Clueless in Seattle (.Gov)

Paul McDougall points out in An InformationWeek blog on Thursday that a data security letter published on Seattle.gov, the web site for the city of Seattle, published content that is word for word identical to other new releases. One of these is an article published by InformationWeek writer Kelley Jackson Higgins. Googling the first sentence of the article produced a couple of other sites with identical sentences, though I could not actually find the article when I went to those pages.

It is particularly odious when a government entity (local or otherwise) indulges in behavior that even gives the appearance of plagiarism, for it undermines values that it should help promote, and justifies unethical practices when it should be serving as the gatekeeper. That said, and granted it is a fine distinction, but the publication of previously written content on a web site is not, by itself, plagiarism. That is because it does not attribute the content to someone who did not originate it. In many cases, such as the one McDougall points to (at least originally), the site simply fails to attribute the content at all. We can argue about whether it is implied, by virtue of publication, that the content is original. That is a difficult case to make out, because (1) on many web sites, most of the content is not attributed to anyone; (2) "publication" is a term of art, here, because there is normally no peer review and often very little in the way of oversight, or even editing, of the content; (3) the intent to deceive, which is a normal component of most acts of plagiarism, does not clearly exist; and (4) the expectation of profit, recognition, or other benefits that usually motivates plagiarism is not clearly present. So I don't know if McDougall's epithet "blatantly plagiarized" really fits the situation. We should be a little circumspect before lumping cases of anonymous web posts together with those of the student who hands in a plagiarized paper with his name on it as fulfillment of a course assignment, or the author whose name appears on a book or article in which content written by someone else appears without attribution.

The kind of practice McDougall points to is so prevalent on the Internet that picking out one instance almost misses the point. He opens his article by pointing to "news aggregators", sites which provide brief summaries, quotes and/or links to sites which originate content. There are an endless number of such sites, at least if you count them liberally; even such recognized sites as Slate and The Huffington Post could be made out to be part of the problem. Just how bad it is depends on how much unoriginal content is required before the use of it becomes objectionable. But regardless of the precise extent, the prevalence of these practices is sometimes taken as evidence that they pose no problem. We may have a tendency to feel that anything that is very widely done is not worth objecting to. But that is more intellectual laziness than considered judgment. The problem goes way beyond the self-conscious aggregators, who depend in part on a broad interpretation of the concept of fair use. I've recently found the same health care information - exact same wording, as in the examples cited by McDougall - posted on not two, but maybe half a dozen different sites. In some cases, it is the reverse of the present situation: a government institution (such as the National Institute of Health) appears to have created content to which several for-profit web sites have helped themselves. On another occasion I found the entire text of Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit" published on a web site in Georgia (U.S.) that claims to be a news site; although it was attributed to Frankfurt and Princeton University Press, I strongly suspect it was used without permission, and could not conceivably fall under fair use principles.

McDougall is right to be incensed. But the problem is much bigger than Seattle; bigger than news "aggregators"; even bigger than the crop of Internet-age college students who sometimes brag that they have gone through college without ever having had to write an original essay. You can change individual behavior by calling people on the carpet; but you can't change a culture by making examples of a few people. Look at the baseball doping scandal, in the news once again now - it is, in fact, far beyond a problem with a few high-profile players, beyond baseball, beyond the U.S. It came to be accepted that this is the way it is in sports, and if you want to be a sissy and not take steroids then you can watch your stats suffer and your salary go down. Similarly, if you want to try to create your own content - e.g., as I think I'm doing right now - you can just deal with it when you find you can't post as often or get as many hits as some "aggregator" who simply takes sound bites that other people have written and makes that look like a great service to humanity.

The whole notion of original content is undermined by the increasing probability that any given content has already been copied from somewhere else without attribution, making it easy to justify copying from the copier without attribution. And who is supposed to be responsible for investigating whether any particular sentence on a web site is original? Add to that the old adage that "information wants to be free" and you have all the makings of a general descent into postmodern culture where everything is recycled, origins make no difference, and creative incompetence is transformed into the virtue of making apposite choices of material to repeat.

All this is too heavy a burden to rest on the shoulders of some IT dude who ripped some data security articles and broadcasts and put them up as public notice on a non-profit web site. That person must have already soaked up so much of the free-flowing whiskey of repetition that s/he is drunk with possibilities as s/he surveys the limitless expanse of already published web content, and not without some justice counts it as a bonafide professional virtue to be able to sift through it all and post the most relevant items in little blue boxes on Seattle.Gov. The nature of this act is buried under so many layers of banality that some of the commentators on McDougall's blog even questioned why the whole thing was even worthy of a blog post! (What exactly does it take to be worthy of being a blog post these days? Some people actually take the "blog" idea seriously and post any old drivel on a daily basis just to chat in the public's ear.)

