Microsoft Monopoly? slate.com
Slate weighs in again, this time somewhat more, uh, evenhanded than last time. Back to that later, this piece is on the spin angle, e.g. it's all how you look at it.
Klein will have a hard time persuading the public that Microsoft is coercive, because the company exerts its market-share leverage subtly: It distributes IE free, negotiates with computer manufacturers to make IE the default browser on their machines, and links Windows to software and services it wants to promote. These methods allow Microsoft to argue that computer makers can add other browsers (such as Netscape's popular Navigator) and that users remain free to switch to them.
There's that pesky coercion word, it's a little odd to hear the Microsoft/OEM issue described as "subtle leverage" after the little Compaq tiff over the sacred icon, but there you go. One of those "standard Microsoft business practices" things, I guess.
But Larry Lessig, the legal scholar enlisted by the court to sort out the case, is an expert on subtle methods by which software providers can steer consumer choices. He has argued that the cyberindustry's hidden "tyranny of code" can be more pernicious than the clumsy, overreaching state. These views bode ill for Microsoft.
Hey, but he clerked for Posner! He taught at the Chicago School! He should be Bill's friend! Well, maybe not. Little too smart for his own good, perhaps.
Microsoft has used the image of its competitors' political influence to portray its own lobbying as "self-defense." Microsoft spokesmen simultaneously profess 1) "reluctance" at being forced to stoop to lobbying and 2) chagrin at having done so "belatedly." Newspapers have bought both these spins, alternately praising and criticizing Microsoft's virginity, but accepting it as a given. (For Slate's view, see Jacob Weisberg's "Dear Microsoft.")
Yeah, the press division of the ilk has been somewhat remiss in picking up my analysis on this aspect, I got to get after them about that one. Except for old Dan Gilmor at the SJMercury. Microsoft, so clever and ruthless in contracts and business, so naive in politics? Somehow, I doubt it.
Microsoft's critics point out that Windows has 90 percent of the OS market. Conversely, Microsoft points out that IE has less than 40 percent of the browser market, compared with Netscape's 60 percent. On this basis, attorney Charles (Rick) Rule, who has been retained to represent Microsoft, accuses DOJ of suing "a company with a smaller share of sales in order to protect the ability of its dominant competitor to secure an exclusive." (For Rule's views on the case see "The Case Against the Case Against Microsoft" in Slate.) But distinguishing between the two markets undermines Microsoft's thesis that IE and Windows are "integrated."
Good old Charles "Rick" Rule, now where have we seen that appelation before? Of course, in this article we get the correct name and relation to Microsoft, as opposed to the somewhat, um, incomplet bio blurb in the original. Slate ain't so bad, you know. Finally, we have:
Microsoft's argumentativeness has disastrously overshadowed its arguments. Its lawyers have sought the removal of Lessig and the judge. They've derided a government brief as proof that "poorly informed lawyers have no vocation for software design." When instructed by the judge to give computer makers an alternative to packaging IE with Windows, Microsoft made the alternatives unworkable or undesirable. This conduct has embarrassed the company's supporters and triggered an avalanche of editorials calling Microsoft rich, ruthless, sneaky, petty, arrogant, and stubborn.
Well, it doesn't seem to have embarrassed any of the company's supporters around here, I guess the local bunch just knows better what the truth is on all these matters.
Some reports indicate that this tone-deaf performance has already irked the judge and has convinced him to enjoin Microsoft's marketing practices on the grounds that the company can't be trusted to regulate itself. Even if Microsoft wins the courtroom battle, it risks losing the war for consumers' hearts and minds. The rap on nerds has always been that they're technically brilliant but socially inept. Microsoft's behavior has done little to prove otherwise.
Oh dear. That hearts and minds line too, I'm beginning to get spooked. Anyway, I wonder if Bill will have to call old Michael Kinsley in for a chat on this one, maybe acellerate that pay-per-view schedule a bit. Interesting article, I say.
Cheers, Dan. |
