[Am-info] Another view (other views)

[T. Guilbert]

In a message dated 2000 June 12 (Monday), timestamp 10:16 AM, 
   on the topic Re: [Am-info] End Game,
   "Norm" <normanmo@clark.net> wrote:

"|For most of my coworkers M$ was okay by them
"|(especially those who own M$ stock).  They haven't been 'true
"|believers', but they felt M$ develops good products and deserves
"|their monopoly status.  

"|     But lately that's changed.  Finally these people started
"|reading the same things in the national press that I'd been telling
"|them for years, and although his language isn't quite as strong now
"|a federal judge agrees with me too.  Now my dire warnings about how
"|dangerous M$ can be if left to their devices carries credibility

I think you are living in an isolated island of rationality.  I have
mentioned the establishment Oregonian in this maillist before; the
other day, it ran its top editorial on the final judgment in the
Microsoft trial, in which it said that "the industry" and "market
forces" had made the judgment irrelevant and unnnecessary before the
judge had ruled, and that the case was about Microsoft's
"unsuccessful" attempt to kill off Netscape as a browser (which it
views as just another application, not as a middleware threat to an
OS).  

On another maillist, meanwhile, a friend of mine who has served as a
"James Carville" type consultant to many major Democrats, some of whom
you undoubtedly have heard of, wrote a Nixon Defense screed in support
of Microsoft (in response to the posting of another member of the
list, who was not me).  Normally, I would not quote another person's
message from one list on another, but it distills what I have seen as
the _prevailing_ view among those whom I know:

    <begin quotation>

> But Microsoft also used the power of this natural monopoly in illegal
ways.  It
> pressured computer makers not to offer competing operating systems or
> applications that competed with Microsoft's own. 

Standard operating procedure long before MS did it. That's what made
CP/M emerge as the universal pre-DOS operating system. It's what made
"bundling" of applications with CP/M the norm. Here's some very brief
history.

WordStar got itself made the word processor of choice by making deals
with boxmakers who used CP/M, which was nearly all of them. Then
WordPerfect found a better way to twist arms and WS was abruptly
replaced by WP despite WS being the better program. Standard software
competition long before Microsoft. Gates only did what everyone else
was doing.

What went wrong? Gates did it better. He did it as the owner of the
operating system AND the applications. This was more than standard
procedure. It was a new level of market control. Was it illegal? 

The government refused to get involved despite being asked, so
evidently anti-trust didn't think it was illegal. This was the Reagan
era. Republicans. Supply side economics. Laissez-faire. Trust the
marketplace. 

Ah, the marketplace. Application software bundling was always hated
and resented by those who didn't get bundled. Equally, losing to CP/M
was resented by other operating system publishers. Now all these
losers had one target to focus on. Gates created an unprecedented
coterie of resentful losers. 

They found allies in PC techies and consumers who hated Windows,
allies in PC techies and users who preferred OS/2 or whatever, and
allies in society's malcontents who resent on principle anyone else's
success. 

That's a formidable hate group and Gates, who obviously has the people
skills of a techie nerd with greed, blundered enough to fuse the group
into a monster. And didn't care. "But Sire ..." isn't music to the
king. 

> It has apparently given inside
> information to its own application programmers to put outside apps at 
further
> disadvantage. 

The practice was to allow 3rd parties to subscribe to a service which
kept them updated on progress in MS software development. The got the
new code when it was usable. Some resented paying for this and
expected a free lunch. (People skills of techie nerds again.) Some
expected that every update was perfect and could be implicitly relied
on not to change. They believed MS programmers couldn't make mistakes
or change their minds. When such people bitch, consider the source. 

> It has countered the perceived threat of Netscape not just by
> improving its own browser but by the ultimate in predatory pricing,
making its
> browser free (and implying that removing it would cause Windows to fail).

The *free* distribution of a vital, universal software application is
not cause for consumers to retch. 

Forcing the consumer to use your INET services when they use the
product, however, is. Grabbing the consumer by the short hairs and
telling him where to piss adds another layer to the MS hate group.

Hola! Don't Netscape and AOL do the very same thing, pre-set *your*
browser to *their* addresses way beyond what's required to use a
browser? But only MS gets hated for it, due to acclimation. 

If we didn't resent the guy we could appreciate that Gates saved us
millions if not billions in browser costs. Once out of beta Netscape
was supposed to cost $100. With a clear field and no MSIE for
competition it might have risen to three, four, five times that. We'll
never know. Gates never gave Jim Barksdale the chance.

For making the Internet Explorer free Gates is St. Gates in my book.
For giving it the SAME NAME as Windows Explorer he's just another dumb
nerd.

> Left unchecked, this would lead to a world in which only Microsoft
software is
> available.  

Only if MS apps and the OS were better, so that people freely chose
them. Hey, was SUN somehow forbiddden from developing an operating
system for user PCs to compete with MS? They could easily afford the
effort.  MAC wasn't competing? UNIX/LINUX wasn't? The huge Euro
publishers couldn't develop an OS and try to market it? 

This isn't like self-developing film or Xerography where patents lock
up the only known technology for generations.  Anyone with the skills
and money is free to develop a PC OS and apps for it. 

It's adolescent to think the world would beat a path to their door
merely because the product is better, but today bottomless venture
capital is there to pay for marketing expertise as well as programming
expertise. The belief that Microsoft is unbeatable is a fault in the
believer. They're hard to beat, to be sure.
 
> On the other hand, I don't see the case for the government's actions (see
below)
> regarding nylon.  Anyone was free to come up with a superior product.
There was
> no coercion to use it instead of rivals, nor was there a problem of
maintaining
> compatibility as there is with software.  In practice, I don't know that
anyone
> has surpassed nylon, but does that affect the legalities?

Why the anti-trust functionaries trudge into action is only a mystery
if one goes to the schoolbook where it says - "We live under the rule
of law."


It's no mystery when you look closer and see what that really means -
we are a government of men writing, passing, and using laws in a
profit-driven representative democracy. Ergo, we live under the rule
of laws made by legislators with agendas and constituents and
telephones. Anything can happen. 

The Republicans are gone. Laissez-faire is muted. Under the Democrats
Microsoft becomes anti-trust meat.

On-point - in Virginia our most venerable and honored adage on
government is: "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe so long as
the legislature is in session." We allow our state legislature to meet
two months a year, two and a half months in alternate years. The rest
of the time they lead private work-a-day lives mixed with attending
legislative committee meetings. 

None of them is a professional legislator living a life separate and
above the rest of us. No legislator in Washington is anything else. To
me the difference shows. 

    <end quotation>

-- 
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"T. Guilbert" <ethical@1of1.net>   
"Ethical at One of One dot Net"
Portland, Oregon, United States of America
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