Thanks! That additional background fills in quite a few gaps. What the "antitrusters" are hoping no one sees is the role of their own incompetence in their current market position. They hope that everyone simply goes for the "big guy=bad guy" routine.

Jerry Pournelle has written extensively on this, along with his friends in the know.

His latest I reproduce here, only because the link will change soon:

I have a lot of mail about the Microsoft case, most trying to convince me that I am wrong about one thing or another. I remain unconvinced.



It is over: the lawyers keep hoping for some enormous "settlement" that would give each of 100 million consumers a $3 certificate and the law firms a few hundred million, but it won't happen. Microsoft has the time, patience, money, and legal talent to drag this on until everyone has forgotten what it was about, if they ever knew in the first place.

Second, it remains true that the harm to consumers is theoretical, and the findings of harm all cite harm to competitors. There are many theories, most originating with the competitors, on why harm to competitors is equal to harm to consumers, but the law is not written that way. It is not illegal to have a monopoly; it is only illegal to use illegal means to acquire and keep it, or to have legally acquired a monopoly and use it to the harm of the general public.

Third, those who seem to know more about my thoughts and beliefs than I do have asserted that I must not believe in anti-trust. As I have said about a hundred times (go back to Mail 26, or use the site search engine on anti-trust), David McCord Wright used to say that the anti-trust act was one of the things that upset Marx's calculations on the future of the capitalist system, and I believe that thoroughly.

Fourth: the computer world changes, and often, and fast. Either Microsoft will keep up with those changes, or it will vanish. Microsoft did not get where it is by being extraordinarily clever, but the company was flexible to changes. Its competitors were arrogantly stupid and unadaptive. I am not at all convinced that I would be better off now had IBM won the war to the death started when IBM walked out of the Microsoft OS/2 conference in the presence of myself and most of the computer press and financial analysts. I am not convinced that I would be better served by arrogant stupidity any more than I am by whatever adjectives you care to use to describe Microsoft.

Fifth: we can all do more with these machines than anyone I know including me ever thought we would be able to do with them in 2002 back in the 80's or early 90's. The mass market changed everything. Microsoft rode that wave. No one else did. For good or ill, Gates's vision was the only vision large enough.

We come to a new phase now. We will see what happens. But the lawsuit is effectively dead and will stay that way. The main outcome is that those who started it now face a new level of tribute they must pay to the government. Microsoft went from nothing to an enormous lobby effort. Their rivals must match that. They can't really afford it, but it is they who opened that front and it is they who must now pay.

We live in interesting times.



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I don't agree with him on the history of antitrust, but that's not relevant here.

For the record, the Mercury News has been very good about my letters, and has published quite a few of them. Edits have been few, and reasonably harmless. I actually got a Silver Pen Award from them a few years back, with a great free dinner thrown in.