Ken: It will be a cold day in Hades when the Wall Street Journal comes out in favor of an antitrust action. Bob Bartley's friends on the editorial page are royalists, after all, if they had the guts to admit it. Below you'll find the WSJ editorial from today, in which they completely take Microsoft's side, as they have all along, now agreeing that the DOJ should drop the case because of Netscape-AOL.
What your friend saw Wednesday was a New York Times editorial, not a WSJ editorial. The Times did come out that day with a very brief editorial, which I enclose also below, saying to the DOJ: don't let this new development stop you, keep going with the case.
I gotta stop doing these copyright violations. :-)
Regards,
--QwikSand
November 27, 1998
Review & Outlook
Joel Klein,
You've Got Mail
Maybe we are beginning to understand why Bill Gates was so impatient at his video deposition and why David Boies, the Justice Department's hired-gun inquisitor, was so calm. Their worlds move at very different speeds.
Twenty-four hours is enough to change Mr. Gates's life, not to mention the six weeks Justice has spent trying to pin the monopoly tail on Microsoft. We do have antitrust laws, for whatever they're worth, but this case was already showing signs of descending into a grudge match with no earthly public interest at stake. The AOL deal clinches it. Let's call this whale hunt off.
Not that we really needed AOL's purchase of Netscape to know we were moving away from the Microsoft era of personal computing. The dominance that Microsoft once enjoyed is necessarily fleeting--and was clearly so the day Apple's IMac began flying off the shelves in computer stores. You could also tell the same from all the recent talk about Linux, Unix, Red Hat and other gobbledygook that you probably don't need to look up--just know that many kinds of cars are being born and popularized that will work equally well on the information superhighway.
But wasn't that supposed to be the ne plus ultra of the Microsoft "threat"--that Microsoft would control access to the Web because it controlled the desktop?
Didn't turn out that way. Microsoft cried uncle two years ago when it relinquished the desktop to the AOL icon. For that matter, GE, Disney and thousands of Yahoo investors would hardly have bid up portal stocks if they thought Microsoft's advantage prohibitive.
Rather than Microsoft leveraging the desktop to control the Web, the Web has eroded Microsoft's control of the desktop, as any economist worth his hat size would have predicted. Much of the credit for Apple's turnaround rightly goes to Steve Jobs, who after all did take Apple by the scruff and make it deliver a machine to ride today's opportunities. But it was AOL that created those opportunities. Thousands of computer shoppers could weigh up the alternatives and decide that a Windows machine was no longer the no-brain option. The trade media sometimes likes to paint these customers as technophobic "newbies." A better description would be intelligent moms, dads, aunts, uncles and grandfolks who want to get on-line because suddenly it's a genuinely useful thing to do. The AOL-Apple combination gets them there easier.
But these are just pieces of scenery racing past the Justice Department's horse and buggy. Taking in the broad sweep of our economy, it would be hard to think of a sector that has delivered more, faster, that we never dreamed of, than the personal computer industry. Around the antitrust bar, they have been buying drinks for Justice's Joel Klein and patting him on the head, saying whatever the outcome of the Microsoft case he would be setting precedent. That's right. The precedent turns out to be that we don't have to worry about temporary positions of market power in the information technologies. Like one of those subatomic particles whose natural life is measured in nanoseconds, it will be gone by the time we catch up with it anyway.
Justice could now establish this precedent as one of posterity's glories by folding up its briefing books and going home. Despite efforts to humiliate and vilify him, Mr. Gates's poll numbers have held up as an entrepreneurial role model to many Americans. Mr. Klein and his trustbusters, if they persist, may be remembered only for discrediting antitrust enforcement in the eyes of a generation too young to remember the IBM case.
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URL for this Article:
interactive.wsj.com
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Copyright c 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
END WALL ST JOURNAL, BEGIN NEW YORK TIMES
November 25, 1998, Wednesday
Editorial Desk
Competition on the Internet
America Online's effort to acquire Netscape and set up
a partnership with Sun Microsystems is a reminder of
how rapidly the corporate landscape can change in
fast-moving technical fields. But it does not lessen
the need for the Justice Department to vigorously
pursue its antitrust suit against Microsoft, the
dominant player in software. The department has
presented solid evidence that Microsoft has used its
monopoly in operating systems to muscle rivals and
partners so as to head off competition in other
software realms.
The Internet has risen so quickly as an information
medium that only four years ago, in his book ''The Road
Ahead,'' Bill Gates scarcely mentions it. In addition,
only a couple of years ago America Online, the world's
biggest on-line service, was having so much trouble
getting rid of the bugs in the system it was widely
derided as ''America On Hold.'' Now Microsoft has moved
so aggressively into the Internet that the Justice
Department is accusing it of predatory behavior, and
America Online has rocketed forward to make deals with
other Internet players.
In its antitrust suit against Microsoft, the Federal
Government charges that the company has illegally
bundled its own browser with its Windows operating
system to smother Netscape's chances of marketing its
browser. Now in the corridors outside the antitrust
trial Microsoft's lawyers maintain that Netscape has
found a new partner in America Online and has no need
of protection from the Government. But it could be as
easily argued that Microsoft has bludgeoned Netscape
into dissolution, forcing a distress sale to America
Online. Nor is it clear that customers of America
Online will choose Netscape's browser as a vehicle for
buying and selling on the Internet. Even in its newly
musclebound form, America Online remains dependent on
Microsoft's good will for favorable placement of an AOL
icon on the main desktop screen.
It may be that, years hence, America Online, Netscape
and Sun will put together an alternative means to the
Internet through telephone lines, cables or the like.
But until that day, fairness requires Justice
Department action to insure that Microsoft not use its
current position to thwart consumer choice. Only when
companies know they can get their products to the
consumer will they have the incentive to innovate and
turn the Internet into the revolutionary medium it
promises to be.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company |
