Last year Jonathan Last wrote a very witty and intelligent piece for the Weekly Standard in which he argued that the Galactic Empire against which the heroes rebel in the Star Wars movies wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The basic gist of the piece was this: the prequel movies have made it very clear that the Old Republic the rebels sought to restore was corrupt and bureaucratic, that it tolerated trade monopolies and slavery, and that whatever high and noble ideals the Jedi Knights espoused, they were not particularly ineffective when it came to enforcing them. On the other hand, the Galactic Empire enforces law and order, and the day to day lives of the citizens appear to be free and safe. There isn’t any obvious Nazi-like racism either despite the jackboot-symbolism running through George Lucas’ portrayal of the Imperial Starfleet officers and Stormtroopers. Many different peoples appear to be working together, and instead of royals and self-appointed Knights, the people running the Empire are drawn from academies all around the galaxy and promoted by merit. Many of the “crimes” the Empire appears to commit throughout the movies are much less obviously evil when looked at in the context of a government trying to keep order in the face of mounting rebellion. The Empire may be cruel and brutal in its approach to dealing with the Rebels, but then much the same thing can be said about the British in Northern Ireland, the Americans in Viet Nam, or the Israelis in Palestine. Sometimes what works isn’t necessarily dainty or attractive — there are times when cold force seems the only way to keep the peace.

In the same way, I think that it is time that Mac users took another look at Bill Gates and Microsoft, for many people the Darth Vader and Galactic Empire of the computing universe. Mac users inevitably see themselves as freedom fighters when cast into this particular drama, after all they do their best to undermine the Microsoft monopoly whenever and wherever they can by subscribing to Apple’s alternative set of values: a consistent user interface, elegant hardware and more attention to details like colour management. If anything, the Mac advocate would seem closest to a Jedi Knight, having knowledge of a purer, more powerful way of computing far above the proletarian world of the average office-bound Windows user. Being a minority helps bolster this perception too. Seemingly threatened with extinction, Mac users tend to stick together offering tips and support through underground networks the IT manager never hears about. But is Microsoft really an empire worth bringing down, and are Mac users really the people to do it?

No-One Likes a Rich Uncle

The above was one of my mother’s favourite phrases. Though she was an American, she lived in the UK for the last twenty years of her life, and in that time she often heard criticisms about America and Americans made by Europeans. Sometimes their criticisms were valid, but oftentimes they were based more on jealousy than anything specific about the American psyche or culture, and she used to dismiss such comments by saying that the problem with many Europeans is that they simply don’t like having this rich uncle, the United States, in their family. Sure, they look forward to Christmas when the get lots of neat stuff (be it the Marshall Aid infrastructure rebuilding plan after the war or top-of -the-line missiles and fighter planes on favourable terms nowadays), but the rest of time they can’t wait to say that despite the handmade shoes and bespoke tailoring, the United States is culturally backward and lacking in the grace and intelligence of any European state or principality. Extend the family a little wider to include Latin America and the Middle East, where the gap between what the kids have and what the rich uncle is happy to show off and sometimes treat them to, and this love/hate relationship becomes even more tense, slipping into the acts of spite and malice that recent history is all to full of. I’d be wary about stretching this hypothesis too far though; however wise my mother was she was no historian, and deeper social and political currents flow through world history than simple envy. But reflect for a moment: do we dislike Microsoft because it is a bad company that misuses consumers and stifles competition, or because we’re envious that it dominates the home and office computer market and not Apple?

Like a rich uncle, Microsoft breezes in and out of the Mac users life on an occasional basis distributing largesse but rarely getting thank-you letters. Of course Apple is mother and father, and we could stay at home forever and eschew Microsoft products forever (and many do), but for most of us Word and Excel are essential tools, and PowerPoint and Explorer remain useful despite sound alternatives in the form of Keynote and Safari. All these Microsoft products are powerful and do a good job (whatever minor niggles many of us have with them). There are alternatives to Word in the form of AppleWorks, Open Office, XAbiWord, Nisus Writer and others, but Word remains far and away the most popular word processor among Mac users. To criticize Microsoft as a company while using Word as a key part of your computing toolkit puts you on morally dubious ground, rather like the guy who says Americans should buy more American cars while driving a Toyota himself.

Comply or Die

Whether or not Microsoft make good products for the Mac user, the company’s biggest influence is on standards. To take one example, HTML, the language of web pages and the Internet, Microsoft has been criticised widely for devising their own standards effectively forcing them onto the rest of the world regardless of the browser and operating system involved. As any web page designer will tell you, if your page doesn’t work in Microsoft Explorer for Windows, then it won’t work for the majority of your intended audience. While other companies have thrown out new HTML tags and standards from time to time (Netscape’s infamous “blinking” tag for example) none of them have had the clout of Microsoft Explorer with its massive user base in practically every segment of the market. Couple this with Explorer coming built into every Windows computer as the default browser and the Microsoft dominance, estimated to be around 90% of the Internet browser market, becomes even more overwhelming.

