Bargaining - 6/22/02
The Federal and Microsoft bureaucrats are
reversing their legal positions - 8/24/01
Gates’ Monopoly Key to Cyberspace -
6/5/01
BREAKING MICROSOFT’S MONOPOLY - 4/5/00
At a meeting in Orlando last January, some members of the Liberty Alliance,
which includes American Express, General Motors and United Airlines, accused
their colleagues-bureaucrats of Sun Microsystems for statements portraying their
union as an anti-Microsoft monopoly initiative. However, Sun's executive,
Jonathan Schwartz rebuffed them by asking them not to be such hypocrites,
because -- "Would any of you be here if it wasn't for Microsoft?"
The Liberty Alliance was created to develop "open" and "neutral" standards for
online identity systems, which supposedly would be crucial for a coming
generation of Internet services and the growth of electronic commerce. Open to
what and neutral to whom? You guess it... neutral to the Microsoft bureaucrats,
whose drive to conquer new markets beyond personal computer software, has
consistently run into resistance from the economic bureaucrats of other
companies and industries, who allied to insure there is a competitive
alternative to the services of MS bureaucrats, who had planted their stake in
the online identity field with their .Net Passport, Hotmail e-mail accounts,
instant-messaging service, and the Windows XP operating system -- the
combination of which required users to set up Passport accounts and be on the
hook of the MS bureaucrats.
However, the corporate bureaucrats of United Airlines, American Express and
General Motors have millions of customers, and each team of bureaucrats
determined to exploit Internet commerce itself and for themselves; consequently,
they were determined not to relinquish their customer data to another team of
bureaucrats operating an online identity system, and certainly not to the
Microsoftians.
Yet the alliance also quickly decided that it should not be led by technology
companies because Liberty would then lose credibility, being seen as just an
anti-Microsoft organization. Consequently, Eric Dean, CIO of United Airlines and
the chairman of Liberty Alliance thus spins the dilemma: "We don't want to sell
tools for identity management. We're not selling software. We just want to use
it." Therefore, the anti-Microsoft rhetoric has to not be so obvious. And the
anti-Microsoftians have clarified their approach and their vision of online
identity management as basically open technical standards that will allow Web
sites and companies to share data, with the "customers' permission", of course.
Instead of a single sign-on used everywhere online, they see different sets of
credentials much as in a person's wallet — a driver's license, a library card,
and a bunch of credit cards from different banks.
On the other hand, the Microsoftians have defended their Passport from the
criticism of privacy groups and corporations by clarifying their vision and
emphasizing that personal information will not be passed on to marketers,
without the "user's permission", of course. At the end of last year, the
Microsoftians announced they were adopting a looser model for Passport, which
they call "federation". So, the different teams of corporate bureaucrats would
control their own "islands" of data instead of relying on a sole brokerage team
of MS bureaucrats.
The overly-aggressive plan of the MS bureaucrats generated fear among the rest
of the gang of the American corporate bureaucrats that Bill Gates and Co. were
positioning themselves as a sole gatekeeper to Internet commerce, thus
effectively collecting and storing personal information on millions of people,
and more importantly, collecting super-profits. But according to the mantra of
economical bureaucrats, the profits on their capital should be equal in the long
run, despite the industry it applied in. The super-profits of the MS bureaucrats
have been continuing more than two decades, thus effectively transcending into
the category of unreasonable profits. The Microsoft's "single sign-on" to many
Web sites and Internet services, promoted as a consumer convenience, brought
protests from the bureaucrats of professional organizations, credit card
companies, airlines, banks, car makers, phone companies, you name them. The MS
Passport seemed to the rest of economical bureaucrats as a technology that makes
the MS bureaucrats the unnecessary go-betweens between them and their customers,
who garner the cream by doing nothing but holding the key of their intellectual
property, which should expire a couple of years ago.
During the past two years, the equality drive of the anti-Microsoftians has
materialized, firstly, by organizing themselves into the Liberty Alliance, and
secondly, by gaining on their band-wagon the majority of the political
bureaucrats. The growing roster of Liberty Alliance now includes not only the
American economical bureaucrats of AOL Time Warner and Hewlett-Packard, but also
international bureaucrats of Sony, Nokia, France Télécom, Bell Canada, the
German software maker SAP, the Japanese Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and many
more.
The MS bureaucrats have found their advances elsewhere slowed by wary soft- and
hard-industry rivals. The MS bureaucrats have had little success to date in
convincing the bureaucrats of cell-phone and cable television industries to
adopt pared-down versions of their Windows OS. The latter have preferred rival
technology — despite the billions of dollars the MS bureaucrats have spent to
gain entry into the cable and cell-phone markets. Moreover, the MS bureaucrats
are faced the increasing challenge in their back-yard market of personal
computers, from where their strength derived but gradually dissipated in new
market-places.
The vast majority of economical bureaucrats learned too well the experience of
the IBM bureaucrats in the PC business, who had helped to create a new
industry only to lose control of it to the MS bureaucrats by mishandling their
property rights for a software and allowing the MS bureaucrats to make an
industry standard of it, thus, effectively allowing the latter to collect much
of the industry's super-profits for two some decades. Though cable television
bureaucrats wanted Bill Gates' money and the latter sought in the cable industry
a huge new market for his software, the former didn't want to be the IBM-like
losers and get cored out from the inside. That is why Gates' $10 billion
spending spree in the cable business over the last five years turned out as a
losing strategy. In 1999, the bureaucrats of AT&T's cable division got $5
billion in cash from the MS bureaucrats while bought 2.5 million copies of
Microsoft's version of Windows for interactive set-top systems, at $10 a copy.
However, the contract terms did not commit the AT&T bureaucrats to actually use
the Microsoft software, and they shunned up the Microsoft technology. Despite
its lavish spending, the MS bureaucrats have so far only two modest footholds in
television set-top box software: on the Ultimate TV digital video recorder used
by DirecTV and for some customers of TV Cabo (a Portuguese cable company).
The bureaucrats of the cell-phone and wireless telecommunications industry
(including the bureaucrats of Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola) have organized a
joint venture (named Symbian) in 1998. Last November at Las Vegas' big annual
trade show of the PC industry, the Symbianese announced the Open Mobile
Architecture Initiative, which uses the Sun Microsystems' Internet programming
language Java for their wireless applications. Their implicit intention has been
to develop a cell-phone operating system that would be an effective barrier to
the MS bureaucrats' advance in the mobile phone market. Recently, the Nokia
bureaucrats have decided to license cheaply their programs for such tasks as Web
browsing, messaging, and e-mail, in another effort to prevent the Microsoftians
from controlling the key software standards for so-called smart phones. And the
bureaucrats of Palm, the champions in the hand-held market, have made their Palm
operating system as a separate PalmSource, in order to be more assertive and
aggressive in the cell-phone market.
The worry of the cell-phone makers is that they will suffer the fate of PC
makers, allowing another company to own a lucrative technology standard. That
fear came to surface last February at a telecommunications industry conference
in Cannes, France, when the Microsoftians (including the corporate bureaucrats
of Intel -- the dominant producer of PC microprocessors) announced that they are
working on a joint design for sophisticated phones that they will license to
cell-phone makers. This move of the Microsoftians would effectively reduce the
cell-phone companies to the equivalent of PC clone makers, who steadily have
profits sharply below the average.
Three days ago, the federal judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial indicated for
the first time that she was questioning the government's proposed settlement,
which she could reject if she found that it was not in the public interest.
Deciphering from the aristocratic language, it means that the interests of the
political bureaucrats in this matter are not settle down yet either.
The political bureaucrats of an appeals federal court found last June that the
Microsoftians had acted illegally to undermine the Netscapeans' Web
browser (Navigator, now owned by the team of corporate bureaucrats of AOL Time
Warner) and the Java programming language (created and owned by the corporate
bureaucrats of Sun Microsystems). Both these computational tools could have
evolved into a viable OS that could compete with the Microsoftians' Windows OS
on equal terms, thus undermining the latter's monopoly and bringing down their
profits to the average level; and that would supposedly benefit not only the
entire upper class but also the commoners in America and around the globe.
After the federal bureaucrats reached an agreement with the Microsoftians and
the latter acknowledge to be liable for repeated anti-trust violations last
year, the states' bureaucrats became eager to get a slice of that pie too by
saying that they wouldn't allow the Microsoftians to continue to stifle
competition in the market for computer operating systems (OS) in their
particular regions. The Microsoftians argued that the anti-Microsoftians'
proposals would destroy the computer software market, raise prices and force the
company to stop selling their Windows OS, which runs on 95 percent of the
world's PCs.
Under the settlement, the Microsoftians agreed to enable computer makers to
remove the desktop icons to several of the software programs (that they include
in their Windows OS) and to disclose more information to rival developers so
that the Microsoftians' programs would not have advantage over the rivaling
software because of their superior interaction with the Windows OS.
The political bureaucrats of nine states who originally joined the bureaucrats
of Federal Justice Department's lawsuit against the Microsoftians also signed on
to the settlement. But the bureaucrats of nine other states, led by the
Californians and Iowans, argue that the settlement is ineffective. They wished
that the Microsoftians would sell a stripped down version of Windows OS that
would allow computer makers actually to substitute rival programs for those
produced by the Microsoftians, rather than simply removing the icons. They are
also pushing for broader disclosure provisions, without the exceptions included
in the proposed settlement, to ensure that the Microsoftians share information
about their Windows OS with rivals. Other crucial provisions of the
Californians-led bureaucrats include forcing the Microsoftians to give away the
source code for their Internet Explorer browser, and to auction their popular
Office software to developers who could create versions for the Linux OS.
