Microsoft and Anti-Trust

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue May 19 08:41:48 PDT 1998


John St. Clair wrote:


>Since this list is ostensibly a "left business" list, I wonder about your
>take on the Microsoft anti-trust issue. Doug, since the coverage in the
>NYTimes has been horrible (tech journalists seem to be one-source wonders),
>could you add any infogossip on the states' case? I'm especially interested
>in the difference between the JD/AG's positions on (a) must-carry and (b)
>bundling. NYT's coverage indicates that the states were trying to stop not
>only the bundling of IE with Windows, but bundling *any* software together,
>specifically Office? Even if you are virulently anti-MS, and totally opposed
>to IE-Windows integration, doesn't this strike you as absurd? It's in *my*
>interest to buy 5 programs separately, rather than as a package? Who is
>driving this aspect? Hatch and his Utah (Novell) cronies?

I don't what to think about this MS thing. I don't share the populists' uncritical admiration of competition, and I'm pretty persuaded (without having delved too deeply into it) by arguments that tech markets tend towards monopoly as a way of imposing common standards. (And I say this as a loyal Macintosh user.) I noticed the other day that I was running four MS programs at once - Word, Excel, IE, and Bookshelf - and I was enjoying the way they were all integrated with each other. Highlight a word in Word, and look it up in Bookshelf; click on a URL in Bookshelf and IE takes you there, etc. Gates's arguments along these lines are self-serving & hypocritical - he's not doing what he's doing for the "end user," as his PR people have evidently coached him to say - but to solidify MS's dominant market position. But still, the MS position isn't entirely without merit either; the whole suit seems to be designed to protect Netscape, which doesn't strike me as the most pressing need of the moment (especially since their browser, at least in its Mac version, is decidedly inferior to MS's).

Who's really behind this suit? I don't think the U.S. DoJ or 20 state AGs would go after this behemoth if there weren't some significant ruling class interest in doing so, but who? How? Why? Larry Ellison & Marc Andressen don't carry enough weight on their own. Anyone understand this?

And, speaking of questions about MS (or MSFT, as they say on the Street, which the repellent Jim Cramer of TheStreet.com keeps calling Mister Softee), just what did Gates contribute to the success of the organization? Does anyone know? Is he a technical genius and a business genius rolled into one? Or was he just a geek in the right place at the right time?

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list