But are standards a good thing when they evolve through the effort of the wider community of amateur and professional programmers but a bad thing when created by a for-profit company? Not necessarily, after all, for the end user it doesn’t matter who set the standards, only whether or not their computer works with them. Moreover, computer programmers don’t always see the world in the same way as an office clerk, a high school teacher or a little old lady in Lincoln, Nebraska. (That anyone can seriously believe that Linux provides a user-friendly, easy to set up, home computer operating system is but one example of this.) Businesses, even Microsoft, need to be able to predict what the market will want with some degree of accuracy. Or course critics would say that with a market dominance such as they have, Microsoft can pretty much force their products onto consumers regardless of how good or not they are. To some degree experience does support this view, many of Microsoft’s products have flaws, often quite serious ones (the security problems in the Windows operating system reported in the news over the last few months being merely the latest). Elsewhere on the AppleLust website Pierre Igot mentioned problems with Microsoft Word that have been around seemingly through several generations. This strongly implies that in the absence of serious competition in the word processor market place, Microsoft doesn’t feel the need to turn out the best possible products. Perhaps the Mac section of the Microsoft software development team has become fat and lazy, and forgotten how to compete. Maybe it is telling that with Apple’s new Safari browser the new standard among OS X users, instead of giving Explorer the long-overdue refurbishment it deserved it’s been allowed to wither and die.

In this world view, Microsoft products are second rate because they don’t have any reason to improve them. But how did they get to this lucky position in the first place? For one thing they won the battle for the desktop computer operating system during the 1980s, for a variety of reasons but chiefly because together with Intel they offered an acceptable product in the form of the Windows on Intel hardware combination at a lower price point than the competition, primarily Apple Computer, but also footnotes to history like IBM’s OS/2. Apple may have produced better computers and certainly the operating system was far superior to Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, but it was also a good deal more expensive, at least up front. Mac advocate counter with talk of ease of use, greater reliability and a diminished demand for IT support services, all of which may be true, but to the bean counters in corporate America or the guy browsing for a laptop in CompUSA, none of this really meant very much. For these people an okay product at a low price point that was reasonably easy to use fit the bill just fine. In the words of the farmer at the end of Babe, “That’ll do pig”.

But What About Bill?

None of this is an excuse for Microsoft turning out mediocre products while either stifling competition if they can or avoiding it altogether if they can’t. Elsewhere for this site, Joe Carson has written a series of articles prognosticating on what he believes are the signs pointing to the imminent collapse of the Microsoft corporation. Whether or not he is right only time will tell, my question is whether Mac users should be baying for blood. Carson repeatedly likens Microsoft to an “evil empire”, an image that has a particular connotation for Americans that is very different to citizens of other nations. Americans see empires as intrinsically evil, as the Star Wars movies show quite clearly, while other peoples see them as a part of history, sometimes bad but sometimes benevolent. The British Empire is a case in point: its unfortunate legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa, Kashmir, and Palestine are perfectly plain to see but by the same token the Empire did much that we would today call humanitarian, things like installing water pipes, building roads and railways, and educating the natives. Admittedly these things were often done to increase the profitability of the colony or possession in question, but even today much foreign aid is a way of extending credit to developing nations to buy our surplus agricultural products manufactured goods. As G’Kar once pointed out in Babylon 5, the universe operates because of a balance of matter, energy and enlightened self-interest. For those inhabitants of countries over which alien empires extended, the identity of the flag flying over the local ruler’s palace was much less important than the degree of social justice that was enforced. Spanish Jews famously enjoyed far greater liberty under the Moorish princes than they did when the native Spaniards reclaimed their country and kicked the Muslims out. The disintegration of the Soviet Empire has shown us vividly what happens when diverse peoples get the opportunity to express their national identities and aspirations, sometimes this can lead to inspired leadership, but oftentimes to religious and ethnic persecution. Obviously Microsoft being split up into a dozen little companies isn’t going to result in bloodshed, but it could lead to chaos. Quite possibly Microsoft is the single Devil we know, and can work with.

To finish up, let’s turn to the emperor in a drip-dry shirt, Bill Gates. Among Mac users he is the definitive satanic figure not least of all because he looks much less cool than Steve Jobs and isn’t nearly as interesting as Steve Wozniak. But he is unarguably a much better businessman. He may quite possibly be a much better human being too. His personal philanthropic foundation has given away literally billions of dollars, and often to causes that don’t otherwise get much political advocacy, from building local libraries to increasing the access of minorities to higher education. On the world stage his charity is one of the largest and most progressive. In a time when the White House is much keener on promoting so-called Christian values like abstinence over contraception as a means to tackling the AIDS epidemic, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sponsoring frank and innovative initiatives in contraception research, AIDS vaccines, and helping women equalize the sexual politics in traditional societies. Though you may not like the guy, by any token his foundation is doing a huge amount of good on a large scale and in a coordinated manner.

Ultimately, Apple Computer and the Macintosh platform will remain under the shadow of Microsoft for the foreseeable future. But I don’t see that as a bad thing, and though it may be an evil empire to some, here I am writing this essay with Microsoft Word quite happily and without any sense of guilt or anxiety. Sure, there are demons to slay, including the unrestrained infringement of artistic copyright by music pirates through file sharing, but Microsoft isn’t one of them. And to quote from Dr. Strangelove, that’s how I learned how to stop worrying about the bomb and just get on with my life.