Others doubted the wisdom of the fact that in his final paragraph, McDougall has the chutzpah to mention that Microsoft, in the following context:

Microsoft has been at the forefront of efforts to combat piracy and intellectual property theft, but most of its efforts have focused on China and other developing markets. Note to Ballmer and Co.: Time to start looking in your own backyard!

True, as the commentator, who posts as "NYSSA", pointed out, MS is in Redmond, not Seattle. As if Redmond had a reason to exist other than as a Seattle suburb until MS put it on the map. Surely it takes only a limited grasp of geography to see that it counts as MS's "own backyard". NYSSA then asks, " Is anything happening in Washington now to be tied to Microsoft?" True, MS is not responsible for every tree cut down by Weyerhauser. On the other hand, McDougall did not say that MS is responsible for the posting on Seattle.Gov. But NYSSA misses a much bigger point, though I'm not sure McDougall even wanted to go there (so I will). We are in the midst of a vast proliferation of digital content; a single sentence or an entire article can end up on dozens of web sites overnight, and the phenomenon extends even to official government sites. It is pervasive, and threatens us with a general cultural and moral decline, as the distinction between originality and regurgitation gets blurred, and the value of creative expression is lost. What is Microsoft's response to all this? What is Apple's response? What is Sony's response? Three little words, "We're losing money!" (Abbreviated "DRM".) The very people who brought us into the world where the virtual is the real and the real is the virtual have only one complaint: dirty no good rotten Chinese pirates and Russian hackers are threatening our profits and making it possible to not only copy literary content (about which we could not give two hoots, let Google worry about that one) but software, songs and movies! The nerve! Track them down, fine them (or their parents, if they happen to be under age) or force them to take jobs as data security consultants!

Not too long ago I had in my hands a resume from a consultant applying for a high level position managing a major IT project. One of the requirements for the job was the ability to write complex design and analysis documents. People were required to submit samples of their work. What I received from this consultant looked very professional; I was duly impressed. But just as a precaution, I grabbed a particularly well put sentence from his document and stuck it in my favorite search engine. Never guess what popped up... perhaps the latest Annual Report from the company where the consultant had just completed an assignment? This is why it is ever so appropriate that Harry Frankfurt's article should end up copied wholesale on some obscure web site, available free of charge to anyone who doesn't want to pay Amazon $9.95 for a hardcover reprint of On Bullshit ($7.96 for the Kindle edition, speaking of repetition - that would be, I think, the sixth licensed version of what is a philosophy article of ordinary length.) We are becoming a nation, no a world, of bullshitters, and the bullshit is hitting the fan. The proof of it is that when somebody like McDougall gets decently outraged at a shining example of the bullshit that is blowing in the wind, some people cannot even figure out what the hell his problem is. Here is the latest response to his blog post, by someone who identifies him/herself as "dorsai":

I'm not saying that ignoring copyright is OK, but this might have been a legitimate oversight by an overworked city worker, that appears to be fair use (at least it is now) based on the attribution links on the site.

Not quite sure why this warranted a blog post.

Okay, you're not sure, allow me to jump in. Go click on the link again, my friend, and you'll see an amazing thing: in the aftermath of McDougall's article, the aforementioned overworked city worker (I count myself as one of those, BTW - different city, though) has found the time to amend the article with attributions for each and every one of the security alerts he posted on the site! Now there's a reason to write a blog, by golly! Something that was a little off got corrected, the original writers received credit, the Seattle IT guy undoubtedly feels better about the whole thing, and the world is in general a better place! You know, if I could claim such accomplishments for most of my dozens of blog posts (not all on this blog) I think I would just throw a big party and invite everyone at Seattle.Gov and CMP too. Fortunately for my budget, I can't make such claims. But let's not get so jaded that we just look the other way or make excuses every time someone points out a mass instance of unattributed copying. The most encouraging thing about the whole incident is that the Seattle IT guy took the issue more seriously than his would-be defenders, and did something about it. Which suggests once again that if there is hope for a creative rebirth of humanity, it will probably come out of Seattle. Or at least the soundtrack will.

February Crashes and Burns

February 1909 was not exactly a dull month for disasters. There was the wreck of the Penguin, a New Zealand ferry that struck a rock on February 12 and took down some 75 of the 105 passengers aboard. Then on the 16th, a mine explosion at the West Stanley Colliery in Durham, England, ended the lives of 168 people. The cause was never determined. The U.S. contributed to the carnage with several train wrecks, including one near Delmar, DE that took seven lives, and another in Carbodale, IL that sent five more to their graves. Overall, though, it was far from the worst month for catastrophes here, at least according to what I can glean from the not exactly uplifting information on GenDisasters.Com.

