Localisation : Avenue Daumesnil et Chantier de la Tour Volta (La Défense, Paris) / Redmond (Washington) et Santa Clara (Californie).
Dates : de mai au 29 juin 1997.
Point de vue : Édouard Renault-Tessier et Lazare Bonaparte, puis Bill Gates et Andy Grove.
Le printemps 1997 n'a pas connu les grands moments d'électricité des années précédentes. Il n'y avait ni rideaux de velours rouge au Pleyel Hall, ni projecteurs découpant la silhouette d'un homme au col roulé noir devant un lit de banquiers et de ministres, ni manifestations théâtrales diffusées par satellite pour humilier la Californie.
Lazare Bonaparte avait décrété une sobriété absolue : pour la dernière génération, trente-deux bits de Volta, le silicium parlerait seul.
Cependant, dès la deuxième semaine de mai, une fièvre singulière s'empara de l'avenue Daumesnil, dans le douzième arrondissement de Paris, avant de conquérir comme une traînée de poudre les galeries marchandes de Munich, Milan, Amsterdam et le quartier d'Akihabara à Tokyo.
Devant les portes vitrées de l'immense magasin Surcouf, dès huit heures du matin, la file d'attente s'étendait sur deux cents mètres le long du trottoir bordé de platanes. Il ne s'agissait pas d'une bande d'adolescents hystériques venus acheter un jeu vidéo ou une console de salon.
Il y avait des pères de famille en vestes de tweed, des architectes tenant leur serviette sous le bras, des comptables de PME, des étudiants en ingénierie de Jussieu ou d'Orsay, et des passionnés de micro-informatique à la retraite qui lisaient religieusement les bancs d'essai de la presse spécialisée.
À l'intérieur des travées, sur des palettes entières que les manutentionnaires dévidaient à la chaîne, s'empilaient des milliers de petites boîtes cubiques d'un noir mat, marquées d'un simple « V » métallisé bleu cobalt : la VESLA-III 2490, nom de code interne « Swan ».
Dans les laboratoires du monde entier, l'analyse de cette puce au microscope électronique a provoqué une stupeur muette.
Pour la première fois dans l'histoire industrielle, une fonderie commerciale, la MégaFab de Strasbourg, dirigée par René Castella, a produit un microprocesseur à grande échelle gravé en 0,18 micromètre dont les six niveaux d'interconnexions métalliques n'étaient plus en aluminium, mais en cuivre pur protégé par des barrières de tantale.
Le VESLA 2490, cadencé à quatre cents mégahertz natifs, avec quatre files d'exécution simultanées et deux mégaoctets de cache de second niveau gravés sur des puces de silicium, n'était pas seulement antérieur à la concurrence américaine ; il semblait appartenir à une autre décennie.
Mais le véritable séisme économique qui se produisait dans les foyers européens n'était pas uniquement dû à la qualité du cuivre alsacien. Il avait tenu une promesse faite quatre ans plus tôt.
En 1993, lorsque Lazare Bonaparte inonda le Vieux Continent et l'Asie de la gamme Compaq AXIOM et d'ordinateurs professionnels, des millions de foyers et d'entreprises s'étaient équipés d'une machine alimentée par le vénérable VESLA 2190. Quatre ans s'étaient écoulés, une éternité à l'échelle informatique.
Of course, the recent release of VoltaOS 4.0 and the ingenuity of Karim Belkacem's compilers had miraculously prolonged the youth of these computers. But the digital world had gained weight: the high-speed connections of the Volta-Box, the multimedia encyclopedias on optical disk, the processing of high-definition images and the fulgurging rise of three-dimensional worlds finally breathed the first-generation silicon.
In the traditional economy dictated by American manufacturers, this wear offered only one way out for the consumer: to put his entire turn to waste and to pay a thousand two hundred euros to buy a new computer.
Lazare refused this fatality. From the outset, he had imposed the AXIOM chassis and its connector, the Socket V, as a sustainable standard. Although the new VESLA 2490 would have been designed to power the Socket B5 at recent stations, Meudon's engineers had slipped a fine gilded interposition base with a miniature voltage regulator at the bottom of each retail box.
The whole of Europe then discovered the magic of what computer journals called Drop-in.
For one hundred forty-nine euros TTC, any individual who had never touched a soldering iron of his life would return home on Saturday afternoon, disconnect his old AXIOM, remove the two screws from the hood, lift the steel lever from the support, remove the 1993 chip and instead lay the black ceramic square of the VESLA 2490.
