Well, Judge Penfield Jackson just confirmed what everyone involved in the personal computer industry already knew but was too busy making money to talk about. Microsoft, or should I say Bill Gates aided and abetted by everyone from his staff to his stockholders has created a new form of what could only be described as 'entangling alliances', to use a term from the Woodrow Wilson administration.

Mr. Gates is a very, very smart man with a lawyer for a loving father, so it was inevitable that he could leverage MS-DOS into the worlds greatest post-sputnik commercial achievement. Unfortunately, just as Wilson's feared that strategic alliances could pull the USA into a world war, so too, may Bill Gate's alliances with just about everything high tech pull him (and the rest of us) into an abyss which could could make this y2k business look like a Sunday waltz.

We in this country truly understand about the survival of the fittest and how important some commercial success is to the well being of you and your loved ones but if mercy, service and justice are not served at all then that commercial success rings a bit hollow. In my 10 years of involvement of virtually every aspect of the Bay Area computing industry I have never seen anything like the wake created by the Microsoft juggernaut. I suppose it was the same thing in the early part of the century when there were more auto makers, more oil companies, and more steel companies. So many great ideas, so many great products, so many wonderfully talented people either co-opted, cheated, or just ignored.

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The big problem with Microsoft is it's paranoiac way of controlling the nozzle through which new products, new ideas literally are able to flow into the marketplace. Ideas are the life blood of any endeavor and Microsoft's ability to manipulate users takes several forms:

1. Pre-announce products in a way designed to chill corporate aspirations to try new vendors. (this is accompanied by between-the-lines threats to savvy managers about what might happen to defectors)

2. Purchase-and-shelve strategies. Simply buy your innovative competitor and take it off the market.

The second item, long a tool of businessmen and women in any industry, is particularly grievous in a business which is, at it's core, an industry of ideas. The Darwinian approach (the best idea-no matter whose it is) brought us the Internet and the PC revolution in the first place. Remember MS did not invent personal computing, nor operating systems theory, nor hardware innovation, or Internet technology. They have been successful within the realm of MS-DOS and their own ability to market themselves as mission critical to American business. They have NOT contributed a single thing to the computing infrastructure as an original idea. Microsoft consolidated existing technologies into something American business could understand and for that he and Allen and Ballmer deserve to be rich men. Gates already was. However, with early collusion from IBM and later Intel, Microsoft has improperly leveraged that marketing-based approach to co-opt technologically superior solutions from competitors like Apple, Borland, IBM itself and others too numerous to mention. With remoras like Ziff-Davis feeding us a constant supply of "MS is God " in the trade press for the last 10 years, it's really no wonder that we find ourselves at this juncture. If Microsoft is guilty, the trade press should be named as unindicted co-conspirators.

Remember, whatever we think, Bill Gates sees himself as providing a service to all of us and he's right. It's just that when we look back now on 10-years of bread crumbs on the trail, we have finally tracked Microsoft to it's lair and it's littered with the carcasses of some very worthy competitors, perhaps too many of them....and we even found the remains of some of our friends who were missing. Nasty business capitalism. Judge Penfield Jackson's ruling gives us a look at the new killing floor akin to the stock yards Sinclair Lewis told us about in the 30's but in the 90's the blood is on the floor of the stock exchanges. More on this later. I'm glad I use a Mac, but pretty soon it really won't matter.

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