In fact, it seems to have had its moment of courageous victory over the forces of evil, as a horrible train wreck near Whitesboro, NY (three miles west of Utica), ended with the loss of only two lives, both railroad workers. The engine of a westbound train exploded just as it was passing the passenger cars of an eastbound train, throwing the entire eastbound train from the tracks, scattering cars into a field and leaving a long trail of debris. The wreck on the redeye apparently happened before daybreak, at temperatures of 15 below. Nevertheless, uninjured passengers on the westbound train, which merely stalled, rushed to the assistance of others, as townspeople also jumped out of bed to lend a hand. In the end, not a single passenger died; the injured were rushed to hospitals by sleigh and other means. Shades of a certain emergency landing on the Hudson River almost exactly 100 years later. Maybe there is some cosmic symmetry in history after all.

Unfortunately, if there is, it's not all of the kind to jump and cheer about. There is a story that some time around the turn of the century there were only two cars in the state of Kansas, and they collided. Probably an apocryphal tale from Ripley's Believe it or Not, though repeated in popular culture often enough to make it seem real. That supposedly occurred on July 4, 1904. It now has an eerie parallel in a so-called "freak accident" in which the French nuclear-armed submarine Le Triomphant triumphantly rammed the British nuclear-armed sub H.M.S. Vanguard. The date of the sub crash was only given as "early February". The two submarines were playing hide-and-seek, the game in which these units armed with enough power to destroy much of the civilized world try to hide their whereabouts from one another's sonar. Disaster, thy name is Progress! A car wreck can injure a few people and spill some antifreeze (toxic to wildlife). Two nuclear subs can destroy an entire oceanic ecosystem with radiation leakage even if they don't accidentally discharge any nuclear-tipped flying objects and take out a city or two. Why are these things patrolling the oceans, jumping around and hiding from one another like some underwater Mario figure? As far as I can tell, were we to peer into the minds of many of our world leaders what we would find is a bunch of anxious little boys who are mentally primed to pull handles and push buttons, as if the enemies were virtual and the lives they endanger mere animations. Yet we believe we have no choice but to accept this sick state of the body politic.

The almost benign Whitesboro wreck has a less fortunate centenary sister to offset the more pleasant turnout on the Hudson, i.e., the fatal crash of Continental Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY on February 12. What a comedown, after January's "miraculous" Hudson River landing. But actually, that miracle was no fortuitous gift of god. It depended on a plane engineered to land on water and float for a period of time, equipped with life preservers and a crew trained to react in case of an emergency water landing. It depended on a pilot who had to practice water landings in flight training until he could execute them about as confidently as a normal landing. It depended on communications between air traffic controllers and the flight crew, accurate enough (in spite of some errors) to let rescue teams know what was about to happen and where, before it actually happened. That is not to say that nothing could possibly have gone wrong - had the emergency occurred at night, or the river been laced with big chunks of floating ice, or one or another systems failed, there could have been a much worse result. But this was no miracle, just an example of how technology can be controlled even in the most adverse circumstances when enough planning and careful execution goes into it. With Continental Flight 3407, it is possible that all reasonable measures were taken to de-ice the plane, and that there was no way for the crew to do more than guess where on the plane the additional ice buildup had occurred, leading them to take the wrong corrective action when an autopilot system sent the plane into a descent. But there have been ice-related crashes before, including an awful incident in which a de-iced US Air plane spent so long on the runway at LaGuardia while waiting for takeoff in a March 1992 snowstorm that it accumulated a new, dangerous sheet of ice on the wings, resulting in a crash and 22 deaths.

Birds, ice, lightning strikes, wind shear - we know the most common causes of plane crashes, but for some reason we have not managed to eliminate them. I guess you could ask why we are spending billions of dollars engineering nuclear submarines which can destroy life on earth, when the tremendous scientific and technical efforts and financial resources required to build such things could be put to use figuring out how to build ordinary commercial planes that don't inhale birds or get coated with sheets of ice in flight. That would presuppose that we elect rational leaders, driven by a sincere belief in the good of humanity, rather than overgrown Mortal Kombat fanatics, driven by infantile aggressive impulses. Well, who knows, maybe we'll get one yet.

February did have a kind of miracle, if you like those: the case of the Turkish Airlines plane crash in Amsterdam on February 25, where the vast majority of the passengers survived even as the fuselage split in three pieces on ground contact. That is just a miracle, no way to plan or predict it but plenty to be thankful for. But everything beyond that sort of lucky turnout has to be done by us humans. That's why it is so disconcerting when it seems that everything was, and lives were lost anyway. We have collectively accumulated millions of miles of flying experience in commercial flights, yet we still cannot control every factor that might cause a catastrophe. So why are we sending nuclear submarines to play cat-and-mouse games beneath the waves? (And whatever you do, don't say "it's the French and the British, not us" - the U.S. has at least 18 nuclear-armed Ohio class subs, and possibly several others, and all our subs are driven by nuclear reactors.) Two nuke subs accidentally playing bumper cars in the world's vast oceans? One good crack-up and it won't be ordinary ice we'll be trying to lose - more like ice-nine. And that doesn't come off too easily.

