If Gates Wins All, What Then?

Any doubts about Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ mastery of marketing were erased Wednesday when his beaming visage appeared on a colossal screen at ground zero of the anti-Microsoft movement: Apple Computer’s annual MacWorld Expo. The virtual Gates dwarfed Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who stepped on stage to announce a financial and business partnership between the two archrivals.

It was a symbol of how fully Microsoft has come to overshadow its rivals in the computer software industry. Microsoft’s Windows programs now run 90% of the world’s computers; this deal further undermines the company’s few competitors. In requiring Apple to make Microsoft’s Internet browser the primary means of surfing the Net on Macintosh computers, for example, the deal will make it more difficult for consumers to use the popular Netscape, a competitor of the Microsoft browser. Microsoft has also made deals with dozens of Internet service providers requiring exclusive use of Microsoft’s browser.

The deal is clearly a good thing for Apple’s survival, for it will pump $150 million into the ailing company. But the long-term question remains: Can Microsoft compete as vigorously against itself as it has against its competitors? In the 1960s, IBM too was seen as invulnerable because of its founder’s ever-vigilant attitude, and yet it became stale and unresponsive to emerging market demands.

Microsoft is trying to stay fresh by hiring talented thinkers. Yet Microsoft, unlike Netscape, didn’t see the Internet’s growing appeal to consumers in the early 1990s. And unlike Apple, it failed in the early 1980s to realize that people would prefer to copy a letter by using a mouse to move a tiny image of an envelope rather than by typing “copy c:letter c:lettersletter.”

Let’s hope, then, that Apple and Microsoft cultures do not merge, that Apple is not erased. The almost cult-like rivalry between the two companies may be both healthy and energizing, revealing the kind of competitive spirit that has been key to America’s unparalleled success at capturing the world’s computer market.