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Let's get two things straight, right from the beginning: I'm not a geek, and I don't like Windows.
When I say I'm not a geek, what I mean is that, despite about two decades of fiddling with computers -- sometimes for a living, sometimes just because -- and despite having wrestled with everything from an old HP machine that took up a refrigerator-sized cabinet and communicated with its user via teletype to the Red Hat Linux installation that currently resides on one of my partitions, I actually like things to be easy when I sit down at my desk.
When I say that I don't like Windows, I'm understating the case. I've cursed the day that Bill Gates was born more times than I can count, usually over little escapades like trying to install a piece of Plug'n'Pray equipment, or reformatting my hard drive because Windows 95 went berserk over a mouse driver and just never recovered. At every opportunity, I've acquired Macintosh machines and loved them. But a couple of weeks ago, I needed a computer. I needed it then, and I needed it for under $400, and that meant Windows 98 (and Linux, which will probably be my OS of choice once I get ahead of the learning curve -- I have GNOME running, and can get something resembling a persistent net connection with the RH PPP Dialer, but that's about as far as it's gone).
Now that I've laid the groundwork, the next thing to get straight is that I am overjoyed that a federal appeals court threw out Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's insane order that would have broken Microsoft into several pieces.
I'm ecstatic for a couple of reasons. The first one, to be honest, is practical. Microsoft has been the dominant force in computer operating systems and applications for a quarter of a century. That has practical benefits. If Microsoft wasn't there, we'd still be on Netscape 1.1 and Mac OS 6, and Linux would likely have never been born. Microsoft's marketing savvy makes other companies work to put out a better product -- and, usually, they do. Far from "stifling competition," Microsoft may be the prime mover behind the computer age as we know it, just because everyone else has to make an all-out effort to defeat their publicity machine with better products.
If there wasn't a boogeyman, mom wouldn't have any reason to provide a nightlight.
The second reason, of course, is moral, and it underlies and precedes my adoption of the libertarian idea. Simply put, it just isn't right to screw with other people's stuff. The antitrust laws are all about screwing with other people's stuff. Telling them what they can sell, how they can sell it, what they can include and how successful they're allowed to be. If baseball didn't have an antitrust exemption, Mike Piazza would have to turn to the umpire and ask for permission to whack one out of the park -- and he'd have to ask when the pitch was midway between mound and plate.
When Judge Jackson rolled out his "finding of fact" in the Microsoft antitrust case, my first reaction was to uninstall the Netscape browser from my computer and vow never to use it again (which, by the way, leaves me somewhat in a bind with Linux). The "facts" that Jackson "found" were as follows: Microsoft did its damnedest to produce a passable web browser. Then it included that browser free with copies of its operating system, and required businesses which wanted to resell the operating system pre-installed on the computer to install the browser as well.
All of these "facts" were, indeed, facts; the problem is that they were about as relevant to any criminal wrongdoing on Microsoft's part as the price of espresso in Istanbul. Yes, Microsoft produced a browser. Yes, Microsoft did everything it could to promote the use of that browser -- except use force. Contrary to popular recollection, Bill Gates was never caught red-handed with a Glock to the head of any computer vendor, forcing him to ship computers with Windows (and Internet Explorer) on them.
Working from these "facts," Judge Jackson reached the remarkable conclusion that Microsoft needed to be broken down into smaller parts so that it couldn't compete with poor, hapless multi-billion dollar firms like America Online and Netscape ... and come to think of it, didn't the former buy out the latter before the ink dried on Jackson's ruling that decreed the opposite for Microsoft? And didn't Netscape acquire a large ownership interest in Red Hat, the purveyors of a competing operating system?
Let's move on to my gift of prophecy and its application to this case. I'm going to get an inbox full of e-mail messages (which I will read with a non-Microsoft client, Pegasus Mail), and each one will declare that Bill Gates is the antichrist, that I have no business defending him, that the writer of the message was "forced" to buy a Windows machine, and that if Microsoft didn't exist we'd all have multi-tasking processors implanted in our brains by now, running Linux and connecting us to a wireless broadband network that would operate at ten times the speed of DSL.
Okay, so it isn't prophecy. I've written on this subject before, so it's more of an exercise in predicting reactions based on past experience. I'm going to be a bit preemptive here and answer those messages before you send them.
No, you didn't have to buy a Windows box. You could have bought a Macintosh. You could have gone to a systems house and had the machine built from scratch and installed Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, or any one of a number of free or cheap operating systems on it. You could even have gone with DR DOS -- and don't tell me you can't get on the net with DOS only. I've done it. You could have bought an Amiga, or an Atari, or a Commodore.
No, you didn't have to use Internet Explorer. Off the top of my head, I can name a number of browsers that are and were available freely or cheaply -- some of them before IE saw the light of day. Netscape, of course, and its predecessor (NCSA Mosaic). Cello and SlipKnot. Lynx. Opera. iCab. CyberDog. Arachne.
The reason you could have bought those operating systems, or installed those browsers, is that Microsoft made computing affordable and popular. And, to be honest, pretty damn simple when everything works right (which isn't very often, but that's beside the point).
Without the massive surge in popularity of computing engineered by Microsoft, resulting in Windows 3.1 on millions of desks, Mark Andreeson would have been just another geek at Champaigne-Urbana, showing off Mosaic to his geek friends in the basement of the computer science building. The mention of Linux in non-geek company would elicit a polite "gesundheit," and "Internet" would still be hick slang for a good 3-point shot by the varsity basketball squad.
Make no mistake about it, the whines of Microsoft's opponents translate to the English as "Microsoft made us -- now we want to feed on its carcass."
Judge Jackson made the mistake of substituting judgment -- bad judgment -- for jurisprudence. Given a set of laws so full of wiggle room and exceptions that anyone could be acquitted or convicted of anything or nothing under them and that are, on their face, an unconstitutional impairment of the obligation of contract and property rights, he tried to dismember the basis of American technological world supremacy. I have to wonder if his state of mind was not affected by a few too many blue screens or by the nightmare of getting Windows to recognize his modem.
Chalk one up for the good guys.
