What if Microsoft hadn't been a bully?
Experts agree tech landscape would be far different today
By Edward Iwata, USA TODAY
Amid the legal barrage battering Microsoft, USA
TODAY posed an intriguing scenario to Silicon
Valley and antitrust experts: What if a kinder, gentler
Microsoft had embraced - not threatened - the Suns
and Netscapes and Calderas of the world?
What if Bill Gates and his field marshals had been
conciliators and team builders, not bullies using their
monopoly to choke the competition, as the
government contended.
Technology mavens chuckled at the questions. Some
were stumped. The radical premise boggled the
brain cells of one avowed Microsoft critic.
''We can fantasize all we want, but Microsoft would
never have acted that way,'' says Mitchell Kertzman,
CEO of Liberate Technologies, an Internet software
firm in San Carlos, Calif. ''Their behavior is genetic.
They're like a great white shark that's always hungry. And they don't care
who or what they eat.''
But Kertzman agreed the digital landscape would look vastly different today
if Microsoft had behaved differently.
Chances are we'd see a more dynamic software marketplace, a larger
number of thriving high-tech firms with record revenue - even an earlier
Internet boom. ''There would be a more creative and competitive
environment everywhere,'' says Chris Le Tocq, director of research at
Gartner Group in San Jose, Calif.
More firms and products in the software galaxy.
Absent the dominance of Microsoft's Windows operating system, potentially
hundreds of new firms and thousands of new software products would be
flooding the global market.
More open standards would have jump-started computer engineers and
high-tech executives and encouraged them to design and sell an astonishing
array of desktop products.
''When you have open standards, you don't fear one vendor,'' says Ken
Wasch, president of the Software and Information Industry Association in
Washington. ''You don't have to buy all of your products from one
company.''
Many contend that Microsoft forced many smaller software firms to retreat
and specialize in niche markets and applications, including word processing,
spreadsheets, databases and presentation graphics. And many midsize
players, from Be to Sybase to Informix, might have grown into technology
behemoths in a friendlier Microsoft era.
Livelier competition among corporations in other
technology-related arenas. Critics say the Microsoft juggernaut had a
chilling effect that spread beyond the software sector, leading to inertia in
much of the closely linked high-tech world. If Microsoft had been weaker,
who knows what other sectors would have blossomed?
''When you have one strong central force such as Microsoft, there's a
tendency for everything to stay the same, for one standard to dominate
everything,'' Le Tocq says.
Industry giants Intel, Oracle and Sun Microsystems might have
enjoyed less success. The Microsoft juggernaut crushed so many smaller
rivals that it may have made business easier for Intel, the world's top chip
manufacturer, and Oracle, the No. 2 software maker on the planet, and
Sun, a leader in the server computer market.
Over the years, Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
have been among the harshest critics of the Microsoft monopoly. Ironically,
tech experts say, they also may have been among the biggest beneficiaries of
Microsoft's reign. ''In a bizarre way, one of the reasons those companies
succeeded is because Microsoft crippled their competitors,'' says Kertzman,
whose Liberate Technologies is half-owned by Oracle. ''There were a lot of
casualties in the Sun and Oracle markets.''
Meanwhile, Intel also has gained immensely from wedding its high-powered
chips with Microsoft's software in the so-called Wintel alliance.
Microsoft still would be politically brain dead. While most big
corporations play the political game with cutthroat skill, Gates and Microsoft
disdained Washington for years. Then the antitrust case slammed them.
Microsoft executives and lobbyists quickly became frequent visitors to
Capitol Hill and the White House. The tech firm gave more than $4 million in
campaign dollars last year to congressional candidates.
''With no antitrust case, Microsoft would have all the clout in Washington of
a Third World country,'' says Richard McKenzie, an economist at the
University of California at Irvine and the author of Trust on Trial: How the
Microsoft Case is Reframing the Rules of Competition.
A quicker adoption of the Internet and Web-based products. If
Microsoft had not spent a small fortune and years of legal labor fighting the
Justice Department, it could have poured billions of dollars much sooner into
online products and services.
Gates and his blue-chip crew of engineers might have focused their wizardry
much earlier on Internet computing with open standards, the wave of the
future, rather than defending their fading universe of personal computers run
by Windows software.
''Imagine what Bill Gates could have done,'' Le Tocq says, ''spending all
those years working on his first love, software development, instead of legal
battles.''
Likewise, scores of big hardware and software firms - rather than obsessing
over the Microsoft threat - might have launched their Internet strategies
months or years earlier.
A wide range of Web-based technology - from hand-held computers to cell
phones to set-top television boxes to streaming media - could have reached
consumers much sooner with Microsoft's formidable help.
The Internet-based Linux operating system, a boon to computer users and
perhaps the biggest threat to Microsoft since Netscape's browser, also
probably would have launched earlier. ''There was a whole revolution
waiting to happen, and theoretically, it could have occurred years earlier,''
says Andrew Gavil, an antitrust professor at Howard University School of
Law in Washington.
If Microsoft had been a different kind of competitor, would another hungry
monopolist have risen to rule the landscape? Unfortunately, yes, says one
computer guru.
''There would have been another predator all too eager to compete in the
same fashion,'' says Clifford Stoll, author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second
Thoughts on the Information Highway. ''I'm afraid that's the nature of
technology, the nature of the beast.''
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