The Microsoftian and anti-Microsoftian political bureaucrats (lawyers,
legislators and executives) have excessively antagonistic remedies in this case,
and the moderate political bureaucrats, like that federal judge, appeared
interested in hearing not the opposing views of extremists but rather
compromises that would be mutually beneficial to both -- to the few extremists
and to the entire establishment.
Consequently, the new judge want to modify the terms of both sides. She
discarded the decision of the previous judge (who insisted on compartmentalizing
the Microsoftians into several teams of bureaucrats, thus guessing it would
restore competition among these teams and between them and the rest of corporate
America) and now stays before a dilemma. If she rejects the settlement of the
federal bureaucrats with the Microsoftians, she would order the former to
continue litigating a case they had chosen to settle; and she would ally herself
with the Californians-led bureaucrats in their attempt to corner the
Microsoftians. However, if she would manage to extract concessions from each
side, there would be a slender chance that she could modify the federal
bureaucrats' settlement without rejecting it; consequently, she could fashion a
single remedy that would safely transport across the river wolf, goat and
cabbage.
The day before yesterday, the Californians-led bureaucrats soften their position
pedaling backward of a demand for a stripped down version of the Windows OS,
saying information sharing is more important than dismantling the Windows OS.
The spokesman of the Californians-led bureaucrats, attorney Steven Kuney began
his closing arguments by saying that a stripped down version of Windows, which
was the first provision in the states' proposal, is only the fourth most
important remedy behind information disclosure and more flexibility and
retaliation protection for OEMs. "In this industry more than any other,
information is the life blood of innovation" - he said. Disclosing APIs and
other technical information is more important than creating a stripped down
version of the Windows OS. Nevertheless, he insisted that the scope of the DOJ
bureaucrats' settlement would have to be broadened to include emerging
technologies such as server OS, handheld devices and set-top boxes. Also the
definition of interoperability would have to be clarified, and the settlement's
many exemptions would have to be removed.
However, the Microsoftians' lawyers argued that even the softened remedies are
punitive, Draconian, fundamentally flawed, and neither necessary nor feasible,
because they would hinder the Microsoftians' foray into new markets. The
Microsoftians insist that the stripping down their Windows OS would cause undue
fragmentation, security problems and harm to consumers as well as the entire "PC
ecosystem." They also argued that the anti-Microsoftians' requirements on
information disclosure, royalty-free licensing of Internet Explorer and the
porting of Office amount to confiscation of the company's intellectual property.
The Microsoftians reiterated their complaints that the anti-Microsoftians'
proposal is too vague and ambiguous for implementing with certainty and that
their industry competitors held too much influence in crafting the proposed
remedies of the political bureaucrats. Consequently the Microsoftians refused to
budge an inch.
Following suit of intractability, the anti-Microsoftians rejected the
Microsoftians' claims that the mild proposal of the former would force the
latter to remove their Windows OS from the market, lay off employees, and cease
innovating. The anti-Microsoftians say that that kind of doomsday predictions
are extreme and hyperbolic, and the Microsoftians strong enough to adapt to the
fair competitive conditions.
And so it goes. Apparently the bargaining between the majority of the upper
class and the Microsoftians will be a much longer process than I expected,
because the economic conditions have drastically changed for the past year.
Instead of the national surplus, the upper class has now deficit on its hands
and couldn't afford to be so generous (while breaking a monopoly) as it was to
the Rockefeller's team of corporate bureaucrats.
6/22/02
On August 7, 2001, the Microsoft bureaucrats asked the Supreme Court judges
to consider their appeal, arguing that the low-level federal judge's (Jackson’s)
comments to reporters before rendering his decision renders it void and null.
Previously, they also asked the mid-level federal judges to stay the mandate
that would return the case to a lower court for further proceedings, but now,
they want to delay those proceedings, hoping that the release of Windows XP will
render the anti-trust case moot and void.
In response, the federal and some state executives suggested that the Microsoft
(MS) bureaucrats were trying to delay the case's return to a new low-level
federal judge, in order to render it moot after the refurbished Windows will be
released on October 25.
the federal and some state executive bureaucrats, while criticizing MS
bureaucrats recent legalistic maneuver to docket their case among the upper
level federal judges and claiming that consumers could be harmed by further
delays in the three-year-old trial, filed the 9-page legal brief, asking the
mid-level federal judges to reject that request and allow proceedings to
continue with the low-level federal judge while the upper-level federal judges
decide whether to hear the appeal of MS bureaucrats. The brief states,
"Microsoft has announced that it will soon introduce Windows XP, the next
generation of its monopoly operating system. The sooner remedial proceedings
begin, the sooner a resolution can be crafted to assure competitive
conditions... Until that remedy is in place, each day of delay contributes
additional injury to the public interest in competition."
In opposing such a delay, the federal and some state executives emphasized the
importance of the upcoming launch of Windows XP, making it clear the new
operating system's (OS) competitive aspects would be explored when the case
moves forward in order to protect vital consumer and public interests. It sounds
well, but what kind of “consumer” and “public interest” they are trying to
protect?
In their June 28 decision, the seven mid-level federal judges though overturned
Jackson's order to break Microsoft into two companies upheld his eight separate
antitrust claims against Microsoft bureaucrats and sent two portions of the case
back to a new low-level federal judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who must rehear
the argument that Microsoft’s bureaucrats illegally tied or “integrated” their
Internet Explorer with Windows 95 and 98 and who must craft a new remedy in a
timely manner.
Legalistic tactics
The legalistic skirmish over jurisdiction is not the first for the federal and
MS executives, but the latest decision of the mid-level federal judges
necessitated them to change their tactics. After Jackson's breakup order, the
federal executive trustbusters asked the upper level federal judiciary to skip
mid-level appellate review and take the case directly, while the MS bureaucrats
tried to keep the case at the mid-level federal judiciary. The upper level
federal judges rejected the request of their executive colleagues; now the MS
bureaucrats are asking them to hear an appeal while the federal executives seek
to move the case back to a new low-level federal judge.
Many legal experts believe it is unlikely the upper level federal judges would
hear soon the request of MS bureaucrats, who rather than attacking the merits of
the case, argued that Jackson should have disqualified himself "as of September
1999, the date of his earliest known violation" of codes of conduct for federal
judges. According to the MS bureaucrats, "Such disqualification would require
(vacating) the district court's findings of fact and conclusions of law". Thus,
Jackson's decision expressed in the findings of fact, issued in November 1999,
and the conclusions of law, released in April 2000, would never have issued if
he had disqualified himself in the first place. Correspondingly, the mid-level
federal judges who decided to keep those documents, even though they chastised
Judge Jackson’s behavior and removed him from further proceedings, would not
overturn the case. But would and could be linguistics cannot make the real
interest of the upper class null and void. And that interest called “equality of
aristocrats” – that is, equal profits on their equal capitals.
Getting the case back to the low-level federal judge is essential for the
federal executives, who are trying to protect the equality of all aristocrats as
a social class while camouflaging it as the struggle for equality of all
consumers, because they need to maintain decorum in the commoner’s eye. On the
one hand, the political bureaucrats want to break the MS economic bureaucracy
into two teams thus creating competition between them and leveling their profits
to the usual norm. On the other hand, such an intrusion of the political
bureaucracy into the economic affairs will show the individual where the social
limitations of his housekeeping ingenuity are. And you know that ignorance of
the commoners and workers is bliss to the aristocrats.
Economy from Greek means the household laws, but lately those laws treated as
the rules directed exclusively toward machines, not the people. This trend is
largely characterizes the era of big government, bureaucrats of which tend to
monopolize the creation of rules of human behavior. However, such a monopoly of
central authority leads to stagnation of local initiative, breeding slavish
dependency of the local bureaucracy on the federal one. That is from where
derived the latest fad of the WH bureaucrats who now zealously propagandize the
so-called faith-based initiative, forgetting that the business is the main
American religion and faith.
The political bureaucrats do seek an injunction delaying Windows XP's launch,
the final or gold code of which MS bureaucrats are going to release to PC makers
today, on Aug. 24. This injunction will delay the selling PCs with Windows XP,
which the computer manufacturers have planned to start on Sept. 24, about a
month before the official release of Windows XP. It means also lessening the
revenue to the federal and state treasuries. But the latter possibility is
somewhat a postponed threat to the power of the political bureaucracy. The most
obvious threat to the political bureaucrats is that the economic bureaucrats of
Microsoft dared to make rules not only for the entire computing industry but
also for the communicative and entertaining ones, and that is a domain and
sovereignty of the political bureaucrats.
Tactically, to protect their domain and to obtain a temporary injunction against
the release of refurbished OS, the political bureaucrats have little time if
any. That is why the MS bureaucrats stopped trying to delay the remedial part
and letting the case back into trial court (where the political bureaucrats
still need to unfold their rational) and transfer their efforts onto changing
the minds of the Supreme Court bureaucrats, the majority of whom are still going
along with the rest of the majority of the political bureaucrats, who charge the
MS bureaucrats nominally with too versatile functionalities of their product
that people are complaining about -- that too many unnecessary functions have
been added to the Windows XP core system, which are not improving the work of
the core and stifle the development of the add-in programs.
Indeed only a handful Microsoft competitors view the bundling controversy over
Windows XP as being “blown way out of proportion." The vast majority of them
don't like that the MS bureaucrats added to their OS some programs that compete
with their own applications. The economic bureaucrats pressured the political
ones and it seems that a cold consolation of the majority of the upper class to
the Microsoft rule in several industries is growing hotter.
Although the MS bureaucrats insist that there are thousands of developers
creating applications for the Windows core system, and the number of programs
the MS bureaucrats choose to add to their OS is quite small in comparison. They
argue that contemplating over the PC industry as a whole and the work that they
put into supporting third-party innovation and development on the Windows core
program, the set of companies and individuals working on innovative tools for
the core program so vastly outweighs the opportunities that companies lost or
will loose because add-in programs became part of the core system.
