"Nobody should underestimate the campaign of vilification and political gamesmanship by Microsoft's competitors that helped bring us to this week's finding that Microsoft had committed "illegal" business acts."
That was from an article in the WSJ on April 5th when Jackson ruled against Microsoft. Undoubtedly the same will apply to Jackson's impending decision today. After all, less than 24 hours is enough for the Judge to carefully examine Microsoft's input.
from "Microsoft's Real World" April 5, 2000 Review & Outlook
interactive.wsj.com
"Bill Gates rates up there with the most admired Americans in polls; the public is sophisticated enough to know that antitrust "wrongs" are fussy technicalities, not moral failings.
That said, the tedious processes of the law guaranteed that even before the case record was closed, this week's decision would be based on how the world looked to Netscape, oh, around mid-1995. We trust we won't be hurting Judge Jackson's feelings when we say the disjunction between legal time and Internet time makes his decision myopic and anachronistic in the extreme.
The judge embraces an argument about Microsoft quashing an emergent Netscape "platform" for "applications" that might have competed with Microsoft's platform/applications. He leaves the impression we've sunk into the dark ages because we don't have a Netscape word processor.
In fact there is a huge new platform for non-Microsoft applications. It's called the Web. By picking up the gantlet that Netscape threw down, Microsoft drove forward the browser technology and ubiquity that make possible the amazing things we see today. There's no way we'd be this far along if Microsoft had left development of the browser to Netscape. We'd say markets have worked fine, unless you have a reason to wish that billions of dollars had ended up in the pockets of Jim Clark and James Barksdale instead of those of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
Judge Jackson misses the forest, meadows, glades and glens by focusing on a patch of lawn. Everything he accuses Microsoft of using its "monopoly" power to stop from happening is happening, on a much larger scale, in the vast world that has popped into existence since this suit was first agitated. Instead of creating another dinky operating system or word processor, we're now in the business of creating (non-Microsoft) applications like "global auto industry" or "global access to the stock market" or "global access to books."
We don't know where it will stop, or if it will, but the IPO market of the past two years has made a mockery of the "applications barrier to entry" that so enthralls the current judicial reasoning. Every Internet company that comes down the pike is, in effect, a new application available to consumers on their desktops. These are in no way beholden to Microsoft just because Microsoft happens to build the browser that accesses them. All these new applications run on open standards (HTML, XML). Microsoft can't control them any more than GE can force you to watch Jay Leno because it makes TVs.
There has been much talk, by John McCain and others, of updating the antitrust laws to fit the information age. That won't help if the laws are employed as a political club that companies can use against their competitors or crabby forces in society can deploy against the objects of their envy.
The case record shows Microsoft doing what a Chicago School competitive "monopolist" is supposed to do. It jumped into the browser market because it saw which way things were going and knew it had to get there faster and cheaper so its customers wouldn't see any advantage in switching to somebody else. One of the original Chicago insights was that "fear of entry" could be a sufficient competitive discipline in the absence of actual direct competitors. Consumers haven't been hurt. The same overwhelming clout that Microsoft used to clobber Netscape is also responsible for pushing Web access out to millions of desktops much faster, and in a more sophisticated form, than otherwise would have been the case.
The Greek chorus missing from Judge Jackson's opinion is the chorus pointing out that Microsoft has done to itself, far more efficiently, what Netscape was threatening to do. The shift to Web computing has breathed new life into Macintosh and made Linux the operating system of choice for thousands of Web servers. And while e-commerce gets all the attention from venture capitalists, Sun Microsystems and others are betting the Web will bust open even Microsoft's lock on word processing, spreadsheets and other traditional desktop applications. In an online world, it's a natural that these applications can be more efficiently maintained, and their data more securely stored, at a central site.
Indeed, the biggest "applications barrier to entry" today isn't Microsoft's control of the desktop, but the lack of bandwidth to deliver this new cornucopia of Web applications to users. Judge Jackson's opinion lacked any cognizance of these realities.
At some point, though, somebody has to hold up the Microsoft prosecution against the real world and ask what's really going on here." |
