"The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981." Bill extolled the "PC standard" as the reason for the platform's success.

I agree the PC Standard is the reason for the internet's success. Without the PC, the "internet" would be a buried commodity stuffed into corporate cost centers and we would all be in a TV based AOLand.

Without PC's, Mainframes would be talking to each other by now on zettabyte optical fibers (1 zettabyte = 1000 terabyte) and providing supercomputer clusters as a matter of course... but, it would have taken twenty years.

The PC filled in for the very slow transmission speeds of the networks of the Mainframe's days. I remember when an industrial grade network coax was as big around as a fruit juice can and tapping into that thing was an eight hour job. Mainframe's were fast as long as everything was real close.

If you had to transport data over a distance, you were going to do it at a large cost and you were going to have to be very judicious about what data you needed to send and receive.

The interim "answer" was to physically transport what the mainframe could do to the local user. Of course, you could only use subsets of function and you had to be judicious with your memory instead of network resources. In fact, there were no network resources unless you worked for a Fortune 5 or the Government. And memory was exchangeable across the geographic space between the ordinary PC by 8 inch floppy.

But, over time the need to bring those capabilities and memory storage up to the level available in mainframes evolved the current technology. Given a mainframe is a massively cored local computing resource, the mainframe has evolved right along with the PC.

What kept the mainframe in second place, however, has always been network throughput limits.

Those limits are coming off. Once the network speed gets to a mature point where it can transport 100Gbps per user available at large scale, the mainframe idea takes hold of its dominance again.

Computers are expensive to buy and maintain. Just as you got a subset of Mainframe functionality and performance, you also took on a subset of the mainframe's support structure in energy and treasure.

Where a mainframe is multi-cored local resources, the PC has an opportunity to combine multi-cored distributed resources. With ultra-broadband, distributed assets can one day bind together mimicking the mainframe's multi-agent architecture by applying tailored agent assets where the expert user is able to fit the specific tasks or disciplines employed in the software structured for that glob of PC's inter-arbitrated into mainframe-like application systems.

Once the physical interconnecting network element is transparent ("zero" latency and unlimited headroom at immediate need) the actual "network as a computer" Sun envisioned will come to be.

When will that be? Verizon is selling and lifting bandwidth while AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner are starting to become bandwidth misers. The Large Hadron Collider data collection system boasts speeds 10000x as fast as current speeds and the speak is that is extensible to others over large geographic distances.

It's all in the optical fiber since copper has its limits no matter how clever you may be. The discrimination technology in the lazers and their detectors is what holds us back at this point. It's always been the needed force to open the network hoses to fully open.

The PC has the chance to become a cluster node in ultra-large and ultra-fast globframes IF Microsoft can manage to squeak through this one keyhole: "Bill realized that the Internet was built on standards over which Microsoft really had no control. In the memo, he called out HTML, HTTP and TCP/IP. He rightly observed that the Internet's popularity would rapidly grow. "Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats," he wrote. He observed not seeing a single Microsoft file format "after 10 hours of browsing.""

Where is that "file format on the internet" thing now, anyway?

Bill's company has had 13 years. 13 years of being at the peak of dominance in the computing market. Bill has had 13 years since he said this: "Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance." He then went on to assert that "the Internet is crucial to every part of our business."

And he has only succeeded on the internet insofar Sharepoint has succeeded since its inception at the hands of people who "invented" technology three years after someone else applied for government protection to develop the technology they had invented for real. People who really employed the standards Bill Gates fought for those 13 years.

If Bill had been less compelled by paranoia and more compelled by a genuine spirit of cooperative development with the information pool (the real customer of computers) he would already be shepherding in Microsoft's next reign of dominance. As it stands, Microsoft is a shoddy-build contraption clinking and clanking toward an inexorable plunge off the cliffs of irrelevance. Why? Because they're late to the party and those who've been practicing what Microsoft's been only preaching for 3 years have things pretty well mapped out as far as I can see.

"Bill wrote: "Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft corporate network. This inversion where a public network solves a problem better than a private network is quite stunning." "

Microsoft does not understand networks. They didn't understand networks 13 years ago because their empire depends on the island of automation embodied by the PC and the instrumentation that can be directly connected to that local resource by ethernet.

They only see networks as a way to transport product that will maintain the local power-structure. A million pieces, each to replicate a small portion of a mainframe's power is vastly more costly to the world at large than a single mainframe installation with a world of pc's.

If it's just interface you need (and that's really all the user needs when bandwidth becomes ubiquitous and unthrottled) you need a small investment in display and keyboard and graphics processors... and the world is your computer.

Microsoft may have lost the opportunity to be there. Now they need to maximize the fat client.

Just as the world embraced tinkering with hardware to replicate soft activity, the world is on the verge of getting just a taste of software to replicate soft and hard activity with no limits on what the novice can build and vast horizons for those who know how to handle replicated tools and resources.

The age of the PC is in transition. The PC market will dwindle just as the mainframe dwindled. Smaller devices and speech interface will fit the neo-client to the neo-consumer.

And Bill Gates will sit and remember those words:

"[We must] define an integrated strategy that makes it clear that Windows machines are the best choice for the Internet. This will protect and grow our Windows asset."

"We need to establish distributed OLE as the protocol for Internet programming." [Object Linking and Embedding later evolved into ActiveX.]

"We need to give away client code that encourages Windows specific protocols to be used across the Internet."

None of it worked. The standards he saw staring him in his face on the internet were the open standards he needed to embrace. But, he and his army weren't smart enough or trusted enough to figure out how to use those standards.

They still haven't - that's the dirty little secret behind this slow, stumbling decay and slouch toward obsolescence that has left a gaping hole in Microsoft's reputation.

Microsoft announcing they will adopt UML is a marker. Hell, it's a flare. It says "we surrender". "We want to save our company so it will grow in the future."

The only hope for Microsoft is to be able to fit in the world of corporate business modeling since they've abdicated by error their opportunity to build on the web. Times do pass, you know. Once that time is past, getting there becomes exponentially more difficult and costly - exponentially through time.

Steve Ballmer didn't surrender. You can bet that. Bill Gates did the flag waving. Steve Ballmer has entered that long winter CEO's face when they screwed up in public and have no cover. And, after all that planning... Ballmer told us all through a willingly complicit media he "put a lot of personal thought" into his plan for Yahoo.

Plan A fizzled. There was no Plan B. By the time a Plan C came out, the industry was talking openly about Microsoft's blunders. Plan D, Carl (Codger) Icon sliced off a chunk of Yahoo butt and said Microsoft was going to starve to death unless they could cook on the internet. Plan E? Enough. Already.

"Bill Gates established the blueprint in 1995, and it's only in the last 18 months that Microsoft has started to really deviate from it. But that's a topic for another post."

Joe, we're waiting on pinchers and wedges for you to be able to explain how 13 years of doing the wrong things came down to doing 18 months of preparation to do right.