SCN: AOL & Microsoft

[patrick]

This article, while well written, was written too early. A court made a
decision yesterday, and while Microsoft and a lot of people think that
Microsoft won, the court was hard on them for the really bad things they did,
and went easy on them for the little things that MS did.

MS does not have an easy road ahead at all. People may go after MS like people
went after the tobacco companies. It was decided that MS was guilty of abusing
it's power while a monopoly. 

It's okay to be a monopoly in this country, our government will sanction it.
But use that power to control and be abusive? That is bad. Keep it up and you
will be in court like MS. And that is why they have a rough road ahead.

Industry insiders are saying that slapping MS on the hand won't work. Only
breaking up the company will work. 

So I don't see MS controlling the internet or anything else. I see them
controlling a particular industry, but not everything. The heat needs to be
kept on them, but they will never control everything.

I'm more worried about AOL. Now that is a mindless company. And they ship
software that is worse than that put out my MS. I hate AOL software more than I
hate Windows (I own a Mac and a PC, but I prefer Macs. And I don't really hate
Windows, but if I was asked to hate some software, it would be that clunky,
crappy AOL!)

Patrick

Patrick
--- Steve <steve at advocate.net> wrote:
> x-no-archive: yes
> 
> ==========================
> 
> A kind of online "people power" forced open Microsoft's and AOL's 
> doors seven years ago. Today both companies are itching to turn 
> back the clock. Can they do it?
> 
> 
> by Scott Rosenberg, Salon, excerpts
> 
> ...we know in our guts that control of the Web is concentrating at an 
> alarming rate. Sure, it's still possible for anyone to put up a Web 
> site. But as the carcasses of independent Web start-ups litter the 
> landscape, the once-wild online free-for-all is rapidly devolving into 
> a showdown between AOL and Microsoft. AOL controls the 
> subscriber lists and a huge chunk of the content; Microsoft controls 
> the consumer operating system and browser.
> 
> We're reaping the worst of both worlds, networked chaos and 
> monopolistic consolidation. The least common denominator of 
> individual behavior multiplies, while the least common denominator 
> of mass taste prevails. 
> 
> How did we...wind up in such straits? To answer that, we have to 
> look back to the roots of today's commercial Internet, the heady 
> days of 1994 and 1995. 
> 
> What made that time so exciting? For the first time in our 
> experience, the spread of the Web had...leveled the playing field of 
> media distribution. The Web's open design and standards meant 
> that publishers of all stripes could stop worrying about getting their 
> products to people; all you had to do was plug your content into the 
> Web, and anyone who had access to the Web could get it. 
> 
> The Web didn't eliminate distribution costs (there are still servers to 
> buy and bandwidth charges to pay), but it dramatically reduced 
> them, and gave the notion that "everyone's a publisher" some 
> credence beyond hype. 
> 
> "Publisher" covers a vast spectrum, though, from AOL Time Warner 
> to your local HTML whiz kid. As commercial publishers colonized 
> the Web and private individuals flexed their new publishing 
> muscles, two vastly different visions of the Web's purpose and 
> value emerged. Old-line media corporations that viewed the Web as 
> a threat and commercial start-ups that saw it as an opportunity 
> shared one perspective: The Web had to be made a safe place for 
> profits, whatever it took in the way of advertising, subscriptions, 
> privacy invasions and other increasingly desperate measures.
> 
>  Meanwhile, the do-it-yourself Web publishers -- from the "build your 
> own page" homesteaders of 1995 to the more recent explosion of 
> weblogs -- reveled in the new ease with which they could post 
> information, from personal trivia to headline-making revelations, to 
> the entire world, and didn't worry much about money. 
> 
> In no other medium have "pro" and amateur, commercial and "just 
> for fun" found themselves so inseparably intertwined. But along the 
> way each camp tended to conveniently forget some facts: The 
> amateurs lost sight of how heavily their "free" publishing was 
> subsidized by venture-capital investments in Net infrastructure -- 
> investments that, having proved largely unprofitable, are no longer 
> flowing. The pros, meanwhile, talked up projections of vast growth 
> for Internet usage, without acknowledging how much of that use went 
> to e-mail or Britney Spears fan pages, neither of which was likely to 
> boost a media company's bottom line. 
> 
> Thanks to this dynamic, the Web we know today evolved. The 
> medium became a laboratory for big corporate media and 
> technology companies to test new software and new business 
> models at relatively low risk and cost. Much of the Web's seven-
> year history is a chronicle of these failures: The e-commerce 
> missteps of 1996..., the city-site wars of 1997, the me-too portal 
> mania of 1998 and 1999, the dot-com dollar palooza that peaked and 
> then cratered in 2000. 
> 
> A lot of predictions made with great idealism didn't pan out. After a 
> brief first wave of innovative new sites -- Hotwired, Feed, Word, 
> Suck, Salon and Slate -- the notion that the Web would foster a 
> renaissance of independent publishing quickly withered in the face 
> of some hard truths about Web media: Yes, it's easier and cheaper 
> to put up a site than to print a newspaper or magazine or start a TV 
> station, but journalism and information still cost money. And once 
> you hang out your Web shingle you still have to figure out a way for 
> people to find out that it's there. 
> 
> So of that first wave of high-profile "indies," Hotwired and Word are 
> long gone, Feed and Suck have just gone into deepfreeze and 
> Salon's financial difficulties have become a long-running soap opera 
> in the financial press. (Slate may belong to this group in its target 
> audience, but it is now so deeply intertwined with the Microsoft 
> Network that its Web address has become a mere redirect from 
> "www.slate.com" to "slate.msn.com," and its editor, Michael 
> Kinsley, says he doesn't even have a separate balance sheet.) 
> 
