She alleged that the company was forcing computer
makers to include its Internet browser with the Windows 95 operating
system, a violation, she said, of the companys 1995 antitrust
agreement with the Justice Department. The company vigorously denied
any wrongdoing.
Whatever the outcome, however, this is the first major
antitrust case to take place in the strange nether world of cyberspace,
and as such it tells us how the computer has altered how we see the
world.
Essentially, this whole fight is about the power of
metaphor.
Ms. Reno alleges that "Microsoft is unlawfully
taking advantage of its Windows monopoly to protect and extend that
monopoly and undermine consumer choice." But that monopoly lies
less in technology than in the "interface," the pictures
and symbols on the screen through which consumers interact with their
computers.
The metaphor at the heart of the interface is that
of the desktop, a personalized space where we keep our files and applications.
We organize our documents by placing them in metaphoric folders; we
discard files in a metaphoric trash can.
Look at it this way. Imagine that Microsoft controls
the market for office desks, and it is also a major telephone maker.
One day it announces that all its desks will come with built-in phonesthereby
putting all the other phone manufacturers out of business.
The Internet browser is the phone here, and Microsoft,
by building it in has effectively made itself into the de facto access
provider to the Internet. This means, continuing in a metaphorical
vein, that the 90 percent of computer owners who use Windows software
on their metaphorical desktop will now ride only metaphorical Microsoft
rockets as they speed through the metaphorical Internet universe.
These quandaries bring home how profoundly the computer
has altered our world view, from one in which objects predominate
to one in which "information," whatever that is, and the
myriad shapes it can take are coming to dominate our lives. The most
important antitrust issues no longer have to do with pricing, said
Assistant Attorney General Joel I. Klein, they have to do with using
innovation, to gain an unfair competitive advantage. The Justice Department
must now try to regulate a pure product of mindthought itself.
We hear a great deal about the tremendous number-crunching
power of the PC, but it is the symbolic capabilities of todays
machinesall those visual metaphors and virtual desktopsthat
are altering our experience of the world.
The wizards at Microsoft have long understood how
visual metaphors can be used to consolidate power while also making
computers friendlier. Even if the Justice Departments latest
crusade succeeds only in making explicit the mixed nature of this
blessing, it will have done us a great service.
Steven Johnson, the editor of Feed, an on-line
cultural magazine, is the author of "Interface Culture."