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In its new cover story on Microsoft, Time magazine finally breaks through this year's biggest mainstream-media blind spot. With this week's "Whose Web Will it Be?" feature, Time becomes the first mainstream journalistic entity to perceive that the real story surrounding Microsoft isn't its jazzy new software or over-hyped Web sites, but a much more elemental issue: Should Bill Gates and his company rule the information age?
Microsoft is the smartest and most successful corporation ever, which also makes it the most dangerous. Gates dominates the computer world. Now, he is threatening to overrun Netscape and dominate the Internet as well.
In addition, by moving into editorial venues, such as the Web magazine Slate and at least 50 other Web sites - "Cityscapes" - all over the world in the next year or so, Gates is moving Microsoft toward becoming the world's largest content provider - on top of being the world's largest software maker and Web-access provider.
Microsoft is already among the most powerful companies in history. And history suggests it will be much larger. But Microsoft isn't an unwieldy giant like most of the media conglomerates. It creates, rather than buys, many of its major products. It is dominated not by the vast hierarchies that cripple most big corporations, but by a single dominant personality with the clout to make decisions, commit money, and alter course. The Time story details how Gates committed thousands of people and billions of dollars to Microsoft's assault on the Web within hours of his decision last December to move his company from personal computing to the Net.
In no other modern media company could a single person make so important and expensive a decision and commit so much money to it.
Although the computer trade press and its peripheral techie magazines seem to get it, mainstream journalism has been almost completely bovine in grasping the new reality presented by Microsoft.
Maybe the mainstream press was blinded by the dazzle of Michael Kinsley's Slate, the most hyped editorial venture in Net history, touted by the press as the Eighth Wonder. The New Yorker gushed that Kinsley was reinventing magazines (not so far, bub), and Newsweek put Kinsley on its cover kissing a fish.
Or perhaps the press was amazed by new Microsoft products, such as Windows 95 and Internet Explorer, which are treated as major news events by journalists - hyped beyond the wildest dreams of any advertising or marketing executive.
Microsoft's predatory and aggressive practices, widely known in the computer world, are much less familiar to consumers of Microsoft's products, who have no reason to think of the company as anything but a brilliant, breathtaking creation of one of the world's smartest men.
In many ways, that image is true. Microsoft is not that evil as far as companies - especially media companies - go. It has earned its place in digital history, outsmarting and outmaneuvering competitors and providing innovative, inexpensive, and reliable - if often unimaginative and dull - products and software.
But the continued rise of Microsoft raises all sorts of enormous questions for government and journalists - questions ratified by Time's cover story.
The story, written by Joshua Cooper Ramo and reported by David S. Jackson, is clear and authoritative. It focuses more on the gargantuan battle between Microsoft and Netscape than on the implications of one company controlling so much media. But it, almost alone among mainstream journalistic outlets, makes the stakes clear:
"An epic battle is taking place between Microsoft and Netscape. Each company wants to be your guide to the Internet, the key to personal computing in the future. The victor could earn untold billions; the loser could die."
Most of the media still don't quite grasp that it isn't just the computer world at stake. Microsoft is moving to become the most powerful editorial entity on earth, one that will dwarf by many times in literal size and power companies like Time Warner. The press, in particular, was always envisioned as a diverse medium, one in which many individuals got to speak their minds. Since the Microsoft juggernaut now seems nearly unstoppable, it's past time to start asking Gates what his intentions are, what his visions of media are all about.
Microsoft's policies toward politics, civics, interactivity, individual access to media, creativity, news, free speech, and language will shape America's modern media as they stumble toward the millennium.
No part of the information culture will be able to exist independently of Microsoft products, software, hardware, or editorial content. Since there has never been a company like this, it's not possible to know what it will mean to media and everybody else.
 "Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram
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