> There's no reason the Web can't support a flourishing field of 
> independent professional publishers in the middle ground between 
> Big Media and feisty amateur -- no reason, that is, as long as you 
> give this still-fledgling business time to sort itself out. Web users 
> will eventually accept the necessity of paying subscription fees for 
> the content they really want. Advertisers will eventually stop holding 
> the Web to standards of guaranteed effectiveness that their bloated 
> print and broadcast budgets could never meet. 
> 
> Sustainable businesses will evolve out of the carnage of the dot-
> com downturn, or grow off the corpses of failed start-ups. Broadband 
> connections and software improvements will, across a decade-long 
> vista, reduce users' frustration and impatience. Anyone, anywhere, 
> will still be able to put up a Web site and reach anyone else online 
> with news, gossip, truth or lies. 
> 
> One big "but" hangs in the way of this rosy scenario, however. As 
> Microsoft and AOL play out their corporate duel, each will inevitably 
> seek to lock in customers and lock out competitors. I think a 
> significant number of Web users, myself included, would be happy 
> to see these two giants cripple each other in the process. The 
> trouble is, their moves are more likely to injure bystanders -- and 
> could wreck the Net itself. 
> 
> While no one company may "control" the Web, Microsoft and AOL 
> each have it within their power to wreak a lot of damage on the 
> network and its users. At the moment, the pressure is on Microsoft 
> to whittle down AOL's overwhelming lead in the subscriber rolls, so 
> it's Microsoft that's causing the most trouble. 
> 
> Since Microsoft controls the operating system and Web browser that 
> most consumers use, Microsoft looks to bend its software in 
> directions that will help drive users to its Web sites and other 
> businesses. This is what Microsoft calls "innovation" and 
> "integration" -- and what the U.S. legal system, depending on which 
> court's ruling is currently in force, calls "monopolistic behavior" and 
> "antitrust violation." 
> 
> Microsoft's role in the ecology of the Internet business has long 
> been to "cut off the air supply" of competitors. Microsoft execs deny 
> coining that memorable phrase, which emerged during the antitrust 
> trial -- but whether they used it or not, it accurately describes the 
> company's tactics. 
> 
> Today, AOL -- with its tens of millions of subscribers -- has the 
> luxury of, in essence, being the atmosphere of the online world. 
> Where Microsoft needs to subsidize its online efforts with the 
> obscene profits generated by its desktop-software monopoly, AOL 
> controls the world's largest stream of direct revenue from online 
> services. This is thanks to the company's unique position in serving 
> as the country's biggest Internet service provider and its largest 
> producer of content. 
> 
> It's not yet clear how AOL will respond to Microsoft's offensive, but 
> you can be sure it will give up no ground without a battle -- in the 
> courts or the consumer market or the software arena or everywhere 
> at once. AOL will do everything in its power, as it always has, to 
> keep users' eyes and dollars from roaming beyond AOL turf -- and 
> now that AOL's turf is so vast, that's an easier task. 
> 
> Before asking whether either of these companies could control the 
> Web or the Net, you have to pin down what you mean by "control." 
> There's control of speech -- of individual users' ability to say what 
> they want. There's control of access -- of whether and how we're 
> able to find and reach others across the network. And of course 
> there's control of the ability to make money online. 
> 
> As long as AOL's and Microsoft's struggle is fought primarily in that 
> final realm, the fight won't be one that most Net users will care 
> about; one mega-corporation's money grab looks pretty much like 
> another's. Things will get far more interesting, however, if the 
> conflict spills over into the other two categories. 
> 
> ...the more AOL and Microsoft "leverage" their advantages in, 
> respectively, subscribership and software, the more likely they are 
> to start closing off entrances and exits and transforming their 
> fiefdoms into private networks. In the world of instant messaging, 
> each company's users are unable to connect with the other's -- a 
> preview of what corporate control of access on the Net looks like. 
> Think of how it would feel if e-mail worked that way! 
> 
> In fact, it's not hard to imagine this at all -- because it's exactly how 
> the commercial online world worked before 1994. The smoke of 
> today's AOL/Microsoft war obscures a secret agenda the two 
> companies will never admit to publicly: They don't like the Internet -- 
> and never have. 
> 
> Microsoft's MSN and AOL were both closed, proprietary networks 
> when the Web exploded and upended their business plans, forcing 
> each to change course radically: Microsoft turned its battleship 
> around to sink Netscape in the browser wars, while AOL dropped its 
> hourly charges. Both companies hooked up their networks to the 
> open Net, while conniving to keep their users just a little fuzzy about 
> where the "branded" AOL or Microsoft turf ended and the rest of the 
> Net began. 
> 
> Both companies, you can bet, would be far more comfortable in a 
> world without the Internet -- a world in which they governed who 
> could post content on their networks and taxed anyone who made 
> money from it. Seven years ago, only one thing made them accept 
> and embrace the strange new notion of a network that nobody owned 
> or controlled: the overwhelming enthusiasm for the Net on the part of 
> masses of users and developers. 
> 
> A kind of online "people power" forced open Microsoft's and AOL's 
> doors seven years ago. Today both companies are itching to turn 
> back the clock. Can they do it? They'll certainly try. But if these 
> companies push too hard, those who care about the survival of an 
> independent Web may simply vote with their feet and wallets, as 
> they did once before. If they don't -- and only if they don't -- it will be 
> time to sing a requiem for the Net. 
> 
> 
> Copyright 2001 Salon.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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