>could you send the financial times letter to the list, or at least to me?
Damn, I misaddressed another email. This is getting embarrassing.
Anyway, in thorough violation of IP laws...
Doug
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Key Microsoft question is whether it profits from ideas of others
05-21-1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From Mr Bruce Page.
Sir, There is much talk of "innovation" in the context of the US Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft. Making a proper list of computing innovations would be quite a task. But here is a list of some obvious majors:
* UNIX, Pascal, BASIC, C in its various dialects, Java, PostScript. The Intel and Motorola microprocessor designs. The Internet, the World Wide Web, client-server structures, the WIMPs interface, relational database design, object-oriented development systems. Mathematica, Adobe Illustrator, QuarkXPress/PageMaker. Supercalc, but perhaps more decisively the first Lotus spreadsheets.
The innovators concerned make a various list: AT & T, Niklaus Wirth, Dartmouth College, Sun, Adobe Systems, Intel & Motorola (obviously), Xerox, Apple, IBM, Lotus, Quark, Aldus (as was), Wolfram Research.
I would include David Potter's invention of the hand-held computer (Psion).
Can anyone provide a list that includes any similarly significant innovations from Microsoft?
Bruce Page, 32 Lauderdale Tower, London EC2Y 8BY
>From Mr Walter Stanners.
Sir, Your leader, "Microsoft besieged", and leader page article, " Government vs Big Business" (May 19), seem to me to omit a main element in the Microsoft antitrust picture. The leader says it is not obvious that the consumer suffers from Microsoft's attempt to squeeze out Netscape and that there is nothing to prevent anyone with a superior product winning back market share. The article quotes a similar view: "This is not a capital intensive industry, it is ideas and the human intellect. Nobody has a monopoly on that, least of all Microsoft."
Microsoft's success, however, is not based essentially on ideas and intellect but on the well-known history of accidents involving the IBM PC. A principal source of its income is the licensing of the PC operating system to computer manufacturers and individual users.
If Apple or Netscape, say, has a good idea, it cannot be patented. Anyone with sufficient programming resources can mimic the new product. No ideas or intellect are necessary for that, only the assured revenue stream Microsoft has. The prime question then is not whether Microsoft will please the customer, or stifle new ideas, but whether, because of its accidental quasi-monopolistic position, it can mimic and profit from the ideas of others, and deprive those others of reward.
And, if unchecked, then of course there would eventually be a drying up of ideas too. The quotation from the regulator thus seems abundantly justified: "We should stop companies using their market power to basically tip the playing field in their direction."
Walter Stanners, 49b Fen End, Over, Cambridge CB4 5NE