Yes, Astroland may have closed but bumper cars are still going strong. On February 10 (at least someplace on earth) two satellites, a defunct Russian gizmo and an Iridium cell phone relay unit, collided in space. Another freak accident, which must have particularly freaked out users of Iridium's international cell phone service; according to a quotation from an Iridium spokesperson on MSNBC, "This satellite loss may result in very limited service disruption in the form of brief, occasional outages." As for the Russian satellite, Dasvidania! The debris now threatens the International Space Station, but NASA claims the risk is "acceptable". It will of course eventually end up on earth. Since a good part of the earth's surface is water, desert, or cemeteries, there is not much to worry about.

Or is there? Well, there's all that satellite debris hurtling around, just waiting to burn a hole in the ISS, which can then in a freak accident come crashing down over... Houston? Oh but no, say the FAA, the U.S. Strategic Command, and the Texas State Police. No, that fireball that numerous witnesses from Waco to Austin saw a few days after the Iridium collision must have been something Apollo (the Greek god, I mean) tossed in our direction for fun. (He likes to play bumper cars too.) "We still think it's possible it might be a natural phenomenon...", a spokesperson for the USSC intoned. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, means almost the same as: "It is likely, though not absolutely certain, that this is a piece of space junk burning up just short of heavily populated areas in Texas." Or, as they might say when they make the movie - "Houston, you have a problem."

Google's Earth, or Is It Brin's World?

An InformationWeek post today by Thomas Claburn is entitled "Google Defuses Street View Privacy With User Photos". It's hard to think of a more misleading way to characterize the situation. Adding user-generated content cannot defuse any issues regarding the still available satellite or panoramic photos of people's homes, windows, front porches, pets and the like. Presenting that kind of content in a commercial setting, where it is detailed and the main subject of the photo, normally requires individual, signed photo releases. Google has managed to get around that, most recently in a flawed decision by a Pennsylvania court. You can get an idea of Google's view of physical privacy in general in their court brief, an excerpt of which was published by The Smoking Gun. Essentially, Google argues (a) that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy for your real property, unless you have taken extraordinary measures to protect it; (b) that the property in question can already be viewed from one perspective or another on publicly available web sites (such as that operated by the County Assessor's office); (c) that while Google photographers did briefly enter a private driveway to make the photograph, that driveway would ordinarily be accessed by many people, such as delivery persons and neighbors, and is not therefore "private" in the way needed to exclude photographs; and (d) that the defendants cannot reasonably claim to have suffered psychological harm from the publication of the photograph and did not take immediate steps to have it removed.

Personally, I think all these arguments are fallacious, because they all overlook two obvious and highly pertinent facts:

(1) Google set out deliberately, and without regard to the preferences of society as a whole or any individual on the planet, to take panaoramic "street view" photographs of every piece of real property in several major cities. This was an unprecedented and extremely ambitious venture, and cannot be compared to the casual, accidental or occasional intrusion by an individual photographer. That is not to say that an individual photographer who deliberately enters a private driveway to photograph someone's house is doing nothing wrong; but it is not comparable to the methodical nature of Google's "street view" program, which might be seen as deliberately and egregiously intrusive even if the wandering photo opportunist is not.

(2) Google's purpose in photographing private homes is purely commercial. Although Google self-righteously pontificates about its "mission" in the court statement ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"), the fact is that Google is a profit-making enterprise, and any ideological motives they may have has to take a back seat to the fact that they are publishing more and more content with the intention of making more and more money. No one asked them or designated them to carry out any "mission"; they do it in the hope of increasing advertising revenue, licensing fees and other sources of income. So when Google hires photographers to stop by your house and take panoramic pictures of it which they can post on the Internet, they are not acting as artists, journalists, casual snapshot takers or any other disinterested party. They are using your property to indirectly generate income for themselves, to which you are not entitled, though you are the owner of the property. They are not fulfilling any (alleged) security mission, as NASA or the Pentagon might be when they point their satellite at your block; if anything, they are providing potentially dangerous information which would otherwise be quite challenging for terrorists or rogue states to obtain. As I said, the deliberate commercial use of a detailed photograph in which your property is the main subject normally requires a signed photo release; but decisions like those of judge Amy Reynolds Hay of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania have helped Google to evade that requirement.