However, the majority of programmers consider that putting something unnecessary
in the core program (OS) should be done only when the developer of the OS wants
to bury that something alive. Once he started thinking of that something as
being part of the OS, he necessitated keeping the core program and its
Application Programming Interfaces secret, making them available only to his
confidants. His secrecy keeps lay-programmers from taking advantage of the
features of that unnecessary something that were buried in the OS, thus keeping
them from developing new applications.
However, the majority of businessmen, including the major PC makers whose
accounting department depends on the Windows OS, believes that distribution of
Windows XP should not be halted, because they are counting on the refurbished OS
to help boost fourth-quarter sales. They argued that the political bureaucrats
shouldn't be involved in software design. However, they would not mind if the
government asserted its right to make the rules for licensing agreements; and if
those licensing arrangements were illegal, then, and only then, the release of a
program should be stopped.
Now that a federal appeals court has upheld a ruling branding Microsoft
corporation as an abusive monopoly, the attorneys general of 18 states are
trying to stop distribution of Windows XP until they can determine whether
Microsoft's inclusion of heretofore stand-alone programs (including its digital
media player and instant messaging (IM) “technology”) is anticompetitive to
other economic bureaucrats and intrudes onto the turf of the political
bureaucrats.
Throughout their antitrust scrambles with the federal and state trustbusters,
the MS bureaucrats maintain that they are simply assert their right to continue
innovating in the development of new versions of their OS that has helped them
to become the world's most successful software-makers. Nevertheless, they are
caving under the pressure. Thus, two weeks ago, they reached a settlement with
the Eastman Kodak bureaucrats over the allegations of the latter that the OS,
designed by the MS bureaucrats, gives unfair preference to the digital imaging
software of the MS bureaucrats that is comparatively worse on its merits than
the EK digital imaging software.
The dispute of bureaucrats of EK and MS is just one example of the challenges
the MS bureaucrats face as the developers of the market-leading OS and the
providers of software applications and online services. Although the MS
bureaucrats insist that there is no “politically correct” test driving the
decision to bundle (“integrate”) technologies into XP, such as applications like
the Windows Messenger and Windows Media Player that the MS bureaucrats has
offered as software add-ins to Windows and made available on other OS platforms,
rather, the decision to bundle is part of the evolution of the product and
"based on meeting and exceeding the expectations of our users."
While the economic bureaucrats of MS team must comply with the wishes of their
shareholders and has to provide value and get people into the stores and to buy
their products, they can no longer entice the buyers by saying that now their
product is more stable because it has less bugs. Nevertheless, Instant Messenger
vendors and digital Media Player providers still worry that bundling programs by
the MS bureaucrats into the Win OS will (as it was the case with the Internet
browser) harm the market for their applications.
Many of them ask why the MS bureaucrats bundle their own applications with their
OS when other OS vendors license add-ins to their platforms from third parties.
For instance, the bureaucrats of Apple Computer (AC) rely on MS Internet
Explorer to help the Macintosh users traverse the Web. Although the AC
bureaucrats made MSIE the default browser on their computers as part of a 1997
deal with the MS bureaucrats, who invested $150 million in the AC corporation,
the bureaucrats of latter had not seen the need to reinvent the Web browser and
had been offering Netscape Communications' Navigator as the default browser up
until that deal.
However, the MS bureaucrats say that they cannot rely upon third parties to
provide that functionality. But why?? Is it because Bill Gates does not believe
into self-regulating nature of competitive market and capitalist society or
what? But that same social system allowed him to grow to the richest man on the
planet. If not that disbelieve, then sheer arrogance of knowing how to handle
millions of people employed in several industries leads Bill Gates and Co. onto
the confrontation with the majority of the upper class.
In their ruling the mid-level federal judges faulted the MS bureaucrats for
illegally maintaining their monopoly in Intl OS. But such accusation requires a
competitive threat, meaning that something could conceivably replace the
monopoly product, be that something either the Netscape browser or Sun
Microsystems' Java programming language. That argument would not necessarily
apply to other programs, such as instant messaging and media playing,
integration of which into Windows XP is under the public scrutiny.
Some MS lawyers argue that if the Netscape browser or Sun Microsystems' Java
programming language are not the core OS, they do not threat to the monopoly of
Win OS, and thus, the MS bureaucrats are not liable for maintaining their
monopoly in Intl OS. Therefore, there is not a clear path to that kind of relief
by injunction. But the problem is in the subjunctive mood – those products could
be a new OS, and thus, could be competitive to the Win OS if the MS bureaucrats
did not stifle them. Moreover, the government lawyers can argue that while the
MS instant messaging (IM) and media playing (MP) can compete with IM and MP of
other companies, their rigid inclusion into Windows XP will potentially disrupt
competition in the IM and MP markets. If the majority of the upper class settled
on to broke the MS team, then the political bureaucrats, during the trial on
remedies, will definitely include the IM and MP functionalities of Win XP into
the scope of the potential remedies, in order to lower the final price of
breaking the MS team.
It must be acknowledged that the political bureaucrats are under the increasing
pressure from the interest groups. Thus, a Democratic senator from New York,
Charles Schumer, being under pressure of his Jewish constituents, has already
called on the federal and 18 states DoJ bureaucrats to seek an injunction
against Windows XP, questioning whether the bundling of some programs with XP
(among them Windows IM and MP) could have an anti-competitive effect.
Already more than 10 privacy organizations petitioned the bureaucrats of Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) to take similar action, tending, of course, to stress the
privacy and security of an individual. Thus, on Aug.15, the Jewish leaders of
these organizations renewed their attacks on the MS bureaucrats and their
Passport authentication service and Windows XP, asking the FTC bureaucrats to
mandate changes in the refurbished MS OS. They had filed a 12-page supplemental
complaint alleging that the MS bureaucrats by offering “Passport”
(authentication) and associated services are engaging in unfair and deceptive
trade practices in violation of Section 5 of the FTC act.
In the original complaint, the members of the privacy organizations alleged
that, "Microsoft has engaged and is engaging in unfair and deceptive trade
practices intended to profile, track and monitor millions of Internet users."
The complaint further alleged that MS Net programs and services (such as
Passport, HailStorm, and MSN) "are designed to obtain personal information from
consumers in the United States, unfairly and deceptively."
“Passport” is an MS online authentication program that is used for logging in to
multiple Web sites or services. The MS Passport program is the base of the
future MS HailStorm program, which will authenticate subscribers to access their
e-mail, personal contact list, schedule and other Web services (such as
shopping, banking and entertainment) through a variety of communicative devices
(such as PCs, cell phones and hand-held computers) from any location.
The MS bureaucrats use the Passport program for some of their MSN Web
properties, their messaging service, e-book purchases and new features found in
Windows XP. The bureaucrats of McAfee and Starbucks, who cooperate with the MS
bureaucrats, use the MS Passport program to authenticate some of their services
and goods, offered over the Web.
The amended filing of the privacy organizations focused on changes the MS
bureaucrats made to Passport in response to the original complaint of those
organizations, which was concentrated on violation of privacy in the Kids
Passport program. Based on a review conducted by the Center for Media Education
(CME), the members of privacy organizations concluded that Kids Passport does
not comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Gabriela Schneider, policy analyst for the CME, argued that, "the Kids Passport
system is not providing the same or greater protection for children as mandated
by the FTC."
The members of CME also concluded that the policy of MS bureaucrats, implemented
in the Kids Passport, requires the collection of more personal information than
is necessary for children. The members of CME argued that, "gathering their
[children] e-mail address and sometimes prompting them to sign up for a Hotmail
address, when the parents' e-mail address is already collected for the
registration of the Kids' Passport," is excessive and unnecessary.
Although the majority of the programmers are not convinced by those allegations
that the MS Passport program is any worse than the same kind of programs
implemented by other companies and say that the MS bureaucrats are not asking
for any more information than any other sites, the political bureaucrats can use
those allegation to sway the majority of the commoners on their own side.
This can happen because of the fear of commoners about their online privacy and
easiness with which their private information could be shared by the corporate
bureaucrats. The fear can prevail despite the fact that the traditional sharing
of personal information of customers by the corporate bureaucrats (such as the
bureaucrats of credit card companies who sell without notice your address to
third-party marketers) is potentially more damaging to the average consumer.
The members of privacy organizations allege that the decision of MS bureaucrats
to reduce the amount of information they collect when people sign up for a
Passport account is inadequate because an e-mail address, country, state and ZIP
code are required. However, the collection of this kind of information,
particularly e-mail addresses, is a common place in the cyberspace.
The organizations also argued in their complaint that "XP will disable certain
programs that users depend upon for privacy and security, such as the Internet
firewalls (Black Ice and ZoneAlarm). Although the complainants acknowledge
changes made to how software drivers work in Windows XP, they failed to note
that many software makers will solve or already solved compatibility issue of
their programs before the refurbished Windows XP hit the shop-counters on
October 24.
The complainants also criticized the MS bureaucrats for requiring Passport
merchants to adopt Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), which allows
Web-users define what types of information they are willing to give, as well as
whether they mind that the primary gatherer of that information would share it
with third party.
The complainants also alleged that many other privacy abuses (such as forced
Passport account sign-up through Windows XP, product activation, and customer
profiling) would follow the release of Windows XP.
It is necessary to note that the “product activation” is largely misunderstood
because people assume that the MS bureaucrats collect personal data during the
process, but they do not. During the installation and registration process of a
MS product, optional registration follows product activation. But because “this”
follows “that” does not necessary mean that “that” is the cause of “this”. The
separate process of product activation does not required your name and address,
but such information is required during the registration of a MS program because
the MS bureaucrats must know this information in order to inform you about
future upgrades.
