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To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (19402)	5/19/1998 1:35:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

Take Bill Gates. Please www5.zdnet.com Now how could I resist a headline like that. This one is on the old hearts and minds thing, another topic near and dear to me. The ruthless cutthroat monopolist the wise Microsoft investors all know and love is not the popular image Bill likes to put forward, but in any other context we'd all agree it's a lot closer to the TRUTH, whatever that means. Whatever comes out of the judicial process, it'll be educational. This time it was different, particularly after the speakers discovered they could get easy laughs by trashing Microsoft. Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, never one to miss an opportunity to ridicule his Redmond rival, laid aside his prepared notes and made like the Richard Pryor of vendor officials. McNealy lit into the upcoming NT 5.0. "The big advance is that it will reboot faster," he said, rolling his eyes. "Now, there's a feature that's going to be tough to compete with." Speaker Paul Saffo, the futurist, also got into the act. He urged his audience to quickly stake out the technology high ground before "Bill" buys it out from under them. These performances got me wondering: Exactly when did Microsoft become the all-purpose evil empire and joke target for people both inside and outside the IT industry? There was a time, not so long ago, when Microsoft's image was very different. Along with Apple, it was leading the new forces of personal choice and expression against the faceless forces of central control (read: IBM). The wise Microsoft investors were always ahead of the curve here. And, of course, the dolts at IBM, with their outdated corporate good citizen culture from the '50s, never quite got the evil empire act down. They had this odd customer service culture too. Plus, they were dumb enough to actually pay attention to antitrust law. Old T.J. Watson didn't like it much, but he listened to his lawyers, didn't try to represent himself in those matters. OK, you may say, what difference does it make if Microsoft is increasingly the object of scorn and distrust? After all, people are still buying the company's products -- or at least they're buying hardware that contains Microsoft products. That's true, but Microsoft's image could begin to hurt the company in a couple of ways. First, as IT and consumer products continue to converge, Microsoft may have trouble attracting consumers to its brand if it continues to be synonymous with the evil empire. And, even in corporations, IT managers may begin having trouble selling business users on Microsoft and its image, much the same way that it became unfashionable to buy IBM products in the mid- to late 1980s. For Microsoft, that would be no laughing matter. Others might find it humorous enough, though. Cheers, Dan.