ANGELS AND DEVILS

Dick Pountain/17 June 2005/11:58/Idealog 131

Way back in the 1960s a friend of mine lived in Edinburgh at around the time that LSD arrived in that hitherto upright borough. One day he was asked by a local hardman of his aquaintance whether or not he'd tried it yet, and given this enthusiastic recommendation: 'Oh aye it's great, it makes you go around loving every c*nt! For some reason that I can't fully explain I was reminded of this anecdote when I heard the news that Apple and Intel are getting together, and more or less simultaneously that Microsoft really is going to make its Office data formats completely open. (Lawyers please note, I'm not suggesting that any of these three firms, nor any of their employees, are or were under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs).

There certainly does seem to be a wholly uncalled-for outbreak of peace and love in the industry at the moment, at least at those top levels where the big decisions are made. As an inveterate realist - some might say, wrongly, cynic - my first reaction to such events is always to look for the real motive. I can't help being constantly aware that the computer industry is the most competitive sector, in the most competitive country, of the most competitive mode of production ever devised by our highly-competitive species on this particular planet. Peace is very far from being its natural state.

The Apple/Intel thing is perhaps the easier for me to understand, because I've never been baptised into the Mac religion and can therefore look at the whole business fairly dispassionately. I'll admit that once-upon-a-time I was a humble acolyte in the religion of RISC, and used to write learned articles proving that Intel's grisly 80x86 architecture was the equivalent of original sin. However I dropped all that stuff half a decade ago, once it became clear that even starting from such a flawed and unpromising base, Intel's sheer size, money and human capital was capable of outperforming in the end even firms that started from far more rational designs. In a recent Idealog about Moore's Law I argued that progress in the microprocessor market is driven by Intel's will to reinvest, not by pious intentions, and so it has proved. Even with a giant like IBM behind it, the PowerPC architecture has just not been able to keep up with Intel's (perhaps because IBM has to worry about so many other things besides microprocessors). Jobs is quite right to think he can improve performance and save money by going Intel (though whether he'll pass on any savings to his punters remains to be seen: history suggests otherwise). It must now be the case that absolute CPU performance levels, plus huge progress in software emulation technologies, has made it feasible to shift a whole computer family from one processor architecture to another, completely incompatible, one in a commercially-reasonable timeframe and at practical cost (if it isn't there are going to be tears before bedtime).

I believe that Apple will bring Intel-based Macs to market, but I very much hope that doesn't mean they'll also be adopting Wintel-style motherboards and peripherals. During the last two years I've come closer than ever in my life to buying a Macintosh simply because of the obvious superiority of the proprietory hardware they contain. The 12" and 17" PowerBooks are the sexiest laptops around by miles. The sheer elegance of Mac DVD/CD drives with their simple slot makes you wonder why on earth PC optical drives are still stuck with that ludicrous wobbly teacup-holder arrangement. It would be quite mad for Apple to retreat an inch in this regard.

So Apple's motives I can begin to understand, but Microsoft's motives for suddenly turning nice guy are harder to fathom, unless you believe that it's finally fed up with people saying rude things about it and transcontinental governments taking it to court. No, I didn't think you would. I'm coming to believe, against the grain, that Microsoft is actually just being sane and rational about this matter. Office's dominance of the productivity software market is now so total that MS can relax on that front and no longer needs to hog-tie its customers using proprietory file formats, and opening up interchange formats will encourage and expand online business to the benefit of all (that is, mostly of Microsoft since it has such huge market share).

There may though be a deeper and less cheerful motive underlying both decisions, which is that from the lofty eminence they occupy these industry giants can see that the seas ahead look pretty choppy, and that pulling together for a change might be a sensible policy. Continuing nightmares over Internet security are eroding public confidence in the whole technology and we may need all hands to the pumps to stay afloat before too long. This has been brought home to me this month by several incidents where writers' formidable levels of firewall protection stripped the attachments they were trying to send me, making email not much better than snail-mail as a communication medium. The last straw was a sneaky 'social-engineering' attack that purports to come from the Cix administrators, claiming my PC had been used to relay spam (untrue) and inviting me to open the attached, virus-loaded document. Once trust goes, everything else follows quite quickly...