Dumb Microsoft coverage

I t's been fascinating, fun and a bit scary watching the general news media attempt to cover the various lawsuits filed against Microsoft recently. Whether it was the Justice Department and state attorneys general antitrust filings or the Sun Microsystems suit over Java, the national news media has said some hysterically funny things about operating systems, Web browsers and programming languages.

Reuters reported, for example, that one scribe at a Justice Department press conference asked Janet Reno if she would ". . . drop the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. if company Chairman Bill Gates solves the millennium bug problem threatening to crash computers around the world?" How many Cobol programmers do you suppose are working in Redmond?

In a recent editorial, The Nation ran all over the map castigating Microsoft for monopolizing PCs, and compared the browser issue to a shampoo maker "bundling" a bar of soap with each bottle - as if a Web browser were just another free sample. In the end, it decided that big business is bad and big government is bad. The editors concluded, in essence, that "somebody ought to do something," but they weren't sure who and they weren't sure what.

Even those media outlets with knowledgeable technology reporters take those stories and filter them through editors and news anchors who have no idea what the story is about. With front page news (such as Microsoft vs. DoJ), it's the star reporters who get the coverage, not the technology nerds, so the whole process (writing, editing, reading) is being done by people with no idea what they're talking about.

Fortunately, you and I have resources such as Network World and Fusion where competent reporters and knowledgeable editors put the stories together.

This isn't news to most of you, but perhaps you don't recognize the opportunity it affords you. For possibly the first time, your company's management and your non-IT co-workers are chatting about technology-related issues. Take some time to put together a digest of articles from Network World and other computer-related publications. Circulate it through the enterprise. Ask to explain the issues at staff meetings. Seize this chance to become a resource, to be considered a corporate asset. These opportunities don't come along very often.