Aside from that, it is just obvious, and should be to any court, that previous publication of unlicensed photos of you or your property is no justification whatsoever for another instance of that to take place. The County Assessors office may actually have no right, or legitimate official interest, in putting your property on display. All the same, if they do, that does not mean that Google's pursuit of profit is an equally legitimate interest in that regard.

Now, back to the latest news bite: Google has not "defused" any privacy concerns with its addition of user photographs, obtained through its Panoramio service. Google is just helping itself to a bunch of free content, assuming vanity will convince enough amateur photographers to turn themselves into an unpaid, worldwide, roaming Google staff. There is some suggestion that the privacy concerns Claburn thinks this will address are more along the lines of the Google photographers' off-color photos of people picking their noses or peeing in public than the photos of people's private property, but privacy is invaded when a compromising photo is published, regardless who the photographer is. Contrary to Claburn's view, Google is not somehow exonnerated, nor are the victims less entitled to redress, because a compromising photo is selected and presented rather than originally taken by Google.

In fact, rather than fix anything, the new idea only raises questions about Google's use of user-generated content in search results that are part of Google's regular commercial activity. Google's Terms of Service seem to make it clear that they do not own the content you upload (see paragraphs 9.4 and 11). But their TOS are strangely similar to those of Facebook, whose latest ethics fiasco has much to do with their entitlement to uploaded content. Facebook claims the right to make "derivative" use of your content, while Google is a bit more vague. Google says that you grant them an "irrevocable" license to distribute, copy and present the work; they suggest that some rights you grant them to some content may be revoked, but only as specified under unspecified "Additional Terms of those Services". They say you may "terminate your legal agreement with Google" by closing your account and writing to them, but not that this revokes their right to your content. Personally, I would be very wary of uploading any photo to Google that you might ever want to either use commercially, or keep private. The pix of you and your girlfriend or boyfriend by the Statue of Liberty may seem like just about the most innocuous thing to put on Panoramio. Well, think ahead my friend. That irrevocable display license you granted to Google may just bite you in the rear end someday when you no longer want that particular association exposed to everyone on the planet.

My own view is that Google's so-called "mission" is on a collision course with basic values we have always had, and it is mainly the naivete and glib attitude of a certain technobrat, IT-snob crowd that makes it seem as if the values have just dispappeared. how convenient for Google, not to mention several other privacy-invading profiteers from surveillance and information-sharing technology. It is reassuring that so far, practically every incursion they make into privacy rights gets some kind of pushback; but power, money, and the shallow acceptance of every new social networking opportunity are pushing even harder on the other side. Which means privacy is constantly losing ground, and often court battles. Well, this blogger at least is not going gentle into that good night.

Is Microsoft Doomed?

I admit I got a little frustrated after no one commented on my Dell post, but now I understand - I just have to post three times a day and carry my laptop with me to the bathroom and I might get some attention, like all those best-selling technology blogs that get high Technorati ratings. Or maybe I should write about nifty gadgets instead of ethics. Well, I don't think it's going to happen. So here I go again, after a brief 8 months or so, with my overly lengthy posts, stubbornly focusing on rights and wrongs in the digital world.

But my topic this time is as much historical as ethical. It is a matter of fact as well as a matter of justice. I guess that amounts to poetic justice, as in the giant who ate so much that he finally exploded. I am talking about that formidable giant Microsoft. I've been in IT since the days when MS's main products were GW Basic (officially "Gee Whiz Basic", I think, but everyone knew it was Gates, William). You could say, I suppose, that at that time they were a reasonable company with a few reasonably competitive products - MS COBOL was one of the earlier microcomputer COBOL products, and I think it worked on mainframe and midrange systems too, which gave it some advantages over Ryan McFarland and other products. Then they struck it rich by beating out CPM to make MS-DOS the OS for the IBM-PC, and made themselves a key player in the small computer market.

Still they were nothing like what they are today. MS-DOS was, by most accounts, not really an operating system, but an incomplete I/O manager. In any case, you needed half a dozen supplementary utilities (Norton, Sidekick, Xtree, etc.) to make it even minimally user friendly. The first couple of versions of Windows were complete non-starters; we ignored it and used DeskView for multitasking and window-switching. Early versions of Word had only one reason for existence, the ability to utilize built-in graphical capabilities in some of the early laser printers. People used WordPerfect for ordinary word processing, or XyWrite for more technical stuff, or maybe DisplayWrite if they were big IBM ideologues, or Wordstar 2000 if they wanted more power and more frustration (it had plenty of both).

It was Windows 3.1 that finally put MS over the top and created that great sucking sound whereby all new apps had to write to the Redmond API. Soon computer vendors were being forced into MS-only deals. Excel, a ripoff of (Lotus 1-2-3) a ripoff (Visicalc) of a software program, got bundled with Word, which was beginning to resemble a real word processor, and soon MS Office was making a play to be an industry standard, not without some strongarm tactics to help it along.

