All Gates, all the time salonmagazine.com
Here's a choice, self contained excerpt that puts a dagger in the heart of the famous "we must be free to innovate" company line. Again, an analysis I think we'd all agree with in private, I've heard pieces of what follows expressed here by Microphiles, but of course never in the antitrust context.
The message from Microsoft -- repeated over and over again at the hearing and anywhere else Gates is visible today, like the cover of this week's Newsweek -- is, We have to innovate or we will die! The government shouldn't stop us from innovating! This mantra might be persuasive if it didn't sound an alarm for anyone who knows Microsoft's history.
Microsoft has been so often criticized for copying or buying up other people's technology, rather than developing innovations in-house, that its latest PR offensive carries a whiff of the old "lady doth protest too much." This is the company that bought its first PC operating system rather than build one from the ground up; Windows itself is still in some ways a clunky copy of the Mac operating system. It's true that today, Microsoft has vast research labs that produce their share of real innovation -- but that's not how the company won most of its battles.
"Operating systems are based on ideas, and no one owns the factory for ideas," Gates told the senators. But if you have a war chest the size of Microsoft's, you can swoop in and buy all the ideas you want. That may not be against the federal antitrust laws, but it's at the heart of the uneasiness so many people in the technology industry feel about Microsoft. In January, when the company's chief operating officer, Bob Herbold, was asked what competing software firms could do when Microsoft decided to fold a product into Windows, Herbold told Bloomberg News that they had three options: fight and lose, sell to Microsoft or "not go into the business to begin with." So much for Gates' professed concern for preserving consumer choice and dynamic, competitive markets.
That Herbold, sounds like the Maritz "cut off their air supply" quote to me. Worth recycling a few times, I'd say. Anybody from the other side want to take this on? Explain what this has to do with "free markets"? I'm not holding my breath.
Cheers, Dan. |
