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Or, to change the metaphor, like looking at photographs from an east European dictatorship, where old leaders have been airbrushed out after they’ve fallen from grace. If you search the index for what he might have to say about Java or Linux, arguably the most significant innovations in computers this side of the Millennium bug, then you'll be disappointed. On Java, it could be argued that until the mighty hand of the US Dept of Justice decides whether to come down hard, or instead decides that the mechanics of the free market are not too weird, he’d be ill-advised to say anything at all conclusive about the part that Java’s going to play in his plans. And (to continue with the earlier metaphor of east European dictatorships) it’d be a mistake to see Microsoft as a monolithic body, always speaking with one voice. The sudden "leakage" of news about the COOL "Java killer", which was all over the US press for a brief weekend at the end of last year, and then vanished so the corporate in-fighters can sort themselves out, is an indication of much turbulence there is beneath the surface of Microsoft on Java, still a contentious issue within the company. And, of course, Bill has been busily rubbishing Linux at his public appearances, even if he hasn’t deigned to acknowledge its existence in the latest instalment of his collected works. He is probably wise not to fix his words in hard covers. Having virtually written off the Internet in The Road Ahead, he has now swung his huge organisation behind it, and all credit to him for doing so. Though every Windows user curses Microsoft at least once a day when a program (or even the entire operating system) hangs, the world has a great deal for which to be grateful to him. Acknowledging this, it's not necessary to buy into his much-hyped image as the coder turned entrepreneur, because you have to remember that this rests upon the fact that IBM put his Basic programming language on to its PCs back in the days when no one at Big Blue thought that personal computers would ever take off the way they have. And Basic came out of Dartmouth College, not his midnight-oil burning with Paul Allan (not forgetting Monte Davidoff, who showed both of them how to handle the floating point subroutines, though no-one seems to remember that, these days). We shouldn't get hot-and-bothered about this constant reinvention of himself: it’s what huckstering is all about (and Bill is a classic Barnum & Bailey-type huckster, in the immortal mould of that other great fraud of US business, Thomas Alva Edison, who did not actually invent the phonograph, though everyone believes he did). In a world where corporations are barely human, it’s good to have a megacorp which one can identify with a single human being, who can swing the entire organisation round on a dime, if required. So he’s now facing in the opposite direction on the Internet (and may, mark, do the very same thing with Linux, as soon as he can figure out a way of making a buck out of it) than he was in the first edition of his last book. It was impressive, the way when, despite its technical superiority to any other desktop OS, he dropped OS/2 and left IBM to wallow around in his wake wondering why no one was writing apps for it. His instinct for sheer self-preservation will probably stop him, one fine day, from faffing about any more with Java. Yes, he has tried to make it proprietary (as, of course, have Sun). He has tried to muddy the waters. And he’ll no doubt flirt with mavericks like HP who are working on Java clones. But as a man with no principles when they stand in the way of profits, he’ll drop all those poses when it becomes clear, as it will as night follows day, that Java is taking over the world, from mobile phones to washing machines. There’s a lot of business outside the PC desktop, and Bill is going to want a piece of it, a big piece of it. And if that requires him to eat his words, well then he will. Even if his serfs feel it necessary to maintain he never said it, it was some other guy, who’s no longer with the company.
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t’s a bit like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark, reading Bill Gates’ new tome (and what a heavy tome it is, 470 pages, and weighing nearly a kilogram), Business @ the Speed of Thought.