The rest of the story is pretty well-known: Word elbowing WordPerfect (a 10 times better and more intuitive word processor) out of the market, Foxpro (once purchased by MS) knocking dBASE IV and Clipper out of the water, NT blowing Novell away, IE pushing Netscape to the brink of non-existence... all marketing, my friends, not a single one of these stories is an outright victory for quality. Though we did discover (in case IBM hadn't taught us earlier) that once you own the OS, and thereby pretty much control the industry, you can (a) become big enough to acquire a huge staff of high-end technical people and lure industry bigshots (b) buy up anybody who has an interesting technology, or simply steal it and fight them in court for 10 years with your huge legal staff, and make subtle improvements, and (c) bloat your products with features that 99% of your customers don't really need but that make for good sales pitches. I suppose some people might actually see this as a victory for quality. I see it as the way an unimaginative but unscrupulous corporation fought its way to become the Apollo of the computer industry, holding the sun in its chariot and determining the course of your day whether you like it or not.

If I had to pick one example to substantiate this it would certainly be Word vs. WordPerfect. WP 5.2 for Windows is still my word processor of choice, now nicely killed off by the elimination of the 16-bit subsystem in Vista. Granted, it is not a graphic design program or truly WYSIWYG. Later versions of WP are. But this one is simply the best writing program ever made. And I'm a writer, not a brochure designer. Word is a bloated and extremely frustrating piece of sw which I loathe more with every new version. The first thing I do - try to do - is turn off every single automatic correction and formatting and help feature - but it never works. They're hidden all over the place, like some little mouse hiding stashes of rotten food around its mouseholes. Because my organization only supports Word on the desktop, I have to live with MS's way of doing things, which I detest. Quality is not the name of this game; power is. But the superficial appearance of quality is there: more and more features rather than more user-friendly versions of the features they have - that is the MS mentality. You keep going in that direction and you get Word 2007, which sports a toolbar that might as well have been taken from the inscriptions on a pyramid. Nothing will stop the juggernaut of reinvention at M$ because it is what they live for, and by: you can sell the new look as a new product, even if its usability is even worse than the previous one.

So it is not without some sense of relief - call it poetic justice if you like - that I am able to write the headline above. "Some sense of wishful thinking", you might say. After all, in the last few days I have seen numerous pieces in the press alleging that Windows 7 is going to save MS from the ongoing commercial and publicity disaster known as Vista. A piece by David Pogue in the NY Times, several recent pieces in InformationWeek (this one, for example, or check out this alleged Intel endorsement) - they're pretty much all over the place. Windows 7 will save the day. What is the truth of this?

The truth is that MS has tolerated some rejections before, and has the same tried and true methodology for dealing with them: phase out support for older products so that users have no choice but to switch. And fear not, they have already announced the termination of support for Windows XP, the operating system that, despite all its flaws - absurd lack of registry control, endless security holes, occasional BSOD crashes, dubious handling of memory leaks and memory hogs (Outlook being a prime example of both) - was certainly their "greatest hit", especially with businesses who were looking for an improvement over NT Workstation.

It is typical of Microsoft, and of them alone, that a "hit" in the OS business, while supporting their stock price in the short term, is a kind of disaster for them in the long term. MS alone thinks of the OS as something you sell over and over again to the same computer user. For IBM and Sun, for example, when they were heavily invested in the proprietary the OS business, the OS was essentially something you buy with a new computer and then support with a maintenance contract. For MS, the OS is a huge revenue generator; it is supposed to be thrown out and replaced after a few service packs, to the tune of millions of licenses. (I will not get diverted into talking about their increasingly obnoxious licensing schemes, but keep in mind that they went from providing a full, re-installable copy of the OS on floppy disks, to copy-protected versions that would only re-install on the same computer - on a good day - to the current Vista "license" which is pre-installed, must be backed up by the user, and cannot be backed up or restored if a mistake is made in the backup process. Shameful, but typical.) So when one of those OS versions proves stable enough and flexible enough that businesses (especially) think to themselves, "You know, this OS really does just about everything I need it to do, I think I could save the money and an enormous distribution headache and just stick with it", it's a disaster for MS.

