Everhart,Glenn
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Why do programmers hate Microsoft? After all, there's nothing wrong
with trying to make money in the computer industry. Why should one
company be vilified for doing what everyone else wishes they could do?
Isn't Microsoft just trying to make a profit like the rest of us?
Not quite. Microsoft is certainly trying to profit, but not like
everyone else: the missing ingredient is self-restraint. We
all understand that for society to function, we must exhibit this
quality in our personal lives, but sometimes we forget it is just as
important in public life. Self-restraint means resisting temptation
to push the envelope, because you recognize that the envelope was
agreed on for good reasons.
Microsoft pushes the envelope by trying to control standards so it can
lock in customers. It is not so much that it dislikes competing
"fairly", as that it fears competing at all. Microsoft doesn't want
any playing field, unless it can be be both referee and defending
champion, and its relentless drive to be the the sole and only vendor
of operating software for personal computers has brought it very close
to that goal. Fortunately, our society long ago recognized that such
snowballing accumulations of power were a weakness of open markets,
and we enacted anti-trust laws to deal with the problem.
Some people don't think that anti-trust action is appropriate in this
case. It's easy to regard Microsoft as blameless, merely using its
market share the same way anyone would. It's also easy to believe
Microsoft's claims that they're path-breakers at the leading edge of
digital technology, whose creativity would be stifled by government
over-regulation. These opinions, being so understandable, deserve
detailed rebuttal.
Imagine this scenario: a regional supplier of electric current decides
to get into the stereo business, and starts burning out its
competitors' products by changing the rate at which it delivers
alternating current. That would be intolerable, right? A clear case
of using forced market share in one area to remove choice in another.
But this is just what Microsoft has been doing! By controlling the
operating system, it controls the substrate on which other software
manufacturers are forced to build their products. They have no choice
in the matter. And when threatening products come along -- Netscape
Navigator, for example, which offers users a non-Microsoft window on
the Internet, or Sun's Java programming language, which potentially
offers an alternative platform to Windows 95 -- Microsoft responds
like a classic monopoly: it tweaks the current.
As it happens, Netscape's grievances are being addressed by recent
Justice Department actions, while Sun's plight prompted that company
to bring a lawsuit against Microsoft. But neither should have been in
these positions in the first place, and wouldn't have been if
Microsoft didn't insist on abusing its position as a supplier of
something very analogous to a public utility.
Nor are these isolated examples -- rather, they are the pattern which
has always delivered Microsoft's success. Time after time Microsoft
has leveraged an existing monopolistic base to gain control of a
market which was being served perfectly well by an open, undominated
standards process. Yes, new features and programming interfaces and
standards pour forth from Redmond at a furious pace, but this is not
because of customer demand. It is because Microsoft knows that by
giving the rug sharp, unpredictable tugs from time to time, it can
keep everyone -- especially software developers -- slightly
off-balance, scrambling to keep up with a rate of change defined not
by market pressures or genuine creativity, but by one company's need
to hold all the cards no matter what the cost to consumer choice.
Anti-trust scrutiny is appropriate in this case for exactly the
reasons those laws were originally enacted: a single company is in the
position of being able to dominate an entire market, bringing
competitors to their knees not through the superior quality of its
products, but through the well-known dynamics of open markets, which,
if unchecked, will always allow the larger to eat the smaller, and
thus grow larger yet. For not only can the larger afford to keep
fighting longer, it can also persuade third parties to choose its side
or face the consequences. This latter ability is particularly
insidious in an industry so dependent on cross-vendor standards to
maintain interoperability.
It is tempting to shrug and say "Yes, but if it were not Microsoft in
this position, it would be someone else. They are merely behaving in
the only way they can, given their position as operating-system
vendor." This is a seductive argument, but actually they could behave
considerably better than they do. Other vendors have dominating
market shares (Cisco Systems, for example, in network routers), but
haven't acquired a reputation for forcing their proprietary standards
on an unwilling public, nor for bending the public standards until no
one knows what's public and what's proprietary. Microsoft is
exceptional because it is never willing to give up control,
even though it is very clear that no one else wants a single party to
have control.
The Internet has a proven ability to settle on good, workable
cross-platform standards by consensus. But Microsoft still tries to
force us into doing things their way. Unlike other software vendors,
they implement their own proprietary protocols before getting around
to implementing public standards (i.e., ActiveX before Java, WINS
before DNS, and does anyone even remember that document-embedding
format they killed off?). This undermines perfectly good standards,
even as it fails to establish Microsoft's way as a publicly available
solution. The end result is that overall interoperability is made
more difficult. Computer users face a choice between using only
Microsoft products, or dealing with the headache of making their
Microsoft products work with everything else. Don't think for a
minute that this is not deliberate -- Microsoft knows full well the
effects of what they do. That's why they do it!
Were it not for Microsoft's iron grip, we might well have long ago
settled on a workable, public operating system standard that would
allow developers to write truly portable software without worrying
about whose monopoly they're buying into. This is not fantasy -- it
has already happened in the Unix world, but Microsoft's influence has
so far fatally hampered any possibility of an equally healthy
standards process in the world of mainstream personal computers.
The notion that regulating Microsoft might stifle progress is also
mistaken. If Microsoft were the source of any interesting progress in
the computer industry, this might be a plausible argument. But let's
briefly review some software history: what are the most important
innovations of the last decade or so in computing? Off the tops of
our heads, most of us would probably list the mouse, graphical user
interfaces, networking in general and email in particular, certainly
the World Wide Web. And how many of these bright ideas were first
developed, or even brought to maturity, at Microsoft? Not a single
one. Microsoft was actually a latecomer in all these areas,
waiting until market pressure spelled out the future for them before
acting.
Or perhaps you wonder if Microsoft has at least broken new ground in
more esoteric areas, making contributions too technical to be noticed
by the average computer user, but acknowledged among programmers? But
you'd be disappointed again: there are none, at least none that would
be called significant by anyone except a Microsoft employee. For all
its treasure-laden coffers and glitzy,
look-ma-we're-inventing-the-future public relations campaigns, it
remains an essentially conservative company, watching others dive in
while it tests the waters with its little toe, and rarely developing
new technologies -- though often acquiring them by purchase: even
MS-DOS, their first major product and hardly an innovation by anyone's
definition, was not created in-house, but bought from outside.
What comedy, then, that Microsoft is so often referred to as an
``industry leader''. Its corporate policy is to follow, for which I
suppose we should be glad, except that it's a particularly late and
ungainly follower, throwing its weight around with little awareness
that there are standards of good behavior even in a for-profit world.
There are indeed new things under the sun these days, but Microsoft
isn't one of them. It's an uncomfortably familiar monopoly, no
different in principle or practice from all the ones we've seen
before. As for the creative genius being trampled by insensitive
anti-trust watchdogs -- forget about it. The cutting-edge stuff isn't
going on at Microsoft and never has been. Instead of worrying about
Microsoft's problems, worry about yours: imagine a world where you
could shop for operating systems the way you shop for anything else,
and where you wouldn't have to pay an upgrade tax to Bill Gates every
few years just to continue using your computer.
Scary, isn't it? Mr. Gates apparently thinks so.
by Karl Fogel
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=1052