And they thought they had a ship That the water wouldn’t go through; But, the good Lord raised his hand, Said this ship will never land, It was sad when the great ship went down.”
Campfire Song: Source Unknown As we go to press, the rumor persists that the Department of Justice will soon file a broad anti-trust suit against Microsoft. The purpose of the suit is to stop Microsoft’s monopolistic practices. By the time you read this, Windows 98 may or may not have overcome its legal obstacles: it may be on the shelves, or it may be in the courts. (The Court of Appeals says there is nothing to block the planned release, but the DOJ is still rumored to be positioning itself for other actions.) Regardless of the ultimate outcome for Microsoft Windows 98, this entire episode with the DOJ causes us to pause. Why is this going on? Should we care? Microsoft supporters often see MC as an anti-Microsoft faction. After all, we’re an IBM magazine, right? IBM is out to stop Microsoft, right? Ergo, MC hates Microsoft, right?
Wrong on all three counts! We’re an AS/400 magazine; we cover the news related to the AS/400 computing platform. Microsoft—with its SNA Server, its NT operating system on the IPCS, and its predominance on the desktop—is also an AS/400 company. Where would the AS/400 be without the constant prodding of Microsoft? No doubt it would still be a closed, proprietary platform, with client connectivity limited to OS/2 and GUI-challenged green-screens. Yes, Microsoft has done wonders for the AS/400. You know it, and we know it. To ignore Microsoft’s saga in the courts would be suicide.
So is it any wonder that we watch with horror each time Bill Gates plays chicken with the DOJ? Does it come as a surprise that we feel that Microsoft’s corporate bundling and marketing practices are cannibalizing the computing community? We report the legal
conflicts with unashamed, unabashed anguish. Without Microsoft, how will IBM make the AS/400 better?
All the legal wrangling between Redmond, Washington, and the DOJ is beside the point anyway. It frightens us that this legal posturing is drawing our company’s attention away from the single most important crisis in the computing industry. What is this crisis? In less than 19 months, massive sections of our computing infrastructure will cease to operate. The culprit is euphemistically called “Y2K.” All the hype about the future of computing technology—propagated by Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Intel—will soon seem as ill-fated as the maiden cruise of the Titanic. That’s right! We’re all traveling on a doomed ship. There is a huge iceberg dead ahead as we approach the year 2000, and—according to industry statistics—less than 25 percent of our companies are prepared for the impact.
Oh yeah, I know: The AS/400 is “Y2K-ready.” But the Microsoft suites of products still need a lot of work, and most of our own AS/400 custom programs—including those complex client/server applications—are far from ready. What’s worse is management’s nonchalance. Though our vendors are scrambling to secure the decks with new Y2K-compliant releases, most of our management has failed to heed our warnings. In fact, corporate and government leaders seem to be more intent upon enjoying the economic prosperity that their portfolios of technology stocks have provided them. They’re sipping their champagne on the promenade deck—totally oblivious—while we labor furiously to veer the ship off its collision course. Don’t they realize that after the year 2000, all those high-tech stocks will be worthless unless we miss this iceberg?
Of course, many of them are counting on companies like Microsoft to whiz them off the ship right before the crash. “Microsoft to the rescue!” seems to be their toastmaster’s cheer. Imagine their chagrin if Microsoft is too busy wrangling with the DOJ to help them board the life rafts. Imagine our chagrin if we discover there is no life raft!
For, if the truth be told, all the grand technology plans—Microsoft’s, IBM’s, Sun’s, etc.—won’t be worth a single life jacket if we don’t all work together now. All the glorious strategies for implementing the ’net, e-business, Java, COM, and DCOM will collapse like so much rigging. And those great information systems we have so carefully built these past 25 years? They’ll sink faster than a lead anchor in a cold midnight sea.
Wouldn’t it be nice if these companies would just work together? Instead of arguing over who’s going to pilot the lifeboat? Wouldn’t it be nice if we’d all pitch in at pushing the rudder, instead of debating the merits of monopolies and the freedom of the high seas? Wouldn’t it be nice to see them miss the big one, before we all go down?
Thomas M. Stockwell Editor in Chief
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