I wish more of the professional commentators, the ones who (unlike yours truly, so far at least) get paid for their opinions or make money from their blogs, would just get off the bus and say this in plain English. MS wants desperately for the OS to be obsolete, and it is a plain old catastrophe for them if the rest of the world thinks they actually did a good enough job with the last one that a few maintenance tweaks and a couple of utilities (you know, the much-ballyhooed support for new devices and all that) would carry it through day. This of course does not apply only to their OS; it applies to their Office suite. I mentioned the horribly reconfigured, visually confusing implementation of Word in Office 2007, all for no tangible gain whatsoever except to make it look like a new product so they can re-sell it to you. The same is true of most MS products. Every new version of MS Access caused us to have to rewrite a good portion of our Access apps, while keep the same extremely kludgey implementation of client-server. .Net framework 2.0 makes some things easier than 1.1 (database connectivity, for example), and provides a built-in membership class (which, without extensions, is good for only the simplest apps) but it is mainly there to sell Visual Studio upgrades. Every product MS makes is the same: the upgrade cycle is what makes or breaks the company. It is not consumer-oriented. Yes, consumers ask for this or that feature, computers and networks evolve, etc. A well constructed OS can go on for a long time being upgraded and patched to keep up with current standards. That model, however, ends up making very little money. MS never intended to follow the model where they provide basic OS functionality and sell service. They just want to resell the product over and over again, repackaged and made more nifty to suit current tastes.

That is, essentially, what Vista is. I am not talking about code-level Vista vs. XP vs. Windows 7. You can debate that all day. I am talking about functionality, performance, compatibility. It is not a new OS, except in the sense that trading this flaw for that flaw while having essentially the same functionality counts as something new. It is a new interface; it allegedly still has a lot of NT code in the kernel; it rewrites the I/O features (e.g., how it handles audio files) but not in a way that universally improves performance. See the Slashdot debate referenced above regarding the audio delivery system; it sounds extremely sophisticated, but here I am writing this post using Vista Home Premium 32-bit with 2GB RAM, listening to the Dandy Warhols on Lala.Com, and I get audio dropouts. As I did last night playing another album on Lala. For that I need to buy a new OS?

As for performance, also extremely debatable, it depends so much on the total configuration of hw and sw and drivers and what tweaks you do or don't apply. As for compatibility, Vista is totally incompatible with all 16-bit apps, does not support a lot of 32-bit apps, denies rights to a lot of drivers, etc. The one area in which it actually improves things is in the area of security, but at what cost? For example, the driver-signing rules are supposedly there to prevent rootkits from installing, and the numerous required user-acknowledgment dialogues are to keep viruses and trojans from loading. 'Scuse me, but I have anti-virus and anti-spyware sw installed, and I didn't pay for them. So how many of those millions of PC's with the "downadup" worm have Vista installed? A few? Oh, is that because with all those annoying dialogues, most users haven't got the slightest idea which processes should be allowed and which should be denied? Please take a letter: "Dear Steve/Bill/Whoever'sListening: the same unsophisticated users you talk down to by putting in dozens of auto-correct (or as I prefer to call them "auto-annoy") features in Word are the ones who are going to be responding to millions of those dialogues. How awkward is that?"

I cannot go on and on here trying to analyze and compare every feature of Vista, W7 and XP, and it is kind of beside the point. The OS rewrite, if it helps anyone, helps people for whom the main purpose of a computer is to play games. With all due respect to the Wii and Guitar Hero crowd, and the flight simulators who are now busily practicing their water landings, that should not be what drives the PC OS. Not in the least. Not even the consumer OS.

Oh, I hear you: without Vista, no 64-bit support. But businesses, by and large, did not need, and do not need, 64-bit quad-core processors or office apps rewritten to take advantage of them. More likely a lot of them could make do with thin clients, but I don't want to suggest that I am promoting that model either. Setting aside what MS itself is driving with useless bloated rewrites of their own sw, a standard Pentium processor is good enough to support the functional requirements of most business users, including most programmers. Yes, you have your CAD users and all, but they long ago started using workstations dedicated to that kind of calculation-intensive computing. And the same goes for most home users. I use my PC to write, maintain my finances, get to the Net, and a few other things. Don't need MS-generated hassles by having to deal with a new OS every couple of years. In my time I have ended up with Windows 3.1, WFW 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98 2e, Windows ME, Windows XP (a couple of different versions) and now Vista. And I do not consider myself a frequent computer buyer, I do not get a new system every couple of years. Still, I have rarely had the same OS twice. This greatly affects my productivity, on the downside. The only significant change I have seen in the OS in all that time is plug-and-play, the ability of the OS to recognize devices automatically, which was a great improvement over the old manual driver installation model. The USB 2.0 spec was an incremental advance on that. Otherwise, much of the same thing for about 15 years. Supports a browser now, supported a browser then. Addresses more memory, true, but are you telling me that you can't write an OS to address more RAM than is currently the standard? That is patently false. There is very little new in the OS since Windows 3.1 implemented a decent method of multitasking. WOUM: Write Once, Upgrade Many. That should be the model, and actually is in a way, if you look at the underlying code in the kernel, but MS wants to make it seem like you are getting a new product and you must buy a copy of it for all your computers and probably buy new computers for it too.

