Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Let's Get This Straight: By Scott Rosenberg. Why Microsoft should think about freeing the source code to Windows.
Apr 22, 1998 | Bill Gates is now regularly being compared with John D. Rockefeller, the Standard Oil founder whose monopoly a century ago incensed the "trustbusters" of the Progressive era and inspired the United States' first antitrust laws -- and a man whose name, for high school history students across the land, is synonymous with "robber baron."
This is not good news for Gates or Microsoft. Whatever the historical validity of the comparison -- made most recently and at greatest length on the op-ed page of the New York Times last Sunday -- it suggests that Gates' achievement is now being widely viewed less as a laudable instance of Horatio Alger-style success than as a public-policy problem. And it's not just old-fashioned bleeding-heart liberals who are urging the government to "do something about Microsoft"; Bob Dole has also been lobbying for Microsoft's opponents, and yesterday he was joined by Robert Bork -- Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominee and a longtime opponent of government meddling in the business of business. Bork told Wired News, "I think as the Department of Justice looks at this they'll see predatory practices being used and they'll ask them to be stopped."
Has the legal scholar experienced a change of heart away from his long-standing laissez faire-ism? Or does this issue just look different to him now that a coalition of anti-Microsoft companies has become one of his clients? Either way, Microsoft is in the cross hairs from all political directions. While the courts drag out their consideration of the finer points of browser "integration" in Windows 95 and 98 (company lawyers jousted with Justice Department attorneys Tuesday), the wider battle for the public mind is becoming Microsoft's Vietnam.
If there was any doubt left, last week's revelations about a Microsoft plan to concoct favorable letters to the editor and generate phony "grass-roots" support eliminated it. "The only people who use 'astroturf' campaigns are those who believe that, if their identity was known, they would not be believed," San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor wrote in an e-mail response to my last column. "This is a huge change in the atmosphere for Microsoft, which has had a pretty much free ride from the press and public for years."
The press is now brimming with big features (a Business Week cover story, a series in the Seattle Times) that ask, "What to do about Microsoft?" Business Week runs down the possibilities: "Uncle Sam leaves Bill Gates alone," "Justice slows the giant with 'surgical strikes'" or "The Feds split Microsoft in two." But anyone expecting an old-fashioned AT&T-style breakup of Microsoft -- separating its operating-system division from its applications business -- better be prepared for a nice, long wait, as Microsoft's army of lawyers digs in for siege warfare.
Microsoft's enemies make good arguments about the company's overweening power, monopolistic arrogance and aggressive business tactics. But Microsoft's supporters have a point, too, when they maintain that the courts are a lousy venue for making decisions about software products. Is there any way out of this mess?
I think there is, though it's not one likely to make Bill Gates smile: Microsoft could join the free software movement.
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