Monocropoly

You know, I could have sworn I’d written this already, but I did a quick search for “Microsoft” and “Famine” in my previous entries and nothing came up, so it’s probably just something that I’d been intending to write for a while and just hadn’t gotten around to. Anyway, I’m about to go off on a rant about technology for a while, so if that bugs you don’t bother to read the rest of this…

Back in 1999 a computer virus called “Melissa” spread around the world in what was, at the time, the worst outbreak ever. In 2000, the “I Love You” virus redefined what people thought of as the worst outbreak. The definition of worst was stretched once again in 2001 with the “Anna Kournikova” virus, and again with the two versions of “Code Red” and the “Nimda” virus. 2002 gave us “SQLSpider”, 2003 brought “Sobig” and its friends, and we’re not even through with January 2004 and we’ve got “MyDoom.” Somewhere around 2002 I started thinking about how Microsoft is bringing people closer to a technological version of the Irish Famine of the late 1840’s.

Y’see, back in the early Renaissance, someone realized that the potato could produce more food per acre than any other crops that Irish farmers had grown before. It was such a reliable crop that it displaced pretty much any other food source in many parts of the country. Then in 1845 a fungus called Phytophthora infestans wiped out pretty much the entire potato crop. It happened again in 1846, and again in 1848. (Historical info from The Potato Then & Now). According to Ireland’s National Archives, nearly a million people died of hunger and disease and twice that number fled the country looking for any kind of work that they could find.

Fast forward to the 21st century and there’s a similar problem developing worldwide. Instead of a people becoming dependent on a single crop for food, it’s people becoming dependent on a single corporation for software. And as we’ve seen every year since 1999, viruses move through that company’s software faster than pureed apricots through a dyspeptic orangutan.

So what’s the solution? Well, diversity, obviously. If all you’ve got to eat are potatoes, and there’s a potato blight, you’re pretty much screwed. Ireland proved that in the 1840’s. Similarly, if your entire business relies on software out of one big company with a trigger-happy legal team whose name starts with “M”, and some script kiddie writes a virus that spreads through your whole corporation and eats all your data, you’re similarly hosed.

And yes, it’s going to cost more to maintain multiple platforms. Potatoes were grown in Ireland because they were cheap and grew well there. Corn or mangoes wouldn’t have been anywhere near as easy to grow, but when the blight hit there would have been something to eat besides grass and weeds. The added expense of computer maintenance will probably pay for itself the first time you can be open for business while your competitors are all hunting madly for uncorrupted backup tapes.

Update: Questions have been raised about whether orangutans eat apricots. I don’t know, but they’re both orange-ish in color… And somehow the image of a diarrheic monkey brachiating through Borneo while those below it suffer from the fallout seems to suit Microsoft…