Windows XP was not, in spite of what they say, a great OS. The taskbar is extremely problematic and gets corrupted easily, causing huge headaches. The registry fills up over time with thousands of unreferenced entries, slowing down or crashing the system, and then you can take your life in your hands using some registry cleaner and hope you don't get rid of something you need. BSOD crashes are too common. Errant drivers can crash the system on bootup. Security was pitiful until SP2, and merely bad afterward. There are a lot of things you could say about XP that would recommend some improvements. But they do not need to be much more than XP without the bad features. Don't tell me you have to totally rewrite an OS to keep the registry clean, much less to deliver streaming audio so that it (allegedly) hits both your ears at the same time! That is bullshit, the kind of BS that lets MS sell millions of copies of each new version of Windows.

This blog is about ethics, not technical arguments over the virtues of 32-bit vs. 64-bit or this audio codec vs. that one. But here we have a case where the putative technical virtues of the OS are supposed to justify forcing the entire computer world into a huge project involving billions of dollars, millions of man-hours of installation, and millions more dollars and hours in software and hardware upgrades and application rewrites, and the supposed technical virtues are either not there, or they are gratuitous for most users, or they could have been done in a much less costly way. What right does one company have to create this sort of havoc for the sake of debatable or ephemeral improvements? It is absolutely an unethical business practice to change a widely used and understood interface and I/O standard for the purpose of supporting your own bottom line. It is also unethical to conclude deals with every single major retailer - Circuit City (RIP), Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, etc. - to carry only systems with an OS that nobody really wants. (I asked both CC and BB to sell me a system with XP installed and both of them refused.) MS's whole concept of how to do business is unethical, which is one reason they have ended up in court so often on restraint-of-trade charges (or something very similar). It starts with strongarm tactics with smaller sw companies, PC vendors and retailers. It extends to the development and marketing of their OS and all their products. It should be recognized for what it is by journalists and bloggers. That's what objectivity is, calling a spade a spade.

Now that they have suffered their most embarrassing defeat in the marketplace with Vista, and lost further ground to Linux and Apple on the desktop, what is their answer? They will push even harder for W7, cut the XP support lines, and pretend Vista never happened. And unfortunately, a lot of the tech-savvy journalists and bloggers are going along with this. That has an enormous influence on the industry, as corporate buyers read the buzz and think they have no choice and might actually gain something by moving to W7. But will that be enough? I have my doubts. W7 is scheduled for release early next year, and some analysts are suggesting that MS may move up the release date to save their necks. Meanwhile, we are in the midst of one of the worst financial crises in the history of western civilization. Nothing is stabilizing at this point, not housing, not banking, not technology (bye-bye Nortel, you did give it the old college try, didn't you? is Sun next in line for closeout sales?), not employment, and certainly not government, which will soon have committed (by my count) more than a trillion and a half dollars in one form or another to pulling us up by the bootstraps. So is corporate America, and faltering economies worldwide, going to sign up, in the next year or two, for a massive, expensive upgrade to a new desktop OS that is still not really necessary? And what if they don't?

There is indeed a serious question whether they will have a choice. Nothing strikes fear into the heart of corporate system administrators more than the idea of using "unsupported" sw/hw. So MS will make good on the threat to desupport XP, and it doesn't matter if the company has not called MS in three years for support - no more security patches, no more compatibility packs for new devices or hw interface standards - OMG, can't live with that, gotta bite the bullet and go with W7. But what if there is finally a critical mass of companies who decide to turn to open source, SaaS (Software as a Service) or "cloud computing", i.e., hosted apps on a remote Internet site, and other such options? And what if in response to this the level of support for coprorate use of these technologies grows? What if more users conclude that they don't need a PC OS at all, and can make do with tablets and other devices? In case you think MS is not the least bit concerned, note for example the pre-emption attempt with the "Tablet PC" feature in Vista, under Accessories. MS has been offering a thin client OS for something like 12 years (Windows CE) and is now positioning the little-known XP Embedded for service on older PC's that can't run Vista or W7. They are increasingly doing the open-source shuffle without actually committing to much.

Nevertheless, I'm not here to tell you that Linux desktops, thin clients, Android devices, OpenOffice and Joombla/PHP/Perl/etc. are your future. I don't think anyone can predict the future. But as the saying goes, the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. And this giant is due for a comeuppance the size of Mt. Rainier. You know, that's the active volcano which tops off at 14,411 feet above sea level, and which according to Google maps is a 99-mile drive from Redmond. A little less as the crow flies. That's a lotta Java, I mean lava. Come to think of it, Pompeii was very important at one time too.