If you visit Amazon.com and look up “1984”, you’ll see a review which begins with the following words:
Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant “correction” of such records. “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”
I was reminded of this when I saw the photographs of Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer, laughing and shaking hands last Friday. I’ve worked at Sun for nearly 19 years, and during that time Microsoft has always been the “Eastasia” with which our “Oceania” was at war. It was particularly awkward for me in the early years, because I worked on PC-NFS®, a software product that enabled DOS and Windows PCs to use Sun’s NFS [network file system] to share files. This obviously involved down’n’dirty systems programming hackery of Microsoft’s operating systems. I can still remember my first visit to meet the SunOS (Unix) group in California back in November, 1985, and their reaction when I told them that the NFS and UDP/IP software in PC-NFS was written as a 64KB device driver in x86 assembly language. And in the spirit of “using what you write”, I was always a PC user, attacting odd looks from colleagues with their Sun workstations. (I’m still an odd-ball, with my Mac PowerBook rather than a SunRay.)
Initially I think the competition with Microsoft was healthy for Sun – it certainly helped us punch above our weight in the marketing game. However, over the years the rivalry intensified and by the late 1990s it got w-a-a-y too heated for anyone’s good. It all culminated in various nasty lawsuits over Microsoft’s forking of Java and other monopolistic practices. My view was that the suits were thoroughly justified from a legal standpoint, but that it wasn’t clear that they were helping us in our primary rôle as a commercial enterprise. It probably distracted our customers, and I know that it distracted us. I’m sure that psychologists have a term (and a DSM IV category) for people who define themselves by what they are against rather than what they are for, by who they are not rather than who they are. Anyway, it became an institutionalized thing, much like the Red Sox and the Yankees, or Glasgow Celtics and Glasgow Rangers.
But now the Ministry of Truth has spoken. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Eastasia is our ally. It’s going to take some getting used to…..