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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Microsoft's new security drive aims to appease Hollywood, comfort consumers and reinvigorate the PC. But will the price for such safety be too high?
Apr 9, 2002 | Would you trust your life to Microsoft?
That's the challenge the company's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative is throwing down. First hinted at publicly in one of Bill Gates' rare companywide e-mails earlier this year, the sweeping concept was explained in detail in a white paper written by CTO Craig Mundie for January's World Economic Forum summit in New York.
"Computers helped transport people to the moon and back, they control critical aircraft systems for millions of flights every year, and they move trillions of dollars around the globe daily, [but] they generally haven't reached the point where people are willing to entrust them with their lives, implicitly or explicitly," Mundie wrote. "We will have to make the computing ecosystem sufficiently trustworthy that people don't worry about its fallibility or unreliability the way they do today ... It may take us ten to 15 years to get there."
Microsoft is making a big play on its new push: In a wager detailed in the May issue of Wired magazine, Mundie has bet Google CEO Eric Schmidt that by 2030, passengers will routinely board commercial airline flights without a pilot. That is, United and American flights will be flown entirely by computers.
Six months after Sept. 11, you have to wonder: Is he nuts?
Those who've followed the company's escapades the past few years are asking a different question: What's the spin here? What does Microsoft stand to gain by planting in our minds the image of computer systems so reliable we'll leave more fallible human pilots on the ground?
Perhaps, if we'll trust computers with our lives, we'll also trust them with our credit cards. And maybe, even more important, Hollywood will trust them with its movies. The Trustworthy Computing initiative is as much about securing intellectual property control as it is about "safety."
Call it corporate arrogance, call it chutzpah, call it the American way: Microsoft is pushing Trustworthy Computing even as its antitrust settlement with the federal government is being fought by nine U.S. states. The company's announced goal is to make computing a utility as ubiquitous and unnoticed as electric power -- a development that would also just happen to preserve Microsoft's PC-powered monopoly in the process. But with that monopoly comes a software monoculture, one already prone to infections by Outlook mail viruses and Windows server worms. In Mundie's scenario, the threat could hardly be more lethal: Figure out how to hijack one remote-controlled plane, and you can hijack them all.
Still, the company's goal isn't really to fly planes. Onboard computer systems for airliners are a small, specialized market and will probably stay that way. Trustworthy Computing's real aim is to secure Redmond's hold on the desktop, by putting the PC back in the center of the action. Just as Gates' "Pearl Harbor Day" e-mail more than five years ago refocused everything his company did around the Internet, his Trustworthy Computing memo places the company at the forefront of today's driving interests. Bundling up consumers' fears of crackers and e-commerce fraud, IT staffers' worries about server break-ins and Hollywood's paranoia that its crown jewels are being Napstered into worthlessness, Gates hands back a secure solution for all of us that fits the existing space on our desks. Don't panic -- upgrade!