The majority of programmers think the MS bureaucrats actually have broad
incentive to ensure consumers' privacy, because their HailStorm envisioned to
abandon the ad-driven Web (with its myriad of merchants who have incentive to
collect and profit indirectly from personal data) and to focus on the directly
paid services.
The top-ranking MS bureaucrats believe the privacy assurance and delivery of
data and services to any kind of device will make HailStorm
successful-profitable for them and their partners.
If the MS bureaucrats want the public were paying them money for their services,
then, that would be the best guarantee of privacy that the majority wishes to
have; because, if somebody violates my privacy, I will immediately turn my money
around and buy a competing service. However, this is probably not the case,
because the MS bureaucrats have got tons of paper money and now want some real
power -- want to dictate the bureaucrats of other corporations, industries, and
even Feds how high they must jump.
8/24/01
While the dust of the DOT-COM fever begins to settle down and the bull market
is sobering under the pressure of bears, some intellectuals still think that we
are living in the Information Age, when intellectual property is almost
everything and physical property is just annoying mud. Therefore, they believe
that the software and computing operating systems are the heart and brain of our
industrial power, and therefore, we rightly should award such people as Bill
Gates with a lion share of profits out of our national product; otherwise, that
heart and brain would go astray, leaving behind the stubborn hands and legs. If
Mr. Gates believes that the brain can breathe and walk for a long time without
lungs and legs, and therefore, he can take without fight and indefinitely long
the unusually high profits, leaving other members of the upper class with
unusually low profits, then, he is a hopeless optimist who lives in his virtual
world; but in this world, he will not last for long.
However, until now, Mr. Gates has been building his empire on a more firm ground
than that one, which is acceptable by its face value to those intellectual
romantics. From the start of his carrier, Mr. Gates conceived his computer
operating systems (MS-DOS and Windows) as to be industry standards, but the keys
of those standards would be in Mr. Gates’ packet, and therefore, everyone would
pay a surcharge to Bill for using that door-window. And Gates understood it too
well from the beginning. As he told to a Playboy interviewer who asked him --
why he is a software-maker and not a hardware-maker -- "When you have the
microprocessor doubling in power every two years, in a sense you can think of
computer power as almost free. So you ask, why be in the business of making
something that's almost free? What is the scarce resource? What is it that
limits being able to get value out of that infinite computing power? Software.
Another way to look at it is that I just understood a lot more about software
than I did about hardware, so I was sticking to what I knew well -- and that
turned out to be something important."
However, where Mr. Gates used to use the word “important,” the commoners usually
use either the word “interest” or the word “profits”. Indeed, Gates has been
cunning like Mr. Scrooge in hiding his trade secrets and ruthless like Mr.
Rockefeller while cutting down and co-opting his competitors. And just as the
upper class wanted to break up Rockefeller's Standard Oil without breaking the
generic right of the upper class on the nation’s surplus product, so they seek
to dismantle Gates' Microsoft Corporation. They broke up Standard Oil
Corporation but paid to Mr. Rockefeller four times the nominal value of that
corporation, thus, feeding the wolves and preserving the sheep. Now the question
is – how much redemption money are they willing to pay for the monopoly key of
Mr. Gates?
Make no mistake. Microsoft Corporation will be broken. The question is – when?
And that depends on how much the aristocrats as a class can garner from the
commoners and laborers in order to pay out for breaking Mr. Gates’ team.
With the present computing hardware and software, every home might be not only a
learning and trading post but it also might be an entertainment center; and that
is potentially a trillion dollar market. Gates began his business out of a
simple idea that crystallized out of his murky longing for power -- to find the
bottle-neck of the social energy flow, to erect gates over there, and to keep
keys of those gates to himself. Implementing this idea, Bill Gates used
rationally his workers and kept them from fleeing to other software
manufacturers by sharing the wealth through lavish stock options. He was not the
first to try this internal tactic, but no one had shared the profits with
friends and co-workers on such a large scale. After being only two decades in
business, the Microsoft’s roster had more than twenty thousand millionaires, who
became the skeleton of Microsoft bureaucratic team -- magnates and masters of
industry, the ones who integrate it and bring it to fullest fruition. Such
mega-success was, is, and always will be many different things to the captains
of other, not so successful, industries. To some -- they are role models and
computer-wizards who promise that democratic capitalism nurtures a meritocracy
of the naturally talented, to others -- the generous to friends and ruthless to
foes, like the Rockefellers and Capones. But to the majority of commoners and
laborers -- they are evil incarnate, representatives of all that is wrong in our
system, which is not preventing but even deepening the economic disparity
between the social top and bottom by promoting the parasitic, monopolistic
thriving in certain areas of social life.
Friends and colleagues praise Gates' ability to "parallel processing, unlimited
bandwidth and multitasking”. They are ecstatic about his ability to work on two
computers at once in his office at Redmond, Washington, where he sequences data
coming in one computer from the Internet, while with the other -- handles the
hundreds of daily e-mail messages, through which he keeps in touch with
employees and friends. According to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer (a former
Harvard classmate who graduated, but Bill didn't, and whom Bill lured onto his
team in 1980 from Procter & Gamble), even Bill's famously contentious style is a
positive, because, "Conflict can be a good thing. The difference from P & G is
striking. Politeness was at a premium there. Bill knows it is important to avoid
that gentle civility that keeps you from getting to the heart of an issue
quickly. He likes it when anyone, even a junior employee, challenges him, and
you know he respects you when he starts shouting back."
Other colleagues joke that his Operating System (OS) is a fair representative of
his mind and has many of his problem-solving capacities. Mr. Gates goes along
with own cult, partially because he is so heavily invested in Microsoft
Corporation and his wealth at any given moment is tied intimately to the share
price of Microsoft stock. Thus, in 1996, when the surge of the DOT-COMs began
and Microsoft’s stock jumped by 88 percent, Gates’ personal wealth increased by
nearly $11 billion, or about $30 million a day. Gates was squeezing out of the
Americans and the people of other national allegiances nearly $350 a second and
might buy a brand new car every minute. However, when the love affair with the
DOT-COMs became fading in past year, Gates lost nearly $32 billions and became
the second richest man on the earth. Marring and settling down, Gates built a
40,000 square foot home outside Seattle, which has the vaulted garage that can
shelter 30 cars and from which Mr. Gates can overlook Lake Washington. Extremely
modern, this house is a fair reflection of its owner – simple in appearance but
extremely utilitarian inside. Under the influence of his wife, Melinda, Bill
became softer and more philanthropic. Through a foundation run by Bill's father,
the Gates have donated billions of dollars, mostly for education, libraries, and
public health. Thus, in 1999, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation granted
nearly $950 million for vaccines against preventable diseases and $1 billion to
fund the Gates Millennium Scholars program, to enhance minority access to higher
education. In 2000, the Gates foundation's assets topped $22 billion and it gave
away almost $1 billion.
This year, the Bill and Melinda Gates are going to donate $100 million to a
United Nations (UN) health fund for the AIDS research because they think that
improving health of the world population is key to poverty reduction, Of 36
million people infected with HIV around the world, 26 million live in Africa. It
was assumed that, on our planet, 23 million people have died from the virus,
including 17 million in sub-Saharan Africa alone. However, at a UN conference on
poverty last month, EU countries stepped back from donating money to the fund,
arguing there were not enough guarantees yet that the money would be spent
correctly. They argued that it would be the same as to increase funding in
public education in New York City, where the 84% of school funds spent on the
bureaucracy and only 16% -- on the teachers and students. Paul Nielson, the EU's
development commissioner, argued that the fund needed to broaden its approach to
include other diseases, including tuberculosis and malaria, and to provide
cheaper drugs for poorer countries. So far, the US and France have been the only
large donor countries to have contributed to the global fund, giving $200
million and $135 million respectively. Nevertheless, the Gates have donated in
the past five years $750 million to an AIDS research, in hope to boost global
immunization efforts and to search new medicine.
However, the total amount of the Gates’ donations for each year of the past five
years was precisely one tenth of what Bill has been squeezing the Americans out.
Probably like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates promised to God the tithe, but no more.
You probably already noticed that the upper class ideologists usually ascribed
to God their own collective jealousies. However, not so smart aristocrats
sometimes call these things by their first name, without alluding to something
else. Thus, Rob Glaser (a former Microsoft executive who left this team for the
RealAudio team, to run an Internet sound system company) has called his former
boss -- "Darwinist”. Deciphering Bill’s nickname, Mr. Glaser has continued, “He
[Bill Gates] does not look for win-win situations with others, but for ways to
make others lose. He defines success as flattening the competition, not
creating excellence. Thanks to Bill's contentious style, the atmosphere among
the Microsoft teammates was like a Machiavellian poker game where you would hide
things even if it would blindside people you were supposed to be working with."
Many people in Silicon Valley assert that the Microsoft bureaucrats use "their
existing monopoly to retard introduction of new technology." The charge that
Gates and his team are rather evolutionaries than revolutionaries is common
among the direct competitors of Mr. Gates, among those who manage the
cutting-edge high-tech companies. Consequently, because of God’s and the rest of
the aristocrats’ jealousy, Bill Gates and the Microsoft team had been for most
of the 1990s under constant legal bombardment and a lengthy and inclusive
investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. That verbal assault was
materialized into the antitrust suit filed by the federal and several state
Departments of Justice (DoJ) that led to a federal district judge’s (Jackson)
order to break up the company.
