Programming Paradigms

Michael is editor-at-large for DDJ. He can be contacted at [email protected].

It's December, according to the cover of this issue, and although you may be reading it in November (or January if you're behind in your reading) and I wrote it in September, this cover date is the temporal virtuality that we agree to pretend to believe in so that we can communicate. So I draw my imaginary winter coat a little tighter, brush the imaginary snow off my beard (every year there's more snow, and it gets harder to brush off), and watch my breath as I tell you that this month's column brings you word of a book about Bill Gates, a brief bio of an unusual mathematician, a look at Ted Nelson's first shipping product, and a few other little stocking stuffers. Ho ho ho.

Microsoft File Needs Sharpening

A lot has already been written about Wendy Goldman Rohm's The Microsoft File (Times Business/Random House, 1998, ISBN 0-8129-2716-8). It's been reviewed in newspapers across the country, and in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Upside, and The Red Herring, among other publications. That may make The Microsoft File sound like a business book, and so it is; but because it's about Microsoft, its audience is much broader than the average business book. It has probably caught your eye, and perhaps has caught a piece of your disposable income. ("I've got plenty of disposable income," he said, "It's just all predisposed.")

So why am I writing about it?

Well, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of wanting to recommend a bad book. That, in itself, required an explanation. And that explanation, as I wrote it, took the shape of a review of the book I disliked and wanted to recommend. To be exact, it took this shape...

Why I Wanted it to be Good

Wendy Goldman Rohm's The Microsoft File asks good questions: "Is Microsoft's rise as the world's most powerful and successful company in the computer and information industries a classic example of the free market at work?

Is Microsoft's success and the failure of other companies the result of the creative destruction that makes capitalism so strong and unique? Or was there another force at work?

We all think we know the answer to those questions, right? But anyone who really answers them, documenting that "other force" in detail, will have a powerful book, and possibly a case for the Justice Department, in his or her hands.

Rohm promises to document that "other force":

This book will show that Microsoft, under the leadership of its founding genius, Bill Gates, has engaged in a pattern of predatory business practices over the past decade that have all but killed the market in operating systems and applications software, and now likewise threaten to stifle free competition in the Internet and electronic commerce arenas.

And again:

The Microsoft File will show, from inside offices around the world, Gates' campaign to stymie free competition.

That's a book I want to read.

I wanted to read the book that readers were talking about when they called The Microsoft File shocking, eye-opening, and powerful, and said that it made them mad. Readers are seldom wrong -- at least in describing their reactions. There was something in The Microsoft File that evoked these reactions in readers. I wanted to know what it was.

Evidence That it Isn't

It sure wasn't Wendy Rohm's writing.

Well, the editors at Random House share the blame. They should have caught the obvious errors in grammar, diction, logic, and usage. "Chomping" for "champing," "threshing" for "thrashing," "no black and white areas" for "no gray areas," "New versions...was released" for "new versions...were released."

A good editor could have told Rohm, too, that the story of Microsoft's business practices was exciting enough without introducing details of the sex lives of Bill Gates and Microsoft legal honcho Bill Neukom. Publishers may believe that you can't have too much talk about sex, but Congress has tested the limits this year, and may just have found the point of surfeit. Speaking of which, the bit about the cigar on page 72 reads like something from the Starr report. Ultimately, Bill Gates' social life comes across as more pitiful than scandalous. Not as pitiful as Ray Noorda's poetry, which the Random House editors couldn't prevent Rohm from quoting at length more than once, but still pitiful. Other matters not central to the book's theme take over the book for whole chapters at a time, with no explanation offered for why we have, for example, left the subject of Microsoft's legal problems to delve into merger talks between Novell and WordPerfect.

There are crippling problems of pacing, organization, emphasis, and stylistic consistency. Rohm has an annoying, formulaic way (apparently borrowed from a bad novelist) of introducing a character, and she uses it every few pages. The style swoops from novelistic painting of scenes to dense, opaque prose without pausing for breath.

This is the book Microsoft doesn't want you to read, the book's presskit says. Rohm and her editors seem not to want you to read it, either.

Why You Should Read it Anyway

One big reason for reading books these days is because other people are reading them. You don't want to appear not to be up on the latest thing, you want to be able to hold your own in the IRL chatrooms of daily life, you want to score acceptably in the ongoing game of Trivial Pursuit that is casual conversation.

And so, though it pains me to say it, one reason to read this book is that it will be much read. And, unlike the latest Princess Diana bestseller about which you can be honorably ignorant, you won't gain any points in most social settings by being ignorant of the subject matter of The Microsoft File.

A better reason to read it is that there is good information in it. Rohm has packed the book with details that you won't find elsewhere about Microsoft's practices, the charges and allegations against the company, and how the Justice Department case played out.

Yes, it's old news even as I write this and older news as you read. But, in fact, a lot of what is in the book never was news, in the sense that it wasn't widely publicized, particularly the government's handling of the case. And since the mindset behind Microsoft's practices has probably not changed, it's good to review this history.

"Salacious, unbelievable, and dated," the Business Week reviewer called The Microsoft File. I'll give him one for three. It's only dated if you think of it as news; the concept doesn't apply to history. And unbelievable to the Business Week reviewer perhaps, but apparently not to most readers, nor to anyone who has negotiated with Microsoft. I have been very hard on the writing in The Microsoft File, but I must concede that there are stretches where it flows smoothly. Rohm has used a novelistic, fly-on-the-wall style that relies on multiple unattributed sources and her own imagination, which leads to gripping prose during the periods when she manages to hold it together. And the imagination is just to make the conversations read naturally. The significant facts of the story seem to be well researched.

