Manufacturing Consent
May 3, 2000
Perhaps I should call this column "Manufacturing Public Opinion," rather
than "Manufacturing Consent." The idea for it occurred to me as I read the
opinion "polls" taken right after last Friday's announcement of the DOJ's
proposed remedies in the MS anti-trust trial. The pollsters found that the
majority (more than 60%) of the American public is opposed to the remedies
proposed by Joel Klein's team at the DOJ, working with the attorneys general
of 19 states. With more than 20% of undecided, that leaves relatively few
people supporting the DOJ's position. Vox populi, vox dei? Is the DOJ, which
is supposed to fight for the people, out of touch with the public good?
That's what the pollster-geist behind the probe would like us to believe.
Far from me to suggest that this poll is unscientific. Au contraire. It
represents the real science of manufacturing opinion, preferably by creating
an avalanche effect. If most people are against breaking up Microsoft, it
must be bad; therefore, I must join them, and the next poll might show even
stronger disagreement with the DOJ. What's bad for Microsoft is bad for
America.
Let's go back to December 1982. You poll consumers for what they want in a
personal computers. What do you hear? I want a better, faster, cheaper
Apple II, or ///, or PC, or CPM system (yes, these were still around at that
time). A month later, you give public demonstrations of the Lisa.
The same people now tell you that's what they want. B-b-b-b-but, you
stutter, that's not what you said last month. Yes, no, I didn't know this
existed.
In other words, the consumer had no words, no concept, to deal with what was
unthinkable at the time but which suddenly became describable-and
attractive-once seen and touched: a mouse, overlapping windows, a bitmapped
screen, pull-down menus. I can only think and discuss what I have reference
points for and, in general, I tend to describe the future in today's
vocabulary.
In this case, most PC users have only been exposed to Microsoft's lineage of
operating systems. As a result, there are few reference points for thinking
of life with more than one breed of operating system and applications.
Microsoft made sure that an alternative OS such as Be's, Linux, or FreeBSD
couldn't be loaded next to Windows by PC OEMs. As a result, people have no
data other than the Microsoft experience. They're told that some of the
remedies would make the Windows system riskier and that applications might
not work as well. We have something that works, the jack-booted thugs at the
Justice Department want to make it less than what it is today, so why
should I be in favor of breaking up Microsoft?
Setting aside the caricature, the point remains: Microsoft's monopoly
practices are the very reason why we haven't experienced what a truly
competitive situation might be like. This is why the poll is so revealing
of a certain kind of science in manipulating the political situation around
the suit.
Next week, we'll try to look a little closer at the proposed remedies and
the time frame in which they might become applicable, if they survive the
appeals process.
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