For good measure, any rich guy might be charged with the same crime. The
Rothschilds and Rockefellers invented neither the economic bureaucracy nor even
the gasoline-powered engine; rather, they mastered own fortunes by being the
better keepers of what their ancestors had managed to steal and to rob from
other people; and that we usually call "the principle capital". Then, directing
the principle capital to acquire an invention of other people and making
monopolistic use and abuse out of it by thoroughly guarding that invention from
other people (including its real inventors), the proprietors organize their
"lawfully acquired" property in such an order as to perpetuate their own
dominance in that territory or industry. And in this sense, the new digital era
is no better or worse then were the previous ones. And probably that is why
Gates’ immediate rivals seem to be mean in attacking the man, his products, and
his commandos.
Thus, once, Borland CEO, Philippe Kahn compared Microsoft to Germany under
Hitler; another time, he likened Microsoft's Windows system to HIV-virus.
Concurring with him, Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor declared that Microsoft's
dominance had turned the software industry into "the kingdom of the dead."
Apparently the most antagonistic of Gates’ many competitors, Oracle CEO, Larry
Ellison told a May 1998 Harvard computer conference that the Microsoft's way of
business was "patently illegal ... more blatant than anything Rockefeller ever
did". Moreover, Mr. Ellison accused Mr. Gates of "lying" about Microsoft's
record of innovation. Evenhandedly, probably that is why Oracle bureaucrats also
hired the private detectives of Investigative Group International to dig up dirt
on their rivals of Microsoft, literally going through the trash of the latter.
In present-day cyberspace, using a latest Microsoft OS and Internet Explorer
(IE), we can easily find Web sites with names like HateBillGates.com, the
Microsoft Hate Page, Punch Bill Gates, Boycott Microsoft, and the Bill Gates
Wealth Clock. The keepers of the latter track Gates’ gross worth by seconds,
based on the 141,159,990 shares of Microsoft he owned as of 1995, and for splits
in 1996, 1998, and 1999. As of today, the Microsoft share price is sitting
around $65; consequently, Bill Gates is worth about $73 billion. If anyone
missed the bigger picture, the site-keepers remarked, that "If you want to know
what God thinks about money, just look at he people He gives it to." And we are
going to do just that.
Birth of Gates' Monopoly
Gates Sr. has been a prominent and wealthy attorney in Seattle, and his wife
(Bill's mother) has been a childhood friend of Meg Greenfield, the longtime
editorial-page editor of the Washington Post. That is why the couple managed to
put Bill through the fashionable and academically rigorous Lakeside School,
where he and his friend (Paul Allen) stumbled upon a fossilized school terminal
bought with the proceeds from a Mothers' Club cookie sale and where they got the
first taste of computing power. Being eighth graders and learning the BASIC
computer language, two friends had produced their first program in 1968. Soon,
by evenings, they were debugging a computer for a Seattle company, getting their
spare change. Being a tenth grader, Bill wrote a scheduling program for Lakeside
School. By this time, Bill and his friends (Paul Allen and Kent Evans) were
contracted to write a payroll program for a local firm and to analyze the
traffic data for the City of Seattle.
In 1973, Bill graduated from Lakeside School and moved to Harvard, while Allen
went to work for Honeywell and Evans died in a mountain-climbing accident. Two
years later, the moment of Microsoft's conception occurred. This event enshrined
in the corporate mythology as follows. Paul drifted to the East to be near his
computer pal. One day, he stumbled on an issue of Popular Electronics magazine
with a cover of the Altair 8800 of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
(MITS), a primitive and capricious computer that promised to be the first
personal computer. Paul shouted at Bill -- "It's about to begin!" Thereafter,
Bill and Paul were busy writing a program for the Altair. In February 1, 1975,
they sold it to MITS, their first customer. Thereafter, Bill became Harvard's
most famous dropout, and the friends moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the
headquarters of MITS were.
Soon, the conception of Microsoft followed. First, it was thought to be a branch
of MITS, and therefore, was spelled as Micro-soft, which finished its first year
with three employees and $16,005 in revenues. However, Bill and Paul were still
hesitating, trying to resolve the fundamental question -- what part of the
computing business they were going to be in. Paul had favored a combination of
software and hardware, because all the computing giants of the time were in
pursuit of hardware. Bill, on the other hand, wanted to do only software,
because he assumed that the microprocessor doubling in power every two years,
thus, making hardware as almost free. However, Bill got into this business
because he longed for money, power, and social success, and his desire
prevailed.
By 1980, Gates and Allen moved their headquarters to the State of Washington,
and Microsoft became a 40-person team, generating about $7.5 million in
revenues. In one year, the firm had grown up to the company, which had three
times as many employees and more than double the revenue. In that year, the IBM
bureaucrats employed the Microsoft team to develop software for their new
Personal Computer (PC). They enticed Gates and Allen to improve their 16-bit
malfunctioning brain inside, so-called Disk Operating System (DOS), by giving it
away to Microsoft. Receiving the sole right on DOS, Gates and Allen renamed it
into MS-DOS and began to license it to other companies and individuals. As Gates
put it, "We wanted to make sure only we could license it. We did the deal with
them [the IBM bureaucrats] at a fairly low price, hoping that would help
popularize it... We knew hat good IBM products were usually cloned, so it
didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that eventually we would license
DOS to others. We knew that if we were going to make a lot of money on DOS, it
was going come from the compatible guys, not from IBM." Thus, Mr. Gates' train
had started to accelerate.
In the early 1980s, after a bout with Hodgkin's disease, Allen left Microsoft
and became a venture capitalist, a sports team owner, and the founder of a
rock-and-roll museum. Meanwhile, Gates and the rest of the Microsoft team, given
an enormous leg up by the IBM bureaucrats’ failure to take advantage of their
own operating system, were making a lot of money.
By the mid-1980s, the Microsoft team had won the personal-computer operating
systems battle, and turned its attention toward dominating the "office suite"
market that combined the word, spreadsheet, and graphic processing. Each new
conquest further engrained MS-DOS (which later became Windows) as the industry
standard. Thus, under an agreement with the IBM bureaucrats, which some would
deride as the "computer tax," all manufacturers IBM personal computer clones had
to pay Microsoft a royalty on every computer shipped, whether or not the machine
was equipped with MS-DOS. Revenues for 1985 stood at over $140 million, more
than nine times what they had been when the company's operating system was first
introduced. The next year, the company went public, at $21 a share with the
price rising to $28 by the end of the trading day. Fifteen years later, one of
those original shares was worth about $10,000, adjusting for stock splits.
So, Bill Gates might be fairly described as an ultra-successful entrepreneur who
knew how to turn technological innovations of others into his own commercial,
and therefore, social success.
Capitalizing in Cyberspace
Since the 1960s, when the bureaucrats of the DoD's Advanced Research Projects
Agency had authorized an experiment in networking, known as the Arpanet, there
was a parallel movement in the development of computing industry that was led by
Bob Kahn and others. As the Arpanet evolved into the Internet, the digital
interconnection of the world's bureaucracy was launched. It brought many new
economic and political opportunities for the knowledgeable, particularly, for
Bill Gates, whose understanding of being on top means to make certain that the
vast majority of computer users would go into cyberspace using Microsoft
products, the keys of which would be "naturally" in the packet of Mr. Gates and
Co. And Microsoft Corporation has plenty of cash reserves to afford some
temporary losses while killing the competitors by drying up their bottom lines.
By making certain that Microsoft's IE would never fly far from its basic OS, Mr.
Gates wants to be sure that the users of Microsoft's products would spend the
lion share of their computing resources onto the Microsoft's products. That is
why he bundled the IE with Windows and created the Microsoft Network (MSN) in
1995. Within its first three months, MSN bureaucrats had managed to enrolled
more than half a million users. Thereafter, what was the most popular PC OS
became the most popular Web exploration software. By the turn of the millennium,
the influence of the Microsoft bureaucrats would permeate all over the Internet
and intranets, and into multimedia, on-line magazine publishing, Web TV, and
just about every neck of the wood. However, such omnipresence would be precisely
what drives the rest of the upper class crazy, because their own talents and
ambitions were about to be wasted.
Just as had been the case with Rockefeller's Standard Oil nine decades earlier,
the political bureaucrats of the DoJ and courts appeared unable to slow down the
Microsoft economic bureaucrats. A year ago, Judge Jackson had ruled against
Microsoft in the antitrust case, based his decision on such facts as -- in
February 1999, the Internet fact gatherers of Stat Market reported that the
Microsoft IE was being used by nearly 65 percent of all Net surfers worldwide,
but one year later, more than 86 percent of global surfers were using the IE.
Moreover, 93 percent of global Net surfers were also using a Microsoft licensed
Windows OS,
Internet Browser
Despite Judge Jackson's decision, Mr. Gates is enhancing and expanding the use
of his instant messaging software, a move he believes could give him dominance
over his rivals from the AOL and Yahoo. Mr. Gates said recently his Windows
Messenger would support the ability to send audio and video across the Internet,
allowing users to share documents and even giving them access to other PCs.
Windows Messenger will be included with the XP Windows system scheduled for
release in October.
Mr. Gates raised the stakes in tense negotiations with Mr. Chase of AOL-Time
Warner, announcing that the next version of Windows will include a built-in
suite of instant-messaging applications. The real-time communications feature
will be included in the Windows XP operating system, posing a fresh challenge to
the AOL-Time Warner’s popular messenger. Mr. Gates said his Windows Messenger
feature would unify existing technologies that allow Internet users to “chat” in
real time, using text, voice or video-conferencing. “We think this is really a
whole new communications category -- it’s the unification of not just instant
messaging, but voice, audio and video collaboration,” said Greg Sullivan, the
manager for Windows XP. “The real focus here is on making it easy so that
everybody can actually get it to work, improving the quality and basing it on
standards.” Real-time messaging also is a key part of Microsoft’s vision for
Hailstorm, a recently announced set of technologies intended to allow Web
communications over a wide range of devices -- not just PCs.
What’s up, doc?
To Mr. Gates’ enemies, Windows Messenger sounds a lot like a replay of the
Microsoft’s successful play to gain dominance of the Internet browser market at
the expense of former market leader Netscape -- a strategy that was described as
an illegal abuse of monopoly power by Judge Jackson. To remedy the antitrust
violation, Jackson ordered Microsoft broken in two, but the effect of his order
has been postponed pending a ruling on the Microsoft’s appeal, which is expected
by the dusk of this summer.
Microsoft’s antitrust defense always has been built on what the bureaucrats of
this corporation see as their absolute right to add any new features to Windows
as long as they arguably benefit consumers. There is nothing new about providing
communications technologies as a part of Windows. The current Windows ME
operating system, for example, includes the Microsoft’s MSN Messenger – an
instant-messaging tool along with less commonly used features allowing for
virtual meetings and PC-based phone calls.
Ed Black, president of a Washington-based Computer and Communications Industry
Association, the majority of members of which usually oppose the bureaucrats of
Microsoft Corporation, sees something more insidious at work, comparing the move
to the way Mr. Gates and his team used their OS as a lever to overcome the
dominance of the Netscape’s browser and to take control over the browser market.
As Mr. Black eloquently put it, “It is the same basic pattern and practice of
bolting products and, increasingly, services to a monopoly product. We are
convinced it is highly anticompetitive and illegal in violation of antitrust
laws. It is exactly the kind of misuse of monopoly power that was at the heart
of creating the antitrust laws. The goal is for products to compete on the
merits and not on the basis of dominance of another market.”
Mr. Gates has been waging a trade-war against Mr. Chase of AOL over instant
messaging since at least 1998, when a very public fight between the two
corporate bureaucracies over standards focused broad attention on the explosive
popularity of the young communications medium. For several months, the two
corporate teams played a high-tech game of hide-and-seek as Microsoft attempted
to make its MSN Messenger service work with the far more popular AOL Instant
Messenger.
The AOL bureaucrats managed to freeze out the MSN customers, and since then the
Microsoft bureaucrats have focused on the creation of a standard that would
allow users of MSN Messenger to communicate with users of similar services such
as Yahoo! Messenger. The AOL bureaucrats, however, have not agreed to support
the standard. That is a major stumbling block because the company controls 70
percent of the market through its two messaging services, according to the
analysts of Jupiter Media Metrix, who estimate that more than 50 million
Americans do some type of instant messaging each month. Just two years ago, 110
sites controlled users’ time. Now it is down to 14, with four of them accounting
for 50 percent of all online minutes.
According to a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst, David Card, mergers, acquisitions
and closings of many DOT-COMs and aggressive cross-promotion are reasons behind
a “dramatic concentration” of how people spend their time online. Moreover, more
than half of all time spent online centers around just four companies – AOL-Time
Warner, Yahoo, Microsoft-NBC and Napster sites. Taking into consideration that
Napster will be out of this league by the end of this year, there will be only
three competitors on this market. More than one-third of the total time that
people spent online, they spent it through the outlets of AOL-Time Warner, the
proprietary service that has 29 million subscribers and other online services
and Web sites.
Consolidation is a normal part of any industry and the DOT-COM crash has
resulted in hundreds of sites either closing their doors or being swallowed by
the bigger fish. However, the population of the Web surfers becomes larger,
younger and less sophisticated, thus, tending to congregate around a handful of
sites, which can be easily found and navigated. Therefore, almost one-third of
online adults visit now 10 or fewer sites a month, according to the analysts of
Jupiter. A vice president of Starcom MediaVest Group, Mr. Tobaccowala put it as
follows, “The more time you spent online you go to fewer places and that
reinforces consolidations [of those corporate sites].” Furthermore, the
bureaucrats of the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are also increasingly
doing everything they can to keep customers within their own networks of sites.
It is somewhat similar to television where, despite having hundreds of TV
networks to choose from, people typically watch only about six different
channels.
In its first quarter earnings report, Yahoo president, Jeff Mallet noted that
his prime focus is keeping the 67 million registered Yahoo users happy and
within the Yahoo pages. Bolstering his self-promotional strategy, Mr. Mallet
said that the time spent within the Yahoo site increased an average of 80
minutes a month in April 2000 to 120 minutes in December.
Talks between the bureaucrats of AOL and Microsoft were turned off late last
week but now on again. The instant messaging is one of the main issues of
contention along with the fate of two competing technologies for playing audio
and video over the Internet -- one from Microsoft and one from RealNetworks,
which aligns with AOL. As a deadline approaches for final changes to Windows XP,
Mr. Gates said that his team is still at odds with Mr. Chase’s team. Even though
the system is scheduled to go on sale October 25, final code changes probably
have to be made at least six to eight weeks earlier.
Some analysts say that while the move of Mr. Gates on instant messaging
inevitably will raise eyebrows, his corporate team is probably on solid legal
ground, with the imminent appeals court ruling expected to go in his favor. As
Mr. Barnicle, an analyst for Pacific Crest Securities, noted: “There is nothing
illegal about being a monopolist. As long as Mr. Gates deals fairly with his
competitors, they will have a hard time making an antitrust case out of the
instant-messaging battle. But an agreement with AOL would provide some extra
insurance. It would mitigate a lot of the antitrust concerns.”
Not only that, but Mr. Gates’ competitors will be hard-pressed to prove in the
court of law the harm to consumers from a technology seen by some as a leap
forward in hard-to-use Internet tools like videoconferencing. The harmful effect
of Mr. Gates’ team’s activity on consumers will be hard to prove because,
politics-as-usual, the Microsoft bureaucrats are building support for their
efforts by tying their Internet Messenger with a Windows platform onto which
outside developers can build new applications, thus, tying them to it and making
them the proponents of the Win OS and the ardent fans of the Gates’ team.
Evolving System
As it had been with Standard Oil, the political and economic bureaucrats, as the
entire upper class, did not wanted to brake their own "right" onto the national
surplus product while depriving John D. Rockefeller of his monopolistic capital.
Therefore, the supreme court bureaucrats stroke a balance -- they ordered to pay
Mr. Rockefeller thrice of the face value of his shares, knowing that this would
soon be gone due to inflation and the nature of money that is not a capital,
with which the lower classes might be exploited.
In our time, the class of bureaucrats wants the same, but the masses became more
sophisticated -- they also learned one or two tricks of their own in order to
control the distribution of the national surplus. Although the economic
bureaucrats are pressuring the political ones to break the Microsoft team, the
political bureaucrats fear to lose their authority for paying either too much or
too little redemption money to Bill Gates. So, what it's gonna be?
According to the compilers of Computer Industry Almanac, 350 million people
globally are expected to be using the Internet at the end of this year. A year
ago, about 43 percent of all Internet users were Americans; by 2005, they will
consist only 28 percent of all 765 million people around the globe who will use
the Internet habitually. As the Web is spreading exponentially, opportunity to
exploit the alien lower classes is spreading with it. The economic bureaucrats
of Microsoft, AOL, Macintosh, Lotus, Netscape, and legion of others had all
played a role in launching the ultimate money making machine such as the world
had never known before. The global bureaucracy is coming!
But for now, the Americans, while they are still Americans, stay before one
dilemma -- who they will pay for the access keys to the Internet? To the
national bureaucracy as a whole or to a particular economic bureaucrat such as
Bill Gates? That is the trillion-dollar question, which will be soon decided --
if not in the courts of law, then, at the public squares.
6/5/01
On Monday, April 3, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that
the Microsoft Corporation, a software maker, violated the Sherman
(anti-monopoly) Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1 and 2. In May 1998, the Justice Department
and the attorney generals of 19 states sued Microsoft alleging the corporation
had leveraged its Window monopoly to crush a threat by rival Netscape
Communications. According to the Justice Department, Microsoft set out to squash
Netscape by illegally using strong-arm tactics, from exclusionary contracts with
computer makers and Internet service providers to rigging Microsoft software so
it would not work with competing products. The illegality of Microsoft’s conduct
consists in tying its Web browser to the Windows operating system in order to
crush rival Netscape Corporation and its Web browser.
Microsoft’s bureaucrats obviously disagreed with the judge, saying that they
would appeal. The rival economic and political bureaucrats however, applauded
Jackson's ruling. The attorney generals of the 19 states and federal attorney
general Janet Reno are very pleased with Jackson's ruling. Janet Reno said
Microsoft "has been held accountable for its illegal conduct by a court of law;"
consequently, "consumers who have been harmed can now look forward to benefits."
In his turn, a plaintiff of the federal bureaucracy in the lawsuit, assistant
attorney general Joel Klein stated: "We are very pleased with the court's
ruling… The decision will benefit consumers and stimulate competition in the
high-tech industry. "
Keep the above-mentioned statement in mind. The goal of the political
bureaucrats is – to benefit us, consumers, through stimulating competition in
the high-tech industry. You will shortly see how this goal has been implemented
so far.
The April of 2000 landmark ruling is the second of three decisions that will
be made by the court of lower instance in this case. In November of 1999, the
judge issued an initial ruling, finding that Microsoft does in fact have a
monopoly over the Intel compatible Personal Computer Operating System (Intl OS).
Microsoft has wielded its tremendous power to bully competitors and stifle
innovation wherever it sensed a potential threat to its monopoly in the Intl OS
market.
In that ruling, Jackson found in favor of nearly every one of the political
bureaucrats' allegations. The gist of Jackson’s first ruling was -- "Microsoft
also engaged in a concerted series of actions designed to protect the
applications barrier to entry, and hence its monopoly power, from a variety of
middle-ware threats including Netscape's Web browser and Sun Microsystems’s
implementation of Java."
The "applications barrier to entry" means the application profitability
threshold to enter a piece of software in its relevant market. There is a
certain amount of expenses, above which the software developers cannot usually
transcend without unbearable sacrifices. The "middle-ware" refers to
cross-platform software, such as Sun’s Java technology, that can increase speed
and make it cheaper to port other programs, which are working on top of an
operating system (OS). The OS is the primary program that starts your computer,
such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, OS2, etc.
The judge also ruled that Microsoft's decision to make the Internet Explorer Web
browser part of the operating system had no business or technological reason
other than keeping Netscape from profiting from its Navigator Web browser.
Since that ruling, both sides engaged in intense negotiations under the guidance
of U.S. District Judge Richard Posner of Chicago. The latter finished the
negotiations, saying the differences between the two sides were "too deep-seated
to be bridged." Then Jackson had delayed for ten days his second ruling, giving
the sides another chance for amicable reconciliation. However, after the
collapse of negotiations, he decided to release his second decision that
essentially decides how the law applies to the facts established in the first
ruling.
In his "conclusions of law," Jackson wrote that Microsoft used "predatory acts"
to prevent for several years (and perhaps permanently) Netscape's Navigator and
Sun Microsystems' Java "from fulfilling their potential to open" the Intl OS
market to competition on the merits of their products. The "predatory"
competition tries to complete the total elimination of a competing product in
its market.
Jackson wrote:
"Because Microsoft achieved this result through exclusionary acts
that lacked pro-competitive justification, the court deems Microsoft's conduct
the maintenance of monopoly power by anti-competitive means… Only when the
separate categories of conduct are viewed, as they should be, as a single,
well-coordinated course of action does the full extent of the violence that
Microsoft has done to the competitive process reveal itself… In essence,
Microsoft mounted a deliberate assault upon entrepreneurial efforts that, left
to rise or fall on their own merits, could well have enabled the introduction of
competition into the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems… While the
evidence does not prove that they would have succeeded absent Microsoft's
actions, it does reveal that Microsoft placed an oppressive thumb on the scale
of competitive fortune, thereby effectively guaranteeing its continued dominance
in the relevant market."
The judge ruled that Microsoft used illegal measures to protect its dominance in
the Intl OS market, illegally increasing expenses for Netscape, Sun
Microsystems, Apple Computer and others, that prevented them from improving
their products, thus harming consumers.
Microsoft illegally made its Web browser non-removable from Windows. At first
glance, Microsoft apparently gives its browser away for free and it apparently
benefits consumers. At a second glance however, Microsoft includes the price of
its browser in the price of its OS. Consequently, the consumers lose in the Intl
OS market what they gain in the browser market. Moreover, trying to save its
monopoly in the Intl OS market, Microsoft is using its economical power to keep
Netscape from making a living in the Web browser market. Eliminating its
competitors in the browser market, Microsoft enjoys the lack of competition in
the Intl OS market and can afford to keep the prices of its Windows and Office
products stable while decelerating the qualitative development of these
products. Jackson concluded that this elimination of competition in both markets
came at an additional price to consumers.
Jackson wrote:
"The fact that Microsoft ostensibly priced Internet Explorer at
zero does not detract from the conclusion that consumers were forced to pay, one
way or another, for the browser along with Windows... Despite Microsoft's
assertion that the Internet Explorer technologies are not 'purchased' since they
are included in a single royalty price paid by [the computer makers -- OEMs] for
Windows 98 … it is nevertheless clear that licensees, including consumers, are
forced to take, and pay for, the entire package of software and that any value
to be ascribed to Internet Explorer is built into this single price."
Jackson ruled one charge in favor of Microsoft -- the charge of "foreclosing
Netscape from the Web browser market" or of shutting off Netscape's ability to
distribute its Web browser.
Jackson said that despite the fact that Microsoft's exclusionary agreements with
the computer makers (OEMs) and the Internet Access, Service, and Content
Providers (IAP, ISP, and ICPs) were directed to exclude Netscape from its
potential market, the latter still enjoy more than 40 percent of the browser
market. Although those Microsoft deals were anti-competitive and deprived
Netscape from the most effective distributive channels, they "did not ultimately
deprive Netscape of the ability to have access to every PC user worldwide to
offer an opportunity to install Navigator. Navigator can be downloaded from the
Internet. It is available through myriad retail channels. It can (and has been)
mailed directly to an unlimited number of households." Because Microsoft did not
manage to acquire more than the 60% of the browser market share, the judge
stated that the legal precedents would not allow him to rule in favor of the
government on this instance. However, Jackson stated that his ruling in the
favor of the economical bureaucrats in this case did not lessen his other
findings against Microsoft.
The plaintiffs charge that Microsoft has waged an unlawful campaign in defense
of its monopoly position in the Intl OS market. Specifically, the plaintiffs
contend that Microsoft violated §2 of the anti-trust law by engaging in a series
of exclusionary, anti-competitive, and predatory acts to maintain its monopoly
power. They also assert that Microsoft attempted to violate §2, albeit
unsuccessfully to date, by monopolizing the market of Web browsers. Finally,
they contend that certain acts of Microsoft violated § 1 of the law. These
Microsoft acts were a part of its campaign to protect its monopoly power, namely
tying its browser to its OS and entering into exclusive dealing arrangements
with the major OEMs, ISPs, ICPs, and ISVs.
Jackson concluded that the bureaucrats of Microsoft maintained their monopoly
power by anti-competitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser
market, violating both paragraphs of the anti-monopoly law by unlawfully tying
their Web browser to their OS. However, he did not find enough evidence that
Microsoft's marketing arrangements with other companies constituted unlawful
exclusive dealing under criteria established by leading precedents under § 1.
The plaintiff states seek to ground liability additionally under their
respective anti-monopoly laws. Jackson found that the evidence proved violations
of the anti-monopoly law and satisfied the analogous laws of each plaintiff
state. Therefore, Microsoft is liable under those particular states' laws as
well.
Section 2 of the anti-monopoly law declares that it is unlawful for a person or
firm to "monopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce among several
states, or with foreign nations." This language operates to limit the means by
which a firm may lawfully either acquire or perpetuate monopoly power.
Specifically, a firm violates § 2 if it attains or preserves monopoly power
through anti-competitive acts. The offense of monopoly power has two elements:
1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market; and 2) the willful
acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or
development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic
accident. The monopolization doctrines directed to discrete situations in which
a defendant's possession of substantial market power, combined with his
exclusionary or anti-competitive behavior, threatens to defeat or forestall the
corrective forces of competition and thereby sustain or extend the defendant's
agglomeration of power.
The threshold element of a § 2 monopolization offense is "the possession of
monopoly power in the relevant market." Therefore, the court must first
ascertain the boundaries of the commercial activity that can be termed the
"relevant market," for without a definition of the relevant market there is no
way to measure defendant's ability to lessen or destroy competition. Then the
court must assess the defendant's actual power to control prices in that market
or to exclude competition from it, because monopoly power is technically the
power to control prices or exclude competition.
In this case, the plaintiffs postulated the relevant market as being the
worldwide licensing of Intl OS. Whether this zone of commercial activity
actually qualifies as a market, monopolization of which may be illegal, depends
on whether it includes all products that are reasonably interchangeable by
consumers for the same purposes, because the ability of consumers to turn to
other suppliers restrains a firm from raising prices above the competitive
level. Therefore, the definition of the 'relevant market' rests on a
determination of available substitutes.
Based on the evidence, Jackson found that there are currently no products (and
there are not likely to be any in the near future) that a significant percentage
of computer users worldwide could substitute for Intl OS without incurring
substantial costs. He has further found that no firm not currently marketing
Intl OS could start doing so in a way that would, within a reasonably short
period of time, present a significant percentage of such consumers with a viable
alternative to existing Intel-compatible operating systems. From these facts, he
has inferred that if a single corporation controlled the licensing of all Intl
OS worldwide, it could set the price of a license substantially above that which
would be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it would leave the price
there for a significant period without losing so many customers as to make the
action unprofitable. This inference, in turn, has led him to find that the
licensing of all Intl OS worldwide does in fact constitute the relevant market
in the context of the plaintiffs' claim that the bureaucrats of Microsoft
maintain their monopoly.
Jackson found that the plaintiffs proved that Microsoft possesses a dominant,
persistent, and increasing share of the relevant market. Microsoft's share of
the worldwide market for Intl OS currently exceeds 95% and the corporation's
share would stand well above eighty percent even if the Mac OS were included in
the market. The plaintiffs also proved that the application profitability
threshold to enter the relevant market protects Microsoft's dominant market
share. This threshold ensures that no Intl OS other than Windows can attract
significant consumer demand, and the threshold would operate to the same effect
even if Microsoft held its prices substantially above the competitive level for
a protracted period of time. Together, the proof of dominant market share and
the existence of a substantial profitability threshold to effective entry create
the presumption that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. Defendants have monopoly
power through the profitability threshold to enter the relevant market and, in
combination with the evidence of market shares, suffice at least to meet the
plaintiff's initial burden. The latter is then placed upon defendants to rebut
the existence and significance of the profitability threshold to entry.
Jackson concluded that the bureaucrats of Microsoft attempted to rebut the
presumption of their monopoly power with evidence of both putative constraints
on their ability to exercise such power and on their own behavior that is
supposedly inconsistent with the possession of monopoly power. None of the
purported constraints, however, actually deprives Microsoft of the ability to
price its products substantially above the competitive level. Microsoft also has
the ability to persist in doing so for a significant period without erosion by a
new entry on the Intl OS market or the expansion of the latter. Furthermore,
neither the effort of Microsoft's bureaucrats at technical innovation nor their
pricing behavior is inconsistent with the possession of monopoly power.
Even if the defendant rebuttal had attenuated the presumption of monopoly power,
there is plenty of corroborative evidence of Microsoft's monopoly power: Neither
Microsoft nor its OEMs believe that the latter have (or will have anytime soon)
even a single, commercially viable alternative to licensing Windows for
pre-installation on their PCs. Jackson assumes that economic agents usually have
accurate perceptions of economic realities. Moreover, for the past five years,
the bureaucrats of Microsoft have comported themselves in a way that could only
be consistent with rational behavior for a profit-maximizing corporation, as if
they knew that they possessed monopoly power and if they were motivated by a
desire to preserve the profitability threshold to enter the market of Intl OS.
The proof of Microsoft's dominant and persistent market share, protected by a
substantial profitability threshold, together with Microsoft's failure to rebut
that the plaintiffs’ showings of the defendant’s monopoly power, have compelled
judge Jackson to find as fact that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the Intl
OS market.
Once it is proven that the defendant possesses monopoly power in a relevant
market, liability for monopolization depends on a showing that the defendant
used anti-competitive methods to achieve or maintain its position. Prior cases
have established an analytical approach to determining whether challenged
conduct should be deemed anti-competitive in the context of a monopoly
maintenance claim. The pinnacle of this analysis is whether the defendant's
conduct is "exclusionary." In other words, whether he has restricted
significantly or threatens to restrict significantly the ability of others to
compete in the relevant market on the merits of their products and services.
Section 2 of the anti-monopoly law directs to discrete situations, in which the
behavior of economical bureaucrats with monopoly powers "threatens to defeat or
forestall the corrective forces of competition."
If the evidence reveals a significant exclusionary impact in the relevant
market, the defendant's conduct will be labeled "anti-competitive." Consequent
liability will be also attached, unless the defendant comes forward with
specific, pro-competitive business motivations that explain the full extent of
his exclusionary conduct. Jackson declined to grant the defendant's motion for
summary judgment because factual questions remained as to whether the
justifications of Microsoft's bureaucrats were sufficient to explain their
exclusionary conduct or were instead merely their pretense. Jackson found that
the second element of a monopoly maintenance claim was satisfied by proof of
behavior that tends to impair the opportunities of rivals and not to compete on
the merits (or does so in an unnecessarily restrictive way).
If the defendant with monopoly power consciously antagonized its customers by
making its products less attractive to them (or if it incurred other costs, such
as large outlays of development capital and forfeited opportunities to derive
revenue from it), with no prospect of compensation other than the erection or
preservation of the profitability threshold against competition by equally
efficient firms, the Court may deem that the defendant's conduct is "predatory."
Predatory practice involves aggression against business rivals through the use
of business practices that would not be considered profit maximizing except for
the expectation that actual rivals will be driven from the market, or the entry
of potential rivals blocked or delayed, so that the predator will gain or retain
a market share sufficient to command monopoly profits, or rivals will be
chastened sufficiently to abandon competitive behavior the predator finds
threatening to its realization of monopoly profits.
Proof that a profit-maximizing firm took predatory action should suffice to
demonstrate the threat of substantial exclusionary effect; to hold otherwise
would be to ascribe irrational behavior to the defendant. Moreover, predatory
conduct, by definition as well as by nature, lacks pro-competitive business
motivation. The evidence indicated that the defendant's conduct was "motivated
entirely by a decision to avoid providing any benefits" to a rival supported the
inference that defendant's conduct "was not motivated by efficiency concerns".
In other words, predatory behavior is patently anti-competitive. Proof that a
firm with monopoly power engaged in such behavior thus necessitates a finding of
liability under § 2.
In this case, Microsoft recognized relatively early that middle-ware is the
Trojan horse that, once having infiltrated the application profitability
threshold, could enable rival operating systems to enter the Intl OS market
unimpeded. Simply put, middle-ware threatened to demolish Microsoft's coveted
monopoly power. Alerted to the threat, Microsoft strove over a period of
approximately four years to prevent middle-ware technologies from fostering the
development of enough full-featured, cross-platform applications to erode the
application profitability threshold. Pursuing this goal, the bureaucrats of
Microsoft sought to convince the software developers to concentrate on the
Windows-specific Application Programming Interface (API) and ignore APIs exposed
by the cross-platform programs that posed the greatest threat (Netscape's
Navigator and Sun's Java technology). Microsoft's campaign succeeded in
preventing (for several years and perhaps permanently) Navigator and Java from
fulfilling their potential to open the market for Intl OS to competition on the
quality of their products and services. Because Microsoft achieved this result
through exclusionary acts that lacked pro-competitive justification, Jackson
deems Microsoft has conducted the maintenance of its monopoly power by
anti-competitive means.
The bureaucrats of Microsoft spent $100 million a year developing Internet
Explorer and $30 million a year marketing it. They compensated themselves
through the constant prices of their Windows OS. They decided to give their
browser away free for no valid business or technological reason other than to
keep Netscape from making a living on its product. Such a practice constitutes
predatory and anti-competitive behavior.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that his legal team is going to dispute
the ruling in the higher court. He also voiced confidence that economics would
ultimately prevail over politics.
During a news conference, Gates said: "We have a strong case on appeal." He
noticed that an earlier decision of the U.S. court of Appeals in the Microsoft
II case said that it is legal to tie the Web browser to the Windows OS.
Nonetheless, Gates failed to note that Jackson concluded his decision stating
that the earlier decisions in the Microsoft cases were not relevant in the
context of this fully-fledged anti-monopoly case.
Continuing, Gates said: "Our success has been built on innovation," and the
company's future success is directly tied to its "ability to continue to
innovate… innovation will continue to be our number one priority." Gates
reconfirmed the economical bureaucrats’ unwillingness to accept any restraints
on their ability to develop software in the way they see as "effective." Some of
us may know for whom that way is "effective." Some of us can see that the
bureaucrats of Microsoft are the richest people on this planet. However, nobody
would argue against that, if the Microsoft bureaucrats achieved their wealth
with legal means, and not at somebody’s expense.
Comparing the rapid changes in the domestic and global technology markets, Gates
noticed that, "it is clear that Microsoft and every other company must be able
to compete and innovate" if they are to be successful. However, Gates’ notion of
success implies that it is OK to violate the law in order to be innovative and
competitive.
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer said that his team of bureaucrats "would love to
continue" settlement discussion "if we saw an openness" on the part of the
political bureaucrats. Gates also alluded to the political bureaucrats, noticing
that "some parties were pushing for extreme measures that were not in anybody's
interest." The bureaucrats of Microsoft have vowed to argue their case in a
higher court. At the same time, they face more than 100 private civil
class-action lawsuits. Those suits will be piggyback riding on the findings and
conclusions of law that Jackson has issued. Jackson’s decisions allowed the
plaintiffs in those civil class-action lawsuits to start their cases while
Microsoft is found "half way there" guilty as a monopoly.
In spite of the evidence, Ballmer denied that consumers were harmed by the
anti-competitive deeds of his team, saying "we think they are misguided…
consumers have not been harmed," and those private suits "will not distract us
from appeal."
Jackson’s second decision is published on the Internet and the final phase of
the lower court trial begins. During the third stage of the case ("remedy
phase"), testimony will be heard to help judge Jackson decide how Microsoft’s
bureaucrats should be punished for their multiple crimes against their
fellow-citizens.
In this phase, which probably would last until July, both sides will make
arguments and offer witnesses to testify about what the remedy should be. The
government is expected to argue that nothing short of a "structural remedy,"
meaning the breakup of the corporation will be sufficient to prevent the
bureaucrats of Microsoft from abusing their economical power in the future. It
is expected that the bureaucrats of Microsoft will argue that any breakup of
their corporation will "stifle" innovation and "hurt" the technology industry
that has been the driver behind the country's present economic expansion.
The remedy phase will finish the case that was started nearly two years ago with
the third decision of the lower court. Throughout the trial, the bureaucrats of
Microsoft have vigorously denied the charges and said the decision to build the
Internet browser into the Windows OS was merely the result of software evolution
that offered consumer benefits. The bureaucrats of Microsoft also argued that
they do not have a monopoly because they face threats from potential competitors
lurking everywhere.
However, judge Jackson saw the real picture, and concluded that the bureaucrats
of Microsoft indeed have a monopoly in the Intl OS market, which they brandished
to crush those various potential rivals – Netscape, Sun, Apple, Real Network,
IBM, and others. Jackson added that the software giant was guilty of
anti-monopoly laws in each of the 19 states that joined the U.S. government in
the suit.
Taking into consideration the quantity of plaintiffs, their bipartisan vigor to
serve the interests of consumers, it is more probable than not that the case
will leave the lower court unresolved in its remedial part. Moreover, taking
into consideration the importance of the case to further political and
economical development of the country, it is more probable than not, the case
will go directly to the Supreme Court. If it happens in this summer, then we
will have the final solution in this case in the next summer.
Between the years of 1995-99, about 150 million PCs with preinstalled Windows OS
had been sold. The price of each Windows OS has been about $89 throughout those
years. Even if some OEMs paid $59 for each copy of the preinstalled Windows, we
can speculate that the possible remedy to the end consumers can reach about
$20-40 from each sold computer with preinstalled Windows OS. It might be amassed
to $6 billion. Take into consideration a remedy for our (consumers’) moral
damage, our sleepless nights, and our contemplation about incompatibility of our
programs – qualitatively, they can significantly overweight our material damage.
Take into consideration remedies for the material and moral damages to such
firms as Netscape and Sun Microsystems, etc. Take into consideration the clear
possibility of breaking up the present bureaucratic apparatus of Microsoft
Corporation, and you will get the entire picture of a possible outcome in this
case.
04/05/00
P.S. If you want to know more about monopoly in our politics, follow the link -- Anti-Monopoly Laws .
Victor J. Serge created this page and revised it on 04/13/03