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.

Yep...it's driven me nuts to read the ridiculously distorted accounts of how Microsoft picked on poor little Netscape, while as a Web designer I've seen and had to live with the reality of Netscape's own abysmal failures. They got too big for the britches from early success, and hubris and karma killed them. Not Microsoft.

Insightful comments from Pournelle. The guy's an arrogant pain in the butt sometimes, but there's no denying that he's often right.

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.

Congratulations! Could it be that your letters were already sensationalistic enough to not need spicing up? [;-)....]

--Robert