Bayosphere

What a year. Sept. 11 dominated everything, but the tech world had an interesting 2001 as well.

Here’s my year-end wrap-up column.

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Dave Winer: When to give away the technology. One little company selling a product does not make a market, no matter how unfair that seems.

Dave’s piece is about technology — about software — and it’s a thought-provoking look at a vital issue.

The sentence I quoted also struck me in the context of the previous posting. One blogger does not make a discussion, and that’s not unfair at all.

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Because decreasingly reliable Windows 2000 notebook remains dead in the water as far as Internet connections go, I won’t be back online Jan. 2.

So until then — Happy New Year to you and yours.

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Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal): Microsoft Has Good Year, At Expense of Customers. The settlement reached in October, now pending before yet another federal judge, does bar some offensive Microsoft behavior. But much of it pertains to the company’s relations with the hapless makers of PCs, which aren’t in any position to defy Microsoft. It isn’t about consumer choice, except indirectly; it’s more about placating Microsoft’s competitors or partners. And it’s all about the past, not the future battle in Internet services. It doesn’t touch the company’s ability to use Windows XP to extend its monopoly to these new areas.

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I’m in Japan, where my IBM ThinkPad running Windows 2000 no longer allows PPP connections with Internet service providers. A call to IBM tech support led to the suggestion that I reinstall everything from scratch. So I’m using a friend’s Mac for a few minutes a day and will be mostly offline until I get back to the US in a few days.

There was a time when I actually recommended Windows 2000. Stupid me.

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Happy Holidays to you all.

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Time Magazine’s choice of New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, as Person of the Year, is another example of Big Media’s increasing timidity.

Giuliani deserves enormous praise for his leadership in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. But this feel-good choice for Person of the Year is a mockery of what Jim Kelly, Time’s managing editor, described as the criteria for the pick in this Q&A a week ago:

“Well, the classic definition of TIME’s Person of the Year is the person who most affected the events of the year, for better or for worse.”

Giuliani? Come on. The obvious choices were Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. Together they most affected the events of the year.

Time’s choice speaks volumes about the journalistic values at AOL Time Warner. What it says is disturbing.

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We’ll always look back on 2001 as the year when America joined the real world in the most horrific way. The Sept. 11 murders did change us.

Technology was central to those events. It will continue to be central in our defense. But let’s hope it doesn’t turn into the tool that makes us into a police state.

More in my Sunday column.

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I loaded Virtual PC 5 for the Mac on an iBook with 384 megabytes of RAM, running OS 10.1, and the performance wasn’t just poor. The computer was unusable.

Connectix admits there’s a serious problem, and says it lies largely in the architecture of OS X. Here’s an discussion thread about the situation, along with this this PDF document explaining the technical issues.

Connectix needs to fix this. Quickly.

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Cnet: Microsoft seeks antitrust hearing delay. “If there is one thing that characterizes Microsoft’s conduct in this case even more than denial, it is delay, delay, delay,” Tom Miller, Iowa attorney general and one of the states’ leaders, said in a statement.

Based on the record, you’d have to give the nod to denial. Feelings of guilt plainly do not afflict Microsoft’s top executives, who have consistenly proclaimed how ethical they’ve been — contrary to the rulings by a trial judge and a unanimous appeals court that the company is a duplicitous, serial lawbreaker.

”We have learned a lot over the past few years of this case,” a PR man wrote me in an e-mail. ”We certainly did not knowingly compete in a way contrary to the antitrust laws — we believed at the time that our actions were legal and pro-competitive. But the Court of Appeals has found that we did violate the antitrust laws in certain ways, and we acknowledge the Court’s ruling.”

I got similar language from Brad Smith, the company’s senior vice president and general counsel, in a phone call earlier this week. The appeals court ”found that in some areas the company’s conduct was unlawful,” he said. ”We certainly acknowledge that.”

Parsed carefully, this extremely precise language admits only the undeniable fact that the court ruled the way it did. In other words, Microsoft agrees that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Getting a straightforward admission of wrongdoing from this lawbreaker is about as likely as discovering that the sun orbits the Earth. Keep fighting, states.

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