Hi James, it's been a long time.
A little rhetorical excess is always good for the soul, and you're certainly among friends here. And I've no intention of hanging around, I promise. But I must repeat myself, as usual. If you don't like antitrust laws, working to get them repealed seems to me more principled than whining about how unfair it all is to the noble Bill Gates. And Mr. Gates would be somewhat more appealing as a rallying point if he could come up with a better line of defense than "Microsoft must be free to innovate" by throwing whatever the latest air supply operation requires into the Windows hairball bundle. Of course, on this point, if not on many others, Bill is being kind to those of us who suffer from the well known hobgoblin of small minds.
I think the line here when antitrust first heated up was that Microsoft would have a world class lobbying machine in control of the situation in 6 months. That was a couple of years ago, maybe it's on the Win2k development schedule.
On a vaguely more serious note, one thing to watch for is the path to the Supreme Court. There's this obscure law that says the case can go there directly, which would lead to the speediest and clearest resolution, one way or the other. If the SC wants to strike down antitrust law, they can, and I wouldn't put that outside the realm of possibility. Somehow, I don't imagine Microsoft will be pushing for that solution, but who knows? If the case continues to be litigated, I fully expect Microsoft to do their best to get the DC appeals court in the path as much as they can, while at the same time arguing about how the slow courts make the whole thing irrelevant. This consistency thing works only in limited circumstances.
Cheers, Dan. |
