Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
It's the little things, like "registered file types," that allow Microsoft to maintain its monopoly. Will the court tackle them?
Oct 8, 2001 | Microsoft and its Justice Department opponents are back in settlement talks ordered by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. The last settlement round, ordered by the last judge, went nowhere. Since then Microsoft has been officially determined, by both the district and appeals courts, to be a monopolist and to have broken the antitrust laws. But the government has dropped its push to break up the company and now seeks a variety of procedural remedies.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to behave as though nothing has happened, merrily releasing a new operating system, Windows XP, whose design replicates all the approaches that got the company in trouble in the past. Microsoft is sticking its tongue out at the courts and the world, essentially saying, "You'll have to come and drag Bill Gates away in chains if you expect us to care about some measly court."
There's a lot that could and should be done to reform Microsoft's behavior. And don't tell me that the antitrust laws should be suspended for the sake of national unity after the Sept. 11 attack -- or that the government should back off of a mega-company like Microsoft because the economy is on the ropes. Restraining Microsoft and restoring competition to the software industry should eventually give the economy a boost. And even if a strict remedy order depresses Microsoft's stock in the short run, Microsoft has always done its best work when faced with real competition -- and in the long run the company can only benefit by being forced to deal fairly with challenges to its leadership.
But as the lawyers haggle over their proposed settlements, something tells me they will not be getting at the meat of the problem. Microsoft protects its monopoly through a host of practices that barely register in the media or the public mind. The trial court's voluminous "findings of fact" only scratched the surface of the variety of stratagems the company employs to lock out competitors.
Take, for instance, the peculiar matter of "registered file types."
That ungainly phrase is hardly a familiar one, and -- unlike "tying," "bundling," "network effect," "browser integration" and other greatest hits from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's courtroom -- it did not become a household word during the serpentine course of the Microsoft antitrust battle. But the problem with Windows' "registered file types" is just the sort of subtle but nasty Microsoft practice that many of us hoped a forceful antitrust ruling and tough remedy would finally change. It is one little example of the myriad techniques our most powerful operating-system vendor has at its disposal to screw competitors, take over new markets and -- contrary to its propaganda -- make users' lives more miserable.
Here's what I'm talking about: Once upon a time, PC users opened documents only from within their application programs. Macintosh users had the luxury of clicking on any file they liked, and, if the program required to read that file wasn't already running, it would automatically launch. The Mac file system understood, as if by magic, which files belonged to which programs. Windows was dependent instead on a relic of the old DOS file system -- a three-letter "extension," like ".txt" or ".doc" -- to match files with programs. This isn't quite as elegant as the Mac approach, but it works -- until you want to switch the program you use for a particular file type.
Then, you're basically at Microsoft's mercy. Because Windows makes you go on a mad hunt through menus and folders and options to find the dialogue box that lets you make any such change. It's not in the "add/remove programs" control panel, where you'd expect it. It's not under "properties" when you right-click on a file. It's not in any obvious or easily accessible location. (For future reference, here is where it is: In Windows 98, open Windows Explorer, find the View menu, look under "Folder Options," then find the hidden "File Types" tab -- which may not even be there, depending on what you have selected in the Windows Explorer window. In Windows XP, the feature is similarly hidden behind the cryptic "Folder Options" label.)
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