| Friday,
June 23, 2000 I leave for PC EXPO tomorrow. I may or may
not be able to do some updating of this from New York. If not, I'll
try to send a few notes for Mr. Thompson to post for me. It will be a busy
day today so little will go up today either. I know I owe the subscribers
a report: I'll try to do a special from PC EXPO that will be mailed to
subscribers. But that won't happen today.
Today I do have a longish thing that was a reply on a discussion forum
and which got away from me in length. It is probably worth posting here:
Regarding punishing Gates for his arrogance to the court:
First, there is a long tradition in the US of not being subservient to
government. In this modern day of Empire we have forgotten it, but
citizens don't HAVE to kowtow and knock the head to the floor in the
presence of royalty, even judicial royalty.
Second, Microsoft may have been guilty of many of the things discussed
here, but THAT WAS NOT TRIED, and unless we have got to where you simply
assume guilt based on feelings and rumour, then even Microsoft is entitled
to the assumption of innocence. Or so I would have thought before the
excellent instruction I am getting here.
Microsoft was, if you read the findings, found guilty in regards to the
Web Browser, which they gave away; and of having a monopoly and misusing
it, but not of business practices that would have been illegal if they had
not had a monopoly. The monopoly was artificially defined, and the domain
of competition left out Apple and Mac; Playstation; all brands of Unix;
Linux; Sun; and indeed everything except, well, except Windows, really.
The domain was defined incorrectly and any competent court will so find.
It is like the case years ago in which breakfast was defined as cold flake
cereals, leaving out every other form of breakfast including hot and
instant. If you define the sales domain narrowly enough, ANYONE has a
monopoly.
Many of the practices which are considered nasty here may be illegal
and may not be: the issues were not tried. They are now being considered
in the remedy as if they were tried, so that the remedy is to be applied
to wrongs that Microsoft has not been found guilty of.
Microsoft's legal defense was pretty dumb, and Gates might well have
been hit with a contempt of court citation and fined a million dollars;
but that was not done. His corporation isn't just his, and to harm all the
stockholders because Gates flipped the bird to the judge seems to me a bit
unfair; perhaps someone here has a good reason why an elderly
stockholder's pension fund ought to be devalued because of Gates's
supposed arrogance? If he was contemptuous to this court then let him pay,
personally; but that shouldn't be a factor in the corporation's guilt or
innocence. I am on public record as saying that I with my family lawyer
(or Mr. Pleasant, or any competent lawyer who could read up on procedure)
could have conducted a better defense than Microsoft put on. But that is
in part due to Microsoft's incomprehension of what they were charged with.
I have long been on record as saying Microsoft ought to publish all
Windows hooks that any Microsoft application makes use of the day that the
call is written into any code at Microsoft; that it ought to be a firing
offense not to make that known to the Technet staff when the call is used.
I think that would not harm Microsoft and would do the rest of us a little
good. But the issue WAS NOT TRIED. There is no finding that Microsoft has
used any secret calls. There is merely the assumption that this is a wrong
to be righted, but it was not tried or proved.
Penfield Jackson has the feeling that the harm to consumers has come
from an artificially high price for Windows. What the price ought to be
was the subject of some "expert" testimony from people who
haven't been known for having low prices or low profit margins. The
laughable part is Apple, which is known to be overpriced, and which as as
much of a monopoly in its sales domain as Microsoft does in the one
defined for Microsoft; but Apple is considered a competitor when looking
at Apple, while Microsoft is considered a monopolist without competition
when looking at Microsoft. This seems an odd finding. And as to the
"should have been" price of Windows, is there anyone here who
would have predicted that you could buy Windows and the entire Office 2000
suite for less than you used to pay for WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3 together?
I did, but I think I am the only one who did.
Ralph Nader's people say Microsoft restricted the size of the market.
This is laughable: there isn't anyone other than Gates, including me, who
had a clue as to how large the computer market would be in 2000 as late as
1990, and damned few who understood how it would grow as late as 1995.
This is a silly thing for Nader to say, but then Nader has been saying
silly things for two decades.
What Microsoft was found guilty of was pretty narrow and in my contemptuous
way I keep bringing up The Channel Bar. Most of this will be about as
relevant as dominating the channel bar.
The fact is that it's hard to show on economic grounds that anti-trust
actions have done much good. Trusts aided by government are dangerous. I
don't like big concentrations of power; but I like even less a big
concentration in government with no countervailing power anywhere, and
that is what is happening today, with anti-trust being used to destroy any
power center that might threaten the Empire.
You may not care much for Gates and Microsoft; but then the Barons at
Runnymede were a pretty arrogant lot, and much nastier than Gates. Normans
tend to be. When the enemy is Empire, the players don't tend to be
sensitive new age men.
The real outcome of this case is already apparent with Gates on TV all
the time, the Microsoft lobby busy as hell in the District of Columbia,
the Microsoft PAC already the largest high tech donor this year and just
getting started (after being insignificant in giving last year). Other big
firms will follow suit as they realize they are next on the hit list. Get
ready for lobbying like nothing you have ever ever seen.
If this is to be a self-governing Republic then abstract notions of
what's right remain that, and are not to be enforced by the Department of
Justice, which must be restricted to what is on the Twelve Tables or in
this case in the Constitution and Statutes; and that means that a number
of arrogant people will get away with a lot of stuff that most of us don't
much like. That's the nature of a self governing Republic.
If this is to be the kind of Constitutional Republic that has remnants
of Crown Power that we were for 200 years, then a different adjustment
must be made, but it is still the case that winning in a competition is
not automatically a conviction of using illegal practices; and once again,
we must be prepared for some outcomes we don't like, but which must be
remedied in law, not in our druthers. The cost of Republic is some
concentrations of power outside the District of Columbia to counterbalance
the concentrations in what used to be a small southern town until WW II.
You will get state and city bosses. They have always been part of our
system. And "robber barons" and other concentrations of wealth
but at least there will be multiple centers of power.
What we are seeing, though, is Empire: all power to the District, all
power through the District, and any power center large enough to challenge
the District to be destroyed. That is Empire, and it is alien to my
generation of Americans although it seems to be more and more accepted
among those who never knew better and who no longer study history. That battle
is not yet over; and the longer it goes, the more need we will have of
Barons like those at Runnymede, who were not concerned with the rights of
"the people" and certainly not with the rights of the Saxon
citizenry. Who were nothing like nice people. If you want to see them in
their best light (about 100 years before Runnymede, but things didn't
change a lot) see the Brother Cadfael mystery series set in the time of
King Stephen. (Stephen was succeeded by Henry II, whose sons Richard and
John became king in