And it's not as though poor writing is rare in business books. If you pass up The Microsoft File in favor of Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller's Barbarians Led by Bill Gates (Henry Holt, 1998), you'll find that it's no better.

So read The Microsoft File, but don't buy it. Borrow a copy. That shouldn't be hard. The book's not a keeper.

Ted Nelson Ships a Product

Now here's something unbelievable: Ted Nelson has shipped a product. It's called "ZigZag." He's been demoing it here and there, and you can download it at http://www.xanadu.net/zigzag/. To run it, you'll need to have Perl 5 and a curses- (or ncurses-) compatible system library installed on your system, but there's a demo runnable on a PC. I tell you the nitty-gritty of downloading it before I tell you what it is on the assumption that you are so curious about Ted Nelson's first released product that you'll download it no matter what it is. ("First released product" may not be entirely fair; it depends on how the various products of Ted's fertile mind are counted.)

If you don't know who Ted is, you should. He's the original hypertext pioneer, computer liberator, and software visionary. His story is the story of Xanadu, a software project so ambitious, so visionary, and so late that it is the stuff of multiple, overlapping legends. I've told the story often enough, and Ted tells it better anyway, so I'll just point you to his web site (http://www.xanadu.net/).

But what IS ZigZag?

The Full Nelson

How's this: It's a hyperstructure construction kit, a software designer's Tinkertoy set, and a generalization of the spreadsheet? A universe of generalized connections, a new world in which to build integrated software? It's a new software paradigm for organizing personal and professional data? It's a chunk of code that implements a new topology of information?

I'll have to do better than this, I can see.

If you've downloaded the demo you've seen that ZigZag is neither cosmetically appealing nor obvious in its function. No desktop. No overlapping windows. No graphics. It looks like something you might have cobbled together on your DOS machine back in the early '80s. When you start to explore it and see what it's implying, you begin to realize that this is both simple and radical. Concepts like operating system and application and file don't map well to ZigZag's world. It's a world of cells -- units of information that may be programs or data -- linked to other cells in a multidimensional space that you control.

And the control you have is near-total: While the cells in a spreadsheet are connected in fixed ways in a flat rectangular grid, ZigZag cells can be connected any way you like. ZigZag space can curve and loop, and you can invent your own dimensions.

Sounds like the web, you say? Ah, but you're getting ahead of the story.

In the demo, you can move around an information structure in three dimensions, following lines between cells, by using arrow keys or i, j, l, comma, and k or K keys. Let's see the hands of those who remember the Wordstar diamond. That's the idea.

As you move, ZigZag shows you the current cell and its immediate neighbors. Without leaving this one connected space, you walk through demos of structures for a spreadsheet, an outliner, and a four-dimensional genealogy chart, (the dimensions are name segments, name list, time, marriages), and a PDA. The PDA demo shows the power of being able to create the links you want wherever you want them. Just because you're checking your appointments that doesn't mean you don't need to keep track of air fares and anything else that happens to be connected -- in the real world -- to your appointments. With ZigZag you can make all the connections that need to be made.

I Zigged When I Shoulda Zagged

Then, just when you think you're oriented to this space, you rotate it and see other views of these dimensions, and other dimensions you didn't suspect were there in the data.

All relationships, it seems, are implemented as dimensions. Cloning a cell is done along a dimension, and you can view and move along the clone dimension just like any other. The relationship of containment employs two dimensions. The connection of the cursor to a cell lies along a cursor dimension. (The cell in the center of the view is the "accursed" cell. Part of the fun of exploring any Ted Nelson project is enjoying the language.)

I mentioned cloning; a clone is a copy of some master cell. A family of clones and their master cell all lie in a chain on a system-maintained clone dimension; editing any clone or the master changes all cells in the chain.

You can literally connect anything to anything. Every cell has a number. Typing a number followed by an arrow key connects the current cell to the cell of that number, in the direction and along the dimension indicated by the arrow key.

Dimensions, the scaffolding of the structures you build with ZigZag, are themselves under your control. You add, delete, or rearrange dimensions by editing a dimension list. A deleted dimension is not really gone, though. It can be reinstated because its connections remain.

Okay, it's trippy. But who exactly is this for?

It's for software developers. It's a toolkit, or a playground, depending on your attitude toward software development. Ted wants you to use it, to develop things in ZZ space. He's inviting collaboration. The intended end result of that collaboration, it goes without saying, is Xanadu. "I am laying the groundwork for the new Xanadu(R), which will turns the old Xanadu ideas inside-out for the Internet," Ted says.

Spy Story

Speaking of old-timers, Spyglass has been in the news a lot lately. Spyglass is the company that licensed Mosaic, the first graphical browser, back in 1994. Their plan was to (sub?)license the technology to other businesses.

Well, they licensed it to Microsoft, where it was used to build Internet Explorer. In no time at all, the other potential licensees -- the other companies producing web browsers -- went away, all except Microsoft and the one company that Spyglass couldn't possibly license its browser to, because the company's chief technology officer had written the original code: Netscape. Suddenly, no market.

Spyglass had to reinvent itself, and its bosses decided to think small. In recent years, the company has been focusing on small devices, and doing so with notable successes. Motorola has licensed Spyglass's small-footprint browser for its Blackbird set-top box, along with other Internet technology from Spyglass. The contract is a significant one, particularly for tiny Spyglass. In addition, Philips Semiconductor has licensed the Spyglass browser for use in digital television receivers. Now Spyglass is also getting into wireless data services. The web browser, as they envision it, would be built into mobile phones, where it would leverage the power of software running on servers. They seem to be getting some interest from potential partners.

Which is all good news for one of the pioneering Internet companies.

Speaking of news, daily tech news links and feedback on this column can be found at Swaine's World, http://www .swaine.com/.

DDJ