In 60 seconds timed, without formatting its hard drive, without losing a single file or reinstalling its operating system, the family machine woke up, four times faster than on the first day.
And on the nearby shelf of the specialized stores was the second floor of the rocket: the graphic card VFX-250.
Disbarred from the first generation VRX-150 youth sins, whose display converter sometimes lost synchronization beyond eighty-five degrees in very high resolution and whose anisotropic filtering allowed some oblique textures to sparkle, the VFX-250 offered thirty percent additional gross geometric power.
Associated with the B3D 2.0 software interface, which directly attacked material without a parasitic layer, it transformed any student or industrial design office into a professional imaging station.
On Saturday, June 14, 1997, at eighteen o'clock, the lukewarm wind of late spring was one hundred and seventy metres above La Défense.
At the top of the forty-second and last floor of what was still called on the cadastral plans of the Sakura Pacific Tower, there were no thick carpets, mahogany woodwork, or leather armchairs. The upper plateau was only a huge cathedral of raw concrete and freshly sanded steel beams, bathed in the golden light of the declining sun that crossed the four-metre-high windows.
On the ground were orange fiber optic sheaths, raking bags and carpenters' establishment.
The forty-two-storey building, set at the strategic corner of the esplanade with a breathtaking and uninterrupted view of the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Elysées and the distant glass roof of the Grand Palais, was built in the late 1980s by a banking consortium in Osaka.
The Japanese bank was hit hard by the bursting of the Japanese real estate bubble and the Asian currency quakes of spring, and was forced to sell its Parisian jewel in disaster. Édouard Renault-Tessier, on Lazare's personal instruction, had purchased the entire tower in April for a fraction of its reconstruction value, in addition to the compensation agreements concluded with the Japanese Ministry of Industry.
The construction elevator stopped at the forty-second level in a metal grin. The grille slid and Édouard Renault-Tessier came out of a pressed step, a white construction helmet placed cross over his impeccably combed hair, his Hermes leather towel tight against his three-piece cold wool suit on which plaster dust was already drawing small white aureoles.
At the end of the desert plateau, Lazare Bonaparte was standing in front of the oriental window, his hands in the pockets of a dark cloth pants, a light jacket thrown on his cotton roll neck.
Next to him, on two mason's trestles covered with a plywood board, smoked two cardboard cups filled with black coffee that he had just assembled from a bakery in the esplanade.
"You made me look to the top of a building without elevator or air conditioning, Lazare, threw Édouard out of breath by putting his towel on the board of wood, but for once in my career, I do not come to tell you that we are at the edge of the bankruptcy."
Lazare turned with a frank and amused smile, taking the second cardboard cup to tender it to his financial director.
"Take a sip of coffee first, Édouard. You climbed the last three steps on foot as if the Brussels Commission were following you down the stairs."
Édouard removed his white helmet, wiped his forehead with a batist handkerchief and opened the golden clasps of his towel with a dry gesture.
The man whom the whole group respectfully called"the man who says no", the former business banker on Rue d'Alésia who had spent the winter tearing off his hair in front of the group's titanic stock, had in his eyes an almost childish glimmer of unbelief, this sacred vertigo that a great silversmith only feels once or twice in his existence.
On the dusty plywood, he displayed three large sheets printed on paper listing, barred with ascending curves drawn in red and blue ink.
"These are the consolidated lifts of seven and thirty hours, Lazare, said Édouard in a voice that trembled slightly despite his usual morgue. I've had the writings checked three times by my Ivry listeners, the European distribution network and the Tokyo clearing house. My predictive models for the first quarter are good for the grinder."
Lazare laid his cup and leaned on the paintings, the eyes shining with attention.
"Give me that, Édouard."
"In February last year, the financier put the index on the first column, I warned you that the service of our Japanese syndicated loan of thirty-five billion euros."
Even at the miraculous rate of two decimal one percent a year and even backed ruby on the nail to our sovereign debt of thirty-five billion euros on Seoul, would puncture nearly three quarters of our current operating cash by the summer.
I had built my budget on the classical assumption that the VESLA 2490 would run at eighty percent via OEM manufacturers, with margins compressed by volume discounts and 90-day settlement deadlines."
Édouard made his finger slip to the red curve that climbed almost vertically on the millimetred paper.
"I didn't plan the Drop-in. No one at City or Wall Street planned it. In six weeks, between April 25 and tonight, we sold seven and a half million VESLA 2490 processors in boxes and three million nine hundred thousand VFX-250 graphics cards to retail customers and small businesses."
Lazare made the mental calculus in a lashes beat, without having to look at the bottom of the leaf.
"The full industrial cost of a 2490 at the exit of René Castella's clean rooms in Strasbourg, ceramic housing, Socket V adapter and fan included, fell last Tuesday to seventeen euros and eighty cents thanks to copper yields,"Lazare softly said. Sold one hundred and forty-nine euros in store."
"Fifty-six percent net gross margin! Édouard with a ferocious greed that made Lazare laugh.
No sheet metal chassis to be transported by cargo, no third-party hard drives to finance, no assembly margin to sell to Compaq, and thirty-day cash payment by purchasing plants! If you add the VFX-250 razzia and Japanese console royalties, we have just brought a billion four hundred million euros of net free cash flow into Ivry's caisses in forty-five days!"
The Chief Financial Officer stood up, crossing his arms on his vest with the majesty of a Chancellor of the Exchequer who had just filled the cellars of the Central Bank.
"In clear terms, Lazare: our Japanese deadlines are fully set for the next 24 months without reaching a cent of the research budget or slowing down the construction of our data centres in Canada and Tokyo. The illiquidity trap of New York banks has just vanished. Munich students, Lyon architects and Tokyo players have just paid cash for our sovereignty by modernizing their 1993 machines!"
Lazare laid a warm hand on Édouard's shoulder.
"And it was you who structured the documentary credit lines to cash this volume without a single cent going through the American clearing chambers, Édouard. Don't be modest: without your stubbornness this winter, we would have left twenty percent of this manna in exchange and discount charges."
Édouard toussota, hiding his pride badly behind a severe fold of the mouth, then his gaze turned around the immense plain of bare concrete on the forty-second floor.
"What brings me to a question of good management, Lazare,"he said, referring to giant windows.
Now that we have the means of our ambitions, explain to me why you are so keen to swallow up one hundred and eighty million in the complete overhaul of these forty-two floors in La Défense, when you have formally forbidden me to transfer to it any Meudon laboratory or any Ivry server?"
Lazare turned towards the window. Below, in the copper light of June, the royal perspective ran straight from the Grande Arche to the Arc de Triomphe, crossing the Seine at Neuilly before diving into the centuries-old heart of Paris.
"Because a tree dies if its roots are cut off,"replied Lazare in a calm and deep voice. Meudon, it's the Souche.
It is there, under the oaks, around Bernard's canteen and black paintings covered with chalk, that Karim, Volkov, Minh, Linh, Didier and our three hundred best researchers invent the future. If you put physicists and system architects on the thirty-fifth floor of an air-conditioned glass tower in suit-dress, in six months they think like consultants and in one year they don't make up anything anymore.
Meudon will never move."
He then designated the south-east of the Parisian agglomeration, beyond the river loop.
"Ivry-sur-Seine is the underground shield. Level 4, IMPERATOR master servers, logistics chests and Major Vauquelin's men must remain below 30 meters of reinforced concrete, where no curious satellite can read through the windows. And Strasbourg is the avil of René Castella, backed by the Rhine and the European electricity network."
Lazare put the palm against the thick glass that dominated the entire western part of Paris. A tender memory passed into his eyes: the night before the sun went down, he had taken Aliénor to the same desert plateau.
His wife, the wind lifting her silk scarf, had looked at the perspective of the Arc de Triomphe with her eyes as historian of Byzantium and had said to him with a smile:"Justinian had Sainte-Sophie and the Grand Palace of Constantinople to tell the merchants of the Mediterranean and Persian ambassadors that the Empire did not tremble. You need a glass headlight."
"Then why these forty-two floors here? smiled Lazare turning to Édouard. Because from next year onwards, Volta will no longer be a supplier hidden in the bowels of Compaq computers.
In 1998, we came out of the shadows under our own name. When the presidents of Asian consortia, European commissioners or Wall Street bankers come to negotiate with your financial management, Victor's legal unit or Nadia Cherif's media teams, I want them to raise their heads from the exit of the ring road and see the cobalt"V"at the top of these forty-two floors.
And above all, Édouard... look at the name written on the highway signs and on the RER docks."
Édouard blinked.
"The Defense?"
"The Defense,"Lazare said gently. Since the first processor welded in the cellar of the rue de la Glacière, we have never done anything else: defending the right of this continent to think, calculate and exist by itself. It was time for the mailing address of our head office to bear the real name of our business."
The financial director remained silent for a moment, struck by the relentless consistency of this thirty-one-year-old man who managed the symbols with the same precision as the copper nanometers. Then Lazare' smile slowly faded to give way to a serene gravity.
"That said, Édouard,"he again tapped the financial statements on the tretle,"keep your billion four hundred million euros warm in liquid Treasury bills at 24 hours. Don't let go of a millimetre."
Édouard frowned.
"Do you fear a reversal of sales in July? The 2490 order book is full until the end of August!"
"I'm not afraid of July, Édouard. I look at September, replied Lazare without raising the tone.
This triumph of Drop-in is a financial blessing, but let us not tell any stories: by allowing seven and a half million customers to put a race engine in their computers from 1993 for one hundred and forty-nine euros, we have just satisfied our own thirty-two-bit market. It was necessary, it was intended, but it is the song of the Swan of Socket V.
Gold, in Santa Clara and Redmond, Andy Grove and Bill Gates took the shock. They have received eighteen billion dollars from Washington, they have purged their teams, and they know that in the fall we are entering the wave hollow that precedes our shift towards sixty-four bits."
The gaze of Lazare went westward, beyond the hills of Saint-Cloud, towards the Atlantic Ocean where the sun was about to dive.
"They did not reply in May because they loaded their artillery pieces,"he calmly concludes. In September, in San Francisco, America will launch the most violent industrial and tariff counter-offensive in computer history.
This billion four hundred million euros that you have just raised, Édouard, is not the spoil of victory: it is the supply that will allow us to hold the siege this autumn while we forge the weapon of spring 1998."
***
Fourteen days later, on the night of 28-29 June 1997, nine time zones west of Paris, air conditioning slowly snored in building 8 of Microsoft's campus in Redmond.
It was about 15 in the morning in Washington State. Outside, the impeccable lawns and Douglas pine groves bathed in the fresh mist of Puget Sound, while the parking lots remained three quarters full.
In the development wings, hundreds of system engineers slept from carpeting in sleeping bags or drank cold coffee in front of extinct cathodic monitors, emptied by fourteen months of a forced march that had broken the most fragile nerves.
On the top floor, in his corner office illuminated by a simple architect's lamp, Bill Gates was not sleeping.
In shirt arm, the ungrafted collar, the glasses of his carefully wiped glasses, Microsoft's founder contemplated a silver polycarbonate disc placed flat on a crystal case, in the middle of his black leather underhand.
The CD-ROM was not yet decorated with any commercial labels. Only an inscription drawn with the indelible black felt by the kernel vice president appeared on the central crown: Golden Master, Build 1381, Windows 98 Final Release.
The general compilation had been completed forty minutes earlier without a single fatal link error. For the first time since VoltaOS's European leap had humiliated Redmond and forced Microsoft to flatten all its software architecture, Bill Gates held in his hands a weapon he did not have to blush in front of a system engineer.
A serious beep hits the encrypted telepresence console installed in front of his desk. The dedicated high-speed fibrous link opened with the headquarters of Intel Corporation, a thousand two hundred kilometers further south, in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley.
Andy Grove's bony and burined face appeared on the high-definition screen. At sixty-one years old, the survivor of Budapest, the man who had theorized that"only paranoid people survived,"no longer showed any trace of the disarray that had iced his board of directors two years earlier in the face of the French flea eruption.
The sleeves of his white shirt rolled over his dry forearms, he stared at the camera with the cold intensity of a Chief of Staff at H-hour.
"The Hillsboro foundries in Oregon and Chandler in Arizona closed the weekly score at midnight, Bill, attacked Andy Grove without preamble, his rocky voice tinted with his old Hungarian accent. Eighty-two percent net yield on silicon wafers. Three hundred and twenty thousand processors a week as early as Monday morning."
Grove raised his right hand in front of the camera lens. He did not hold a small square of classic ceramic with golden pins, but a heavy rectangular carrene cartridge of black anodized aluminum, wide as a compact video cassette, whose lower slice showed a comb of golden contacts.
"Slot 1, simply says Gates as they approach the screen, a fold of carnal satisfaction at the corner of the lips."
"Two models ready to overwhelm the oceans as early as the first week of September,"Grove said, weighingly placing the cartridge on his desk.
On the one hand, the hammer-pilon for the editorial rooms and the work stations: the Pentium Pro Extreme, cadenced out of the factory at four hundred and fifty megahertz, with a speculative execution pipeline pushed to fourteen floors and a megabyte of cache rotating at full speed.
Whatever Bonaparte put in his VESLA at four hundred megahertz, our test benches in Santa Clara exceed him by twenty percent on the integer calculations and resume the head as a floating point."
"What about thermal consumption? asked Gates, always pragmatic. Your engineers were talking about fifty-five watts last month."
"Fifty-eight watts at full load, swept Grove with a sharp backhand. And I don't care, Bill.
We'll put a radiator twice as big and a fan five thousand turns a minute. What counts on September 10 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco is that on the giant screen, in front of eight hundred journalists from around the world, Intel's blue bar is twenty percent higher than Volta's black bar!
For four years, this Frenchman made us look like hand cart manufacturers. In September, we take back the crown of pure speed in front of the cameras!"
Grove took a second black cartridge, slightly thinner, placed next to the first.
"And while the press will have its eyes riveted on the four hundred and fifty megahertz of the top of the range,"said Intel's boss with a wolf smile,"here is the real knife that will cut their shingles in the shops: the Pentium II on universal connector Slot 1, declined in 266, 300 and 333 megahertz.
Thanks to Washington's 18 billion dollars of accelerated national security depreciation, our Arizona lines are already being paid. We will release the model 266 megahertz at one hundred and nineteen dollars wholesale price.
Bonaparte sold millions of upgrade chips to one hundred and forty-nine euros this spring because people didn't want to buy machines? This fall, for the price of a French update, an American or Asian buyer will have a complete new system equipped with a Pentium II!"
Bill Gates took his seat again, joining his fingertips in front of his chin, the spirit boiling.
"And this time, the operating system will give them no excuse to look towards Paris,"said Gates, designating the CD-ROM placed on the black velvet. The Golden Master of Windows 98 is leaving at six o'clock this morning, Andy.
My architects have razed the foundations inherited from old DOS. The kernel manages an armoured preemptive multitask: an application that derails is killed in its memory space without ever dropping the machine.
The entire TCP/IP network battery and the scheduler were manually rewritten as a assembler to feed the fourteen floors of your pipeline without a famine cycle."
The eyes behind the glasses were lit with a cold glow.
"In particular, we natively integrate DirectX 5.0 into the very heart of the system,"said Redmond. So far, software and video game publishers were caught in the throat by Volta's proprietary B3D API if they wanted fluid 3D.
Avec DirectX 5.0 et Direct3D, nous offrons à tous les studios du monde une couche d'abstraction matérielle universelle et gratuite : ils écrivent leur code une seule fois pour Windows, et il fonctionne sur n'importe quelle puce graphique ATI, 3dfx ou Nvidia. Nous brisons le monopole logiciel d'Ivry.
« Et les grands constructeurs ? demanda Grove. Avez-vous les signatures finales ? »
« Tous, jusqu'au dernier, a confirmé Gates d'un ton glacial. Michael Dell a signé mardi au Texas. »
Gateway, Hewlett-Packard et la division nord-américaine de Compaq ont paraphé hier soir des accords d'exclusivité. Le mécanisme de remises est verrouillé : tout assembleur qui livre 85 % de ses machines équipées du processeur Pentium II et de Windows 98 bénéficiera d'une remise de 60 % sur le prix combiné de la licence et du processeur.
S'il a l'intention de fabriquer ne serait-ce qu'une gamme secondaire avec des semi-conducteurs français, il perd la totalité de la subvention sur l'ensemble de son catalogue annuel et voit ses coûts augmenter du jour au lendemain. »
Andy Grove hocha lentement la tête, savourant la brutalité mathématique du piège. Aucun conseil d'administration informatique, soumis à la pression trimestrielle de Wall Street, ne pourrait survivre 24 heures s'il renonçait à une telle subvention croisée.
« Le fonds commun de guerre pour la campagne mondiale d'automne est débloqué », conclut Grove en frappant du poing sur son bureau de Santa Clara. Un milliard et demi de dollars entre Intel et Microsoft.
Le lendemain du discours d'ouverture de San Francisco en septembre, pas un écran de télévision à New York, Londres, Francfort ou Tokyo, pas une double page de magazine économique ne respirerait sans afficher le logo Intel Inside à côté de Windows 98.
Le vieux général en silicium s'est approché de son visage depuis la caméra.
« Lazare Bonaparte croyait que ses victoires de 1995 et 1996 avaient mis l'Amérique à genoux pour toujours, Bill. Il a profité du printemps pour encaisser ses dividendes en s'imaginant que nous étions finis. En septembre, nous lui rappellerons ce qui arrive lorsque la première puissance industrielle et financière mondiale décide d'écraser un concurrent sous le poids du capital et du volume. »
« Viens à San Francisco, Andy, sourit Bill Gates en prenant délicatement entre ses doigts le disque d'argent du Maître d'or. L'automne sera américain. »