It's rude of me to respond to this twice, of course, but I realized that going past the first Q in this interview is silly, there's a critical point to be made right there that I forgot.
IBD: Why is Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft subject to a harsher antitrust investigation than Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel?
Bittlingmayer: Microsoft has more domestic competitors (via individual software applications) than Intel. Yes, Intel faces AMD (Advanced Micro Devices Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Cyrix (Corp. of Richardson, Texas, a unit of National Semiconductor Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.), but not much more. Domestic politics favor attack of Microsoft over Intel.
Right. So, John, or anyone else who thinks Bittlingmayer has some point here, please explain. I've read here and elsewhere about the notoriously ruthless and vindictive Intel, and about how everybody is afraid to cross them. But, somehow, Compaq, the biggest PC maker, has oodles of machines for sale now with Cyrix and AMD processors. On the other hand, in the battle of the sacred icon, Compaq was pretty helpless. Remember the little power play between Citrix and Microsoft? What do you think would have happened to Compaq stock if word got out (Microsoft would never leak such a thing, of course) that maybe Compaq wasn't going to have a Windows license soon?
So, Mr. Bittlingmayer thinks that the hundreds of software vendors somehow give Microsoft real competition, but they're all a bunch of crybaby wannabe's, to recycle a favored ad hominem. It's all politics. So, where's the next software guy (aside from maybe IBM) relative to Microsoft? Where's the competition? Where was Compaq supposed to go? Where's the beef? There's this old saying I got to recycle again, democracy without capitalism is like a fish without a bicycle. What, precisely, is capitalism without competition?
Not that I expect an answer, another one of those conundrums I guess, like the duality of man.
Cheers, Dan. |
