| Friday, April 12, 2002 |
10:17 - Oh. How romantic.
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0411/2270.html
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The big launch finally arrived. On November 14 at 12:01 a.m., Mr. Gates handed over the first Xbox to a dedicated gamer who had waited for hours at the Toys 'R' Us store in New York City's Times Square. Mr. Blackley and his new girlfriend, Vanessa Burnham, were at the scene. He introduced her to Mr. Gates.
"You know, Seamus, I think she could help you get your act together," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley asked. "Something has to."
"You ought to marry her," Mr. Gates said.
"You think so?" Mr. Blackley replied.
"Yeah, absolutely," Mr. Gates said. "Here's a ring."
"I'll give it a shot, OK, cool," Mr. Blackley said. He got down on one knee.
"Vanessa, will you marry me?"
She laughed, then answered, "Yes."
"Thank you," Mr. Blackley said.
He rose and they kissed. Everyone in the store applauded. Mr. Blackley put the ring on Ms. Burnham's finger. John Eyler, CEO of Toys 'R' Us, presented a stuffed animal to her. Mr. Gates had been briefed, but he had ad-libbed the part about Mr. Blackley getting his act together.
Oh, yes, honey, I want to tell our grandkids about how you proposed to me by having the richest tycoon in the world rehearse a ridiculous little off-the-cuff exchange at a public press event and give you a free ring paid for by the blood of all the companies he killed. At that, an exchange that makes it look like you'll do anything he says, like getting married on his offhand suggestion. "You think so?" You pathetic toady.
Great article. Five pages of behind-the-scenes action, the whole story of how the Xbox came to be. All Microsoft fans take note: It was not Billzor Gates and Steve "E-trip" Ballmer, hip 20-something geeks playing air-hockey in the steam room in the sub-basement of One Microsoft Way, who suddenly said to each other, "D3wd! We should like totally make a game console!" "Yeah! We'd be 3l33t!" No. Not hardly. Read this thing. It's all the brainchild of Seamus Blackley, a failed game developer with an ego to match Bill's own, who was desperate to rebuild his shattered self-image after a devastating failure on a game he was working on for Spielberg. He proposed the idea to the Microsoft execs, who hated the idea at first. They took a long time to warm to it. But Blackley kept at it, goat-skulled; he was going to get his own back, damn them all.
I mean, look at this story. It's all a huge, disgusting ego trip. Sure, the guy has an admirable quality to his ideals: video games that are art rather than entertainment (Sony) or toys (Nintendo). But dude, art doesn't sell. At least, not unless it's a part of something larger that does sell.
So when you have internal propaganda like this:
There were plenty of other moments when Mr. Blackley's flair for "morale building" activities got him into trouble. At one internal meeting, he showed an animation dubbed "Survival of the Fittest." It sported a couple of Microsoft's mascot characters at a shooting range. They fired weapons and eviscerated mascots like Sega's Sonic, Nintendo's Mario, and Sony's Crash Bandicoot. He was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "Playing video games is like masturbation; everyone does it but no one wants to admit it."
... Somebody's got to see this effort for what it is: the paranoid scheme of a megalomaniac with more ambition than sense, more talent than intellect. Oh, they all said I was mad... mad! They called me a no-talent hack! They all laughed! ...Well, who's laughing NOW? Haaah hah hah hah haaaaah!"
Granted, it's a perfect fit for Microsoft: inferior in every way that counts, they release their inadequacy-related stress by symbolically blowing up the symbols of the ones who are successful. Hey, look-- it's the David Gonterman of the technology industry! If they can't succeed, they just make it up in really crappy volume, mockery, and FUD. That's the American Way!
Look, I'm big enough to admit that there are many things that the Japanese do so much better than we do that we should not even try. Video games are clearly one of them. Sure, Nintendo and Sony may be big cutthroat corporations with hardly any more ethics than Microsoft. But at least they won on their own merits, by making products that people wanted and by appealing to people's imaginations. With the Xbox, Microsoft is being everything that everybody hates about America: big, dumb, megalomaniacal, ethically stunted, and yet backed by enough resources to shoulder aside the beloved incumbents purely because they think it's their manifest destiny to spread their influence into every corner of the technology market.
I kicked walls when Microsoft decided to move into the server market, bringing a decidedly inferior product to bear against far superior platforms that already served their purpose perfectly well. Windows has never been suited to servers. It's not even designed to be remotely-accessible, for God's sake. There's no useful command line. The distributed-client architecture of Windows client-server apps is a sick joke. Why did they get into this market? Because they could. Because there was money that other people were getting, that they decided they should have instead.
I shrieked to the heavens when Microsoft brought out WinCE devices, creating a monstrously crappy alternative to the already hugely popular Palm platform. WinCE has always suffered from Windows' flashier-is-obviously-better problems; even their ads tout WinCE as superior purely because its e-mail client has more colors. Can your palm do this? (moving loose fist up and down) Never mind which platform is more stable, more extensible, more flexible, or has about a thousand times as much software available for it. Why did Microsoft get into this market? Because they could. They saw someone else getting money hand over fist, and they wanted it instead.
As always, Microsoft will keep doggedly pouring money into these things, making new versions, supporting their initially bland sales figures, gradually patching up the products until they're passable in functionality. But by then, the marketing team will have done their job: convincing the public that the Microsoft product is the only viable choice, no matter how crappy it actually is. All that matters is convincing IT directors and CEOs and gamers that as long as something looks pretty, it must be better. They did it with Internet Explorer (IE3 was awful beyond belief and encouraged bad coding style and had a non-standard table specification, but hey-- it was free! So it's obviously the one we should all be coding for now!). They did it with AVI movies (gee, QuickTime invented the whole concept-- but we can't have that! It's not a Microsoft technology! So let 'em have their little "MPEG" standards. We'll use our own free crappy stuff, everybody will make AVIs because they can, and QuickTime will die!). They've done it with Windows and with WinCE. And now they're going to do the same thing with the Xbox.
Back in 1996, my concern with Microsoft was that they would splinter the Web by forcing everybody onto their inferior browser with its lack of adherence to standards and its poorly implemented feature set, and a great part of the flexibility and promise of the Web as envisioned in the HTTP and HTML specs would be lost forever. Given the garbaceous state of IE at the time, it seemed like a distinct possibility, and the appearance was that Microsoft was simply experimenting-- dabbling irresponsibly in a field where it was dangerous to do something half-assed, where their poorly implemented solutions would inadvertendly kill much that was good in the industry. I wrote many feverish e-mails to whatever addresses I could find at the Microsoft website, berating them saying, "If this is the best you can do, maybe you should stay out of the web browser market." After all, just a month or two before, when asked whether Microsoft would start up an Internet division, Bill Gates had snapped, "That would be like having an electricity division."
Well, as it turns out, my fears were exactly correct. The web now runs exclusively on IE. The coding idiocies that IE had encouraged are now accepted standards-- rendering tables without </TABLE> tags, displaying blank table cells as empty rather than blanked-out with the table border color, supporting BMP images inline, and worst of all, completely ignoring all HTTP headers-- such as Content-type, Content-length, and other such useful controls-- so that it can display Word documents inline even if you've explicitly set the Content-type to try to prevent it from doing that. We no longer have the ability to program web apps according to the flexible published specifications, all because Microsoft successfully pushed IE down everybody's throats.
And yet my reasoning behind this was completely wrong. This was no accident. Microsoft had intended all along for things to go exactly this way. IE3 was crappy on purpose-- or at least, they didn't sweat the details-- because all that mattered was market penetration. Just get it out there, and make sure it's free. Tout useless technologies lke COM+ and ActiveX. Sneer at browsers that don't display gargantuan BMP images inline. Just get it out there... and then worry about making the browser usable. And yes, IE is now a very good browser. It's very fast (well, hell, it's a kernel process now), it renders everything according to spec (because Microsoft took over the W3C and rewrote the spec to fit their rules), and it works with every page known to man. So is this success?
Is this the path to market that we should be encouraging? Isn't this a bit like allowing suicide-bombing to result in renewed negotiations for peace with more concessions given to the side of the bombers? The ends justify the means?
Personally, I do not like that prospect for the technology industry.
Is there any market into which Microsoft will not insert itself if it can be shown that there's money to be made? Obviously video game consoles are not so wildly off-the-beaten-path that they won't leap into the fray, pretending to be the underdog and appealing to the easily-impressed-by-surface-flash geek-wannabes who failed high school calculus but who pronounce SQL as "Sequel" and think they're hot bat shit, just like they did with WinNT/IIS and with WinCE. What's next? Digital TV devices? Oh wait, yeah. So... military equipment? Genetic therapy? Recombinant DNA and viral weapon research?
And of course we're going to keep on sucking up everything they give us, until every nightmare sci-fi scenario about a maniacal corporation that controls everything in the entire world, like in Resident Evil, has come true.
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