In Bank's account, at least at the time he finished his book, the forces of light had prevailed. They had convinced the powers that be the best strategy was neutrality; the best future for Microsoft would be played on a level playing field.
It will be hard for most in this business to believe this view about what Microsoft has become. So deep is the skepticism about this company that it can't announce any innovation without someone claiming Darth Vader the father. The recent flap over Microsoft's "smart tags" is a good example. Smart tags were designed to allow people to click on a word on a Web page and be taken to a set of links related to that word that Microsoft selected. The idea is genius, and depending on how it's implemented, completely harmless. There was nothing to indicate that others couldn't deploy similar technologies easily. And there is nothing wrong with a company - even a monopolist - enabling people to easily see a set of "related" links. Yet the world quickly condemned this innovation as conspiracy, and Microsoft was forced to retreat.
There is an important lesson here that the company must learn if it is to survive. Microsoft is filled with people who believe they are doing God's work; many of them no doubt are. But the challenge for Microsoft - in addition to not breaking the law - is to make itself believable. The world does not buy what this company says, even if it must buy what it makes. It cannot believe that its future will be any different from its (now declared to be illegal) past. The question is what this company can do to convince the world that the forces of light have prevailed; that the lessons of the court of appeals have been learned; and hence that the future will be different from the practice of the now-familiar past.
This is a make-or-break moment for the company, yet the first signs are not good. I had naively believed that once Microsoft lost its appeal, the company's leaders would honestly and directly acknowledge this truth, and signal clearly how they would move on. These last weeks have proved me wrong. (Naivete, of course, is nothing new for me - I'm the one who predicted the Supreme Court would decide Bush v. Gore without a whiff of politics.)
The company has announced tiny, insignificant changes to its licensing policies that completely fail to acknowledge the principle of the court of appeals' decision. It has blasted the world with a grotesquely distorted spin about the meaning of the court's decision, suggesting it's going about business as usual. And it has filled the airwaves with an unseemly image of perhaps the greatest businessman of our time showing the world that he is no longer able to talk straight. The message from this mix is not that Microsoft understands the law and will follow it. The message instead is that Mr. Gates went to Washington and learned its lessons well.
Believability doesn't come from the pen of spin masters. It doesn't grow on a field of newspeak. Credibility will not return to this company until the world sees that Microsoft is not only not above the law, but also not above the truth. Microsoft must find a way to establish credibly that its vision of the future is no different from the court's vision of the law. Harry Truman, not The Truman Show, should become its ideal; honesty, not lawyer-speak, its mantra; and neutral code, not the tilted field of "Windows everywhere," its future.
Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School.
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