|
It was Conrad Black,
the proprietor of the Calgary Herald who once wrote about "the pervasive
Canadian spirit of envy," whereby "the success of a person implies the
failure or exploitation of someone else". Vitriol over my recent column on
the Microsoft anti-trust suit bears this out in spades. Individuals in the
software industry have filled my e-mailbag with cuss-filled messages. They have
not only played loose with the facts, but also seem incapable of grasping that,
at its root, the assault on Microsoft is an assault on property. When government
tells a company what products it may integrate, and what kind of discounts it
may offer, at the threat of divvying up and policing the property should it fail
to comply-- government is violating basic liberties.
One reader denounced
me as a lackey of Bill Gates and worse. Being so patently partisan himself,
another reader was flummoxed to hear that my spouse designs a product which
Microsoft wants to unseat. You will be destroyed by the Gates, this bitter
creature prophesied, which goes to show that myth and superstition fuel the
animus against Bill Gates. The Palm handheld computer and its wireless
technology for which the spouse is responsible, has left Microsoft in the dust.
The little Palm's perfection has techies waxing poetic. The Microsoft version,
on the other hand, is a lumbering "effort to shrink a desktop PC to a
handheld size". The consumer has spoken; the Palm OS has a staggering 78.4
percent of the global handheld computer market. Realistically, Palm has only
antitrust law to fear.
Adopting a position
of remarkable novelty, a reader insisted that the case against Microsoft was not
about monopoly. At the heart of the judgement was the morality of Microsoft's
action: George Pajari of Faximum Software knows what is best for consumers, and
Netscape, he says, had launched a better product. He claims Microsoft's
immorality consisted in developing a competitive product, and using financial
clout to give away its product until Netscape allegedly "went out of
business".
Indeed, Microsoft
gave Internet Access Providers a free access kit, which they grabbed. Netscape
snoozed for nine long months, then awoke with a start to match the Microsoft
blitz with a parallel package, Mission Control, that cost a whopping $1,995. Any
wonder then that Internet Access Providers chose Microsoft? Unaware as he is
that Netscape was the dominant and established incumbent in the browser market,
the reader wants to outlaw such consumer friendly competitive hardball.
Furthermore, if using
financial clout to gain market advantage is immoral, as the reader claims, then
perhaps only cash strapped businesses should be licensed to integrate or give
away products as Microsoft did with its Internet Explorer and Windows operating
system?
The argument that
Microsoft was not within its rights to bundle and market its Internet Explorer
with its Windows OS, and, by extension, that government should be in the
business of interfering with someone's right to configure and sell a product as
they wish, gives way to a reductio ad absurdum. "It is impossible to
purchase a Ford chassis and a BMW motor," write Christopher Westley, Leon
Snyman, Walter Block and Ilana Mercer. "Those who wish to drive such a
concoction will be forced to buy one of each of these automobiles and fashion
this combination for themselves," say the authors in a paper entitled The
Microsoft Corporation in Collision with Antitrust Law. "If we are going
to legally penalize Microsoft on this ground, we must also include in the
indictment…all automobile companies, all TV manufacturers (some buyers may
wish the SONY innards and the RCA tube, or vice versa), all publishers (some
readers may want the cover of the bible and the inner pages of Lolita, or
Playboy, or, who knows, vise versa), etc."
As for accusations
from readers that Microsoft "harmed consumers," Stan J. Leibowits and
Stephen E. Margolis authors of Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition
and Antitrust in High Technology, documented a faster decline in prices
wherever Microsoft was present in software markets. "Software products
which did not compete with Microsoft fell in price by about 12 percent from 1988
to 1995, but where there was competition with Microsoft the price reduction was
almost 60 percent during the same period."
No pronouncement
about the antitrust junta and its hypocrisy, however, would be complete without
the words of former Judge Robert Bork. Wrote Bork in his book The Antitrust
Paradox: "Modern antitrust has so decayed that the policy is no longer
intellectually respectable." "Some of it is not respectable as law;
more of it is not respectable as economics…"
Did I mention that
Bork is a consultant for Netscape and a leading anti-Microsoft cheerleader?
©2000 Ilana Mercer
The Calgary Herald
May 18
|
