by Eolake Stobblehouse

Imagine this: you are a slave master, and you have a thousand slaves that you do not want to misbehave. So what do you do? Well, one option is to use part of your land as a prison, and keep everyone locked up. But people don't like that, so you are never safe from revolt.

Another option is to give each slave a little piece of land, and some belongings. If you combine this with keeping him ignorant, he will thereafter be terrified of loosing these belongings, and will never stand up to you.

A good gimmick is also to give the "good" slaves special privileges, and give them a little power over the other slaves. That way you split them up so they don't unite against you, and you keep the ambitious ones occupied with becoming leaders rather than becoming mutineers.

In other words, all the slaves will continually keep themselves and each other in line and in place, ruled by ignorance and the ever-present fear of losing their belongings and their positions.

Now, I want to talk about business and the general civilization on Earth. This may seem like a complete change of subject to you. If so, never mind, go read your newspaper.

When IBM first launched their "PC" in the early eighties, it was laughed at by Apple and many of the nerds of silly-con Valley. It was a hopeless machine. Apple had until then ruled the personal computer market more or less with their Apple II. They saw no reason to think that they had a serious competitor with IBM's feeble attempt.

Surprise, surprise. The PC became a huge hit. Why? Well, there is the old saying "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". This is a good example of the philosophy people actually live by in big businesses. If you look at it, you should notice two things: firstly, a guiding principle is not "how to do well", or, god forbid, "how to do something great". It is "how not to get fired"! Think about that. Fear. Position. Slaves. The other thing you should notice is how you avoid getting fired. You do that by sticking with authority. By sticking with what everybody else is doing.

IBM is, and particularly was, the safe choice. Authority. Conservative. So when Big Blue went from being the producer of mainframe computers to also the producer of micro computers, it did not matter that no one could claim they were good computers, it was the "safe choice", and everybody ran with it.

Of course, more or less by fluke, the official system on the IBM PC was Microsoft DOS, and it became the "safe choice" by contamination. Later, the torch was passed to that clone of the Mac OS, Windows. By that time, IBM's PC had been successfully cloned by other hardware makers without breaking IBM patents, and IBM was no longer the only game in town. But Microsoft, partly by making sure that its own software showed fake error messages when the user attempted to use competing operating systems, had become the incarnate of "safe".

Never mind that is crashes often, or that it has showed more security holes than a party of falling-down-drunk CIA agents, it is still "safe". Why? Remember the ignorance part? The business users and IT managers don't know anything else. So if someone talks to them about Mac OS or Linux or whatever, they back away so fast they leave skid marks. Fear. They might be fired! They could lose their wonderful, or maybe not so wonderful who cares, suburban home and their two-and-a-half kids and the means to feed the system, sorry, the dog. Nope, stick with what everyone else is using, Windows.

So what would it take for a lot of big businesses to start using Macs, for instance? My guess is that it will take either the economy to reach such amazing levels that even major investments seem like something you can lose without too much worry. Not right around the corner, but not impossible. Or, it would take Microsoft really screwing up, or falling from grace in some major way. Nice thought, but if this happens too fast, it could be very unpleasant for everybody, not just Microsoft. (It could happen; MS has a major situation with false bookkeeping. They don't have the profits they seem to, they are actually losing money.) Or, it would take a very obvious advantage to using Mac, plus a long hard haul of marketing. And I am afraid I don't think that OS X, even as it looks like the best OS in the world by a mile, is quite obvious enough as an advantage for people living in fear.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Perhaps business is overrated. There is after all more to life than spreadsheets.

- Stobblehouse