us had a little outdoor space, all of which was still sandy, barren soil.
The first unit we looked at was somewhat similar to my old condo back in Los Angeles, except it was somewhat smaller and the downstairs space was completely undivided. The biggest difference, though, was the price, a whopping $525,000. The second unit we toured had 1.5 fewer bathrooms and its price was a modest $425,000. Neither of these two options would have given us all that much additional room over the amount we presently have, and would have put us further from the park in a considerably uglier industrial-looking neighborhood. Seeing the asking prices of these units served mostly to increase our estimate of the selling price of Gretchen's present residence, which would now probably be well over 300K.
Without taking the time to explain this characterization, it wouldn't be fair to dismiss Microsoft simply as a force of evil. As a corporation whose principle goal is survival, it's much safer to say that Microsoft is selfish. By similar logic, I am selfish and you are selfish, the Backstreet Boys are selfish, the Mormon Religion is selfish, and so is the state of Surinam. Where Microsoft differs from you or me, the State of Surinam and even the Mormon Church is that most of us are forced to deal with its products in one way or another on a daily basis. Not only has Microsoft won the browser wars, it's also won the desktop office suite wars, mostly because it first cornered the market in personal computer operating systems. As a consequence of their success, I use Microsoft products for nearly every aspect of my professional life. Completely independently, my fiancé Gretchen also uses Microsoft products for every computerized aspect of her very different professional and artistic life. For example, all Gretchen's poems exist as files in the proprietary format of Microsoft Word 2000, a format that is probably already intentionally obsolete with the release of the latest version of the Microsoft Office Suite.
The fact that all of Gretchen's work is stored in a format that a single company can arbitrarily make obsolete leads me to my next point. The particulars of the beast known as Microsoft take it inexorably beyond selfishness and down the path of evil. The struggle for survival, the selfishness, of individuals with limited power is a beautiful thing; we cheer the little bookstore scratching out a living in the face of Barnes and Noble discounts. The enlightened among us seek out quality music made by unknown musicians as we drown in radio airwaves dominated by bubblegum schlock. But no one should find any joy whenever a company as large and powerful as Microsoft succeeds against a much smaller adversary, using its deep pockets to assimilate and destroy. Not only is diversity replaced with a monoculture of compromised, shoddy software, but once one company has control of the file formats and the protocols, it will tend to manipulate these in ways that support the company's interests. Thus in Microsoft products we find decreasing support for open standards such as MP3 and deliberate infidelity to past internally-developed standards so as to coerce incremental version upgrades by users. Though their marketing copy states otherwise, there is no real interest in improvement and evolution of products over time. Increased processing power and connectivity are seen as ways to further proprietize and commercialize the computational experience, in trends completely opposed to the inexpensiveness, inter-operability and freedom brought about by the openness and community of the internet.
In all fairness to Microsoft, I do not think that the monopoly they've established would be any better or worse if it had been established by Sun, AOL, Oracle, IBM, Apple or Yahoo (full disclosure: I work for Yahoo). The nature of unregulated monopoly is that it tends toward society-exploiting evil. This is why we have laws against it, laws that will hopefully be enforced. But even if these laws are not enforced, I believe that Microsoft (and all who follow its model) will lose in the end. I believe this because I believe that ultimately the most successful and accessible solutions to computational and networking problems will come from people who do not want to monopolize or be paid for their solutions. Such people have no interest in rendering their old file formats incompatible with their new ones or ignoring openly-agreed-upon standards. They might constitute an underfunded minority of those developing code, but less of their efforts are wasted, especially in such a well-networked world. And they have a number of advantages, most particularly the fact that their free products can out-compete the expensive proprietary competition.
Of course, part of the reason I throw my backing behind a future run by open-source software is my, well, optimism. To loosely paraphrase something Michæl Pousti (CollegeClub.com's erstwhile CEO) used to tell us at rah-rah Monday morning meetings, it doesn't serve my purposes to anticipate a future where evil has succeeded. By the way, it bears mentioning that my computer skills are limited mostly to the proprietary Microsoft platform, but I've succeeded in directing most of my non-work-related output to the non-proprietary world of Apache servers. I plan to do this in a much bigger way in the near future. Anything short of this is to bet on a future where evil has won.
I mock Sally the Dog all the time and she doesn't even know it. Tonight after walking her in the gentle rain of a contemplative summer thunderstorm (I missed thunderstorms in Los Angeles!), we were standing in front of the door to the brownstone and I did the uncomfortable bit of pulling her collar off over her head and ears, temporarily wrinkling the face beneath her hamburger bun head into the visage of a bulldog. She then stood there, thoughtfully wagging her tail and looking at me with those bright brown eyes of hers. I said, in the high falsetto I use for talking to all dogs, "Oh, it's so sad! I don't have a biscuit for you!" But there are no conditions to Sally's love. I don't think there is any altruism as extreme as a dog's.
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