Most strikingly, he contends that building Internet software into Windows was not only unnecessary but an overall detriment to users, because it sucks up computing resources and forces holdouts to the Web revolution to pay for something they don’t want. In fact, he doesn’t seem to think that browsing should ever be an integral part of an OS. The judge would have been on safer ground to simply state that Microsoft’s massive effort to integrate the browser into Windows was originally launched more to snuff Netscape than benefit customers. But now that the Net seems poised to be fully meshed into our computing experiences and even in our daily lives, it makes sense for operating systems to handle some of the load. At the least, the matter is debatable–but should the decision-making process on this design issue be led by some gavel pounder who prefers fountain pens to WordPerfect?
Judge Jackson’s predictions about the permanence of Microsoft’s headlock on the software industry seem equally questionable. Clearly, Microsoft drew upon its operating systems’ dynasty to trump Netscape’s browser before the rival Navigator morphed into an alternative applications platform to Windows. But vanquishing Netscape does little to help Microsoft in the coming war of Internet-ready appliances, a conflict that seems to favor opponents not burdened with the legacy of Windows software. Despite Judge Jackson’s assurances that America Online has no intentions of trying to push Microsoft off its lofty perch, it’s more than likely that AOL will become a persistent counterforce to Microsoft’s plans to keep ahead in century 21.
And how can Judge Jackson so blithely dismiss Linux, a free OS competing with Microsoft that has 15 million users? Wall Street doesn’t: it’s bestowed a multibillion-dollar valuation to Red Hat Software, a company that distributes Linux on a nonexclusive basis. Sure, it’s a fact when the judge says, “Consumers have by and large shown little inclination to abandon Windows… in favor of an operating system whose future in the PC realm is unclear.” But Linux developers are only starting to stock the system with easy-to-use applications. It’s the land of Moore’s law, inflection points and Internet time, Judge–things can change.
Indeed, in conversations this year with some of Bill Gates’s toughest competitors, I’ve heard grudging admissions that the 800-pound gorilla is due for a weight reduction. Nobody counts out Microsoft as a major force in the future. But its competitors generally don’t believe that the vast galaxy of gadgets we use to hook up to the Internet in 2010 will overwhelmingly be Windows devices.
So if Silicon Valley now thinks Microsoft is vulnerable, does this mean that the high-tech crowd overreacted–perhaps confusing self-interest with the application of law–in urging the government to take down Bill Gates? I’m reminded of what I learned in my Shakespeare courses about what E.M.W. Tillyard called the Elizabethan World Picture: there was a natural order of things, and if you messed with it, well, chaos would come. The bard’s plays were full of this stuff: every time some king (or Roman emperor) was precipitously overthrown–even if he was a corrupt ruler just begging for the hook–this divine order was violated. In “Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare had the commander Ulysses lay it out for us. Skip a step in the cosmic ladder, he said, and “the enterprise is sick.”
In the Silicon Valley world picture, the marketplace rules, and the divine order insists that if an evil monopolist is to be toppled from power, the instrument of its removal should (and will) be the marketplace. But now that these fair-weather libertarians have enlisted Joel Klein, Janet Reno and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to unseat Microsoft from its throne, the high-tech equivalent of plagues, portents and raging of the sea suddenly threaten the Valley. I’m referring, of course, to the government’s intrusive hand.
Can that hand be trusted to do only what’s justified–to firmly slap Microsoft for its bullying transgressions, and snap on only the necessary restraints to prevent subsequent misdeeds? Or will it dig its way into software design and the direction of future innovation? I don’t know the answer to that question, but the potential dangers (shaking of earth, commotion in the winds) are such that a game of appellate chicken between the two parties is senseless. Microsoft and the government should get to the table as soon as possible and not leave the room until they’ve settled this mess. Otherwise, chaos follows.
