And the war is over.

August 7, 1997

Yesterday - on the anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima - Bill Gates bought the world.

The 1984-ish symbolism was all there: Steve Jobs was delivering the keynote at the MacWorld Expo in Boston, and suddenly Bill Gates appears, on the mile-tall TV screen, by satellite from his living room. Amid boos, hisses, and gasps of disbelief, our bene volent Emperor announced to everyone's surprise that he actually likes the Macintosh, enjoys developing for it, and will be stepping up Mac development in the future. But far more important, he announced that Microsoft was investing $150 million in Apple, in nonvoting shares. And far more important than that? The announcement of cross-patent-licensing agreements between Apple and Microsoft, the announcement that Internet Explorer will be the default Web browser in future editions of the Mac OS, and other goodies.

This, just minutes after the good news: Steve Jobs has basically given the Apple board of directors its walking orders and put a new board in its place. There's still no CEO - but Mike Markkula is out (cheer!), Larry Ellison is in (reserve judgement on th is), Steve Jobs is in (reserve judgement on this), Jerry York of IBM and Chrysler fame is in (cheer!), and Bill Campbell of Intuit is in (cheer!).

This, all after the rollercoaster over Mac clones - Apple, or more precisely, Steve Jobs, thinks Mac OS licensing was a bad idea, and threatened to pull it the program and let Power Computing go make Wintels. Needless to say, Power Computing and others we re not happy about this: Power, for one, has been feeling claustrophobic inside Apple's licensing program for some time anyway. Apple will refuse to certify motherboard designs purely on whim, not on whether it runs the OS or not; Apple has on occasion re fused to certify machines that were faster than Apple's own, to avoid competition. Power's CEO Joel Kocher took the stage at the Expo with laptop prototypes and motherboards of 350MHz Mac clones, and sang En Vogue: "you're never gonna get it..." Apple has always been secure in its heavy hardware profit margins, recall the Apple II cost three times as much as similarly powered competing 8-bits in 1983. The Mac has always been expensive - $6000 Macs at the high end have been commonplace for a decade. Power Computing has been known to undercut Apple by half on similarly powered hardware - and rather than try to compete, Apple instead threatened to just pull the OS licensing.

That issue is still unresolved. But we do have bigger fish to fry: Gates. Legend has it, Alexander the Great had himself lowered into the sea in a cage, to see what sea life looked like, and met a creature so huge it took three days for it to swim past hi m. Microsoft is exactly such a fish. What are they now, thirty-six billion dollars? Bill Gates can make and lose a billion dollars in a day just from fluctuations in Microsoft's stock price. $150 million for Bill is like you or me dropping 50 cents into a Pepsi machine. And now, he owns, controls, or has a claw into basically 97 percent of the operating systems industry. Microsoft the company is larger than the remaining active user base of some entire platforms - many 8-bits, for example. That's quite a sandworm, folks. Big, big company. Gates could buy entire countries with ease. He'd probably buy the United States except he'd have to absorb the national debt. (It would certainly get that pesky Justice Department off his back, though.)

At any rate, I see four critical things in this agreement between Microsoft and Apple.

• The patent cross-licensing isn't that big an issue right now, there isn't much in Apple's tech portfolio that Microsoft hasn't already swiped. But apparently there were some existing patent issues that this has resolved - and it remains to be seen how well Microsoft holds up its end of the bargain. Expect to see the Mac acquire a more Windowsey feel in the future.
• $150 million is a carrot. Apple lost $72 million last quarter, so this cash infusion will make a dent - but they'll want more. The next investment might not be nonvoting.
• Internet Explorer as the default browser in new Mac OSes: what's Netscape supposed to do? With Explorer shipping with 97% of all new machines sold, Netscape's pretty much stuck selling to conspiracy theorists, UNIX users, and Windows 3.1 folks.
• Apple and Microsoft collaborating on Java development: does anyone really think it'll be the Sun flavor they use? Recall that Microsoft is writing its own Java toolbox, and has stated they will NOT support Sun's - and it's a good bet Apple will suppor t only what Microsoft supports. Where's Sun supposed to turn?

There's a bigger victory here for Microsoft, though: they have inroads to every desktop in the world. Mac users will now be unable to keep the Microsoft influence off their system - new Macs will be Microsoftified when they unpack the box. OLE drivers in the System Folder are just the beginning. Expect to see an Internet Explorer 4 final release that integrates with the Mac Finder in much the same way IE4 on Windows does. But more importantly, Microsoft achieves its goal - Microsoft software on every desk top in the world - because there's no longer a way around it. Worse still, they've decisively said "There are only two platforms in the world - Windows and the Mac." Third-party upstarts no longer have a chance in hell - because they must beat the Mac to get recognized, and to beat the Mac now requires beating Microsoft's "little buddy." With Apple neutralized, Netscape and Sun gone, OS/2 long gone, and the Amiga a non-entity since 1994, Microsoft can focus on whoever's next - and that looks like Be.

So where has the Amiga been while all this was happening? Indeed, where has the Amiga been all month long?

Good fucking question.

Next time, I'll write an Amiga-only column - assuming enough Amiga-related stuff surfaces in the next couple weeks to make it longer than a paragraph. I know the summer months are slow for computers, but shit, people! Isn't the Amiga doing ANYTHING this s ummer?

Anything?

Hello?