FUD And Loathing In Redmond

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Even as Bill Gates pleaded ignorance in court last week of his smoking-gun e-mails, two fresh Microsoft memos mysteriously surfaced that give an inside glimpse into how the software giant responds to new ideas it finds threatening. It isn't a pretty sight. "These memorandums lay naked the assumptions of Microsoft's corporate culture--the insularity, the arrogance, the obsessive drive to control," declares Eric Raymond, the programmer who obtained the files and posted them on his website www.opensource.org)

Raymond happens to be the chief evangelist for something known as open-source software (which, not coincidentally, is the target of the new memos), a movement that is growing in popularity almost as fast as the Internet that helped spawn it. The idea is that the best way to build and market truly great software is to give it away and then enlist the collective talent of the thousands of programmers on the Net who will use it, debug it and ultimately improve and extend it. Case in point? Linux, a hugely popular version of the Unix operating system that is even overtaking Unix in some markets.

Worse still, from Microsoft's point of view, is that open-source projects "have acquired the depth and complexity traditionally associated with commercial projects such as Operating Systems and mission-critical servers"--that is, the core of Bill Gates' monopoly power. The memos, written by senior engineers, conclude that Microsoft must "decommoditize" (which is to say, lock up and crush) the open standards set through the open-source approach. "FUD tactics can not be used to combat it."

FUD, for those who haven't read Raymond's excellent New Hacker's Dictionary, is geek for "fear, uncertainty and doubt"--a trick invented by IBM and perfected by Microsoft for scaring people away from a competitor's product.

Of course, the Net is nothing if not conspiracy-minded. No sooner had the memos leaked than some began to suggest that they were, in fact, planted. After all, Microsoft has long insisted that it is not a monopoly because its market dominance could be overturned in a flash by any programmer with a better idea.

Microsoft dismissed the memos as innocuous research reports. "Are you surprised by this?" asked a spokesman. "Any smart company keeps track of what's going on in the marketplace." If only to stomp on it.

--By Joshua Quittner