The great Microsoft antitrust trial of the century will have left several lasting legacies a decade from now, not the least of which is this:
In terms of the PC operating system around which the case centered, the trial will only have hastened its irrelevance. Certainly, the future of the operating system will not be as potent as its Microsoft-dominated past.
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Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft exploited – perhaps illegally – the powerful starring role of the operating system on the personal computer. The suit's outcome, mediated or otherwise, will surely deliver a blow to the PC powerhouse that Microsoft built.
The harbinger of change is already here.
PC manufacturers themselves see the computer and its multi-purpose operating system funneling toward a single-purpose future. Especially in the consumer marketplace, that role will be to connect users to the Internet and the information that works through it.
Compaq recently announced a US$499 computer designed mainly for Internet access. Dubbed the iPaq, the machine is Compaq's answer to the Apple iMac, which similarly sought to play off a new, Internet-driven interest in the consumer PC marketplace.
IBM plans an early 2000 debut for an "Internet-ready" PC, code-named EON. And Hewlett-Packard has announced a strategy for the e-PC, a so-called sealed-box line of PCs. The "e" stands for evolution, defining the machines as an interim step between a full-featured PC and a stripped-down Internet appliance.
Ironically, the coming changes in Internet integration into the operating system are the kind Microsoft set in motion years ago – and that eventually got the company into antitrust trouble.
"The operating system will have to be completely integrated with the Internet," said Jakob Nielsen, usability expert at the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting firm in Mountain View, California. "It will have to be the manager of all your incoming and outgoing communication, whether email, Web browsing, or other Internet access."
Nielsen said it is an unfortunate aspect of the Microsoft case that the company has been charged with integrating Web browsing into the OS "as if that were bad."
Monopoly abuse is one thing, but it shouldn't pass a value judgment on acceptable design of the OS, Nielsen said.
Even PC operating system vendors see that the Internet's future does not lie inside the PC as we know it today.
Bob Young, chairman of Linux OS vendor Red Hat, declared last week that the reign of the PC and the traditional operating system was over.
"Our opportunity is in the killer applications of the 21st century, not in reinventing the PC platform," Young said. "And the killer apps will be Internet appliances."
Young, who made his comments to counterpoint the PC's day in the sun at the Comdex computer trade show, predicted that dedicated information appliances will supplant the hardware and software architecture of the PC.
This kind of change isn't as radical as it seems. The PC's Internet role was fragile from the beginning. Luck, not qualifications, landed the PC its job as the consumer's Web machine.
When the Web burst into the mainstream out of government and academia in 1994, it came from Unix-based workstations connected to high-speed Internet backbones. To reach households and employee desktops, the Web needed an existing household device to run on, and it wasn't going to be a Unix workstation.
The simple interfaces of the phone and TV would have made better appliances for the communications-centric activities of the Web. But alas, neither had the circuitry nor the display for the job of connecting to a digital communications network.
By process of elimination, the personal computer – which had grown up serving a set of business tasks like calculating spreadsheets and tallying databases atop a multi-purpose operating system – was pressed into duty. It was awkwardly teamed with the telephone line to become the temporary front-end for a radical new information medium.
It simply would have to do until something better came along.
Five years later, something better is starting to appear. From Net-surfing TVs to wireless handhelds to the increasingly prolific development of Web-centric PCs and Internet appliances, the new tools appear better suited to meet the Web job requirements.
Companies like National Semiconductor and Be Incorporated are among those planning to profit by this sea change.
The companies have partnered to build a reference system for manufacturers to build entirely newfangled Internet devices. More akin to a thick magazine than a desktop computer, National Semiconductor wants its WebPAD – an 8-1/2 by 11-inch device with a simple touch-screen – to be the chassis underlying wireless devices optimized for Internet browsing.
"Our joint offering will be a truly innovative pairing of hardware and software," said Jean-Louis Gassée, Be's chairman and chief executive officer.
Be will provide National Semiconductor with an Internet-centric operating system for the WebPAD, due in the first quarter of 2000.
In a Web-centric world, applications of the traditional PC – contact management, spreadsheets, and so forth – will still function, but through the Web.
"I think there's a huge opportunity here in that the OS itself is going to become a service over the next several years," said Katie Burke, president of Desktop.com.
Desktop.com makes traditionally PC-based applications accessible through the Internet. "[The OS] can tie it all together and have all the software that you traditionally used on your PC being inside of a browser," Burke said.
Microsoft saw all these changes coming long ago, of course.
Knowing that the future of the PC would come to be tied to the Internet, Microsoft tried to make the Net more of a fundamental component of its operating system software, even as it muscled its way into the suddenly important browser market.
However, Jackson ruled Microsoft overstepped its bounds.
Evidence from the antitrust trial shows that Microsoft even tried to get Netscape to kill a project that would have buried Windows underneath the browser itself.
All this was centered on suiting the PC to a job it just wasn't born to do, however. As the Web matures, far better Internet devices will take over the job.
Even as the trial's outcome may boost prospects for alternatives to Windows, the OS and its powerful influence are being overcome by winds of change, blowing in with the toddling Internet age.
