Mr. Gates says, 'make it simpler!'

Although bunkered down a hundred miles away from Davos, its proceedings radiate through the Swiss countryside and indeed to all the corners of the globe, inasmuch as what's being discussed affects everyone, including the policymakers at Davos. One evening the managing editor of Time magazine, the distinguished writer Walter Isaacson, interviewed two guests, Andrew Grove, the head of Intel (who makes all those chips we use), and Bill Gates (who makes everything else). As a prankish providence sometimes has it, the burden of their message directly interfaced, or rather failed to interface, with a personal problem, but one of generic interest.

Where, the interrogator asked, are we going with all this stuff? Mr. Gates accosted the questioner with his most appealing I'm-glad-you-asked-that-question expression. It isn't that Mr. Gates isn't resourceful enough to get asked any question he wishes -- any person with public experience can reword a question to say exactly what he wishes to hear.

But he did say that the great forward march in cybernetic technology is towards simplicity. He took the occasion to say that the reason he (Microsoft) and Mr. Intel, sitting next to him, weren't properly classified as "monopolists" is that genuine monopolists manufacture the identical thing year after year (one thinks of water, electricity, coal). What we do is keep manufacturing better things, simpler things. And the reason we need to make huge profits is that it requires the expenditure of huge profits to go in that sublime direction. If we were to sell today what we had invented three years ago, we would find no customers! (Slight smile on the moonface --the teacher got just-the-right answer, and Bill was pleased with himself.)

Forgive from this quarter a disgruntled expulsion of internal gas of skepticism. An example?

Beginning the day the Davos types convened, I went through the motions of activating my E-mail carrier in Switzerland (MCI) for the 14th year. It was a matter of five minutes to enable the traditional Swiss protocols -- two code words, macro'd together in my Smartkey. (The antecedent words are a fancy way of saying all I had to do was depress two keys.) At that point I needed to depress an 8-digit number, whereupon I was face to face with U.S.A. MCI, whose glories I have celebrated in this space.

But the usual number did not work. That meant a half-day communicating with all the offices in Switzerland that devote themselves to telecommunications. At the end of the day the Helvetian Confederation had concluded that the problem lay in America.

Two successive afternoons were spent with technicians in America. I remind Mr. Gates that all that MCI had to do was find one number that would do the work that one number had so faithfully, so flawlessly done for 13 years. On endless transatlantic calls I was now made to try every possible combination involving the words parity, even, uneven, data bits, stop bits, bauds, and ports. You would think the technicians were trying to rediscover the famous lost chord, which the legendary musician died trying to rehear.

But finally the sequence crystallized. I had only to dial a number in Berne, hit the Carriage Return on seeing the Connect sign, await the appearance of a pound sign (#), type a Capital C (which would be invisible), then type "mci,mail," await the request for my name, followed by the request for my password, give them both, after which I press Alt C, then Alt N, then Alt S. I have then arrived where, since 1983, I had arrived after typing the one number.

Mr. Gates should pay a million dollars or whatever to somebody who should stay at his side day and night, intoning only the one word. "Simpler?" We acknowledge with deferential admiration the complicated things that are going on under the keyboards of modern life. But the monopolists Mr. Gates disdained, who produce all those products that year after year are unchanged, did end up with a faucet. When you pushed it that way, water came out. The electrical people came up with a button. When you push it, the light goes on. The telephone people have made it possible to communicate with anybody in the world (who has a phone) by simply pushing one or two or at most three extra keys. From where Bill Gates lives to where I work is 011-41-26-925-wxyz. That's simple. Maybe Windows 97 -- or if that is too much, too soon, Windows 99 --will make it possible to recapture the simplicity of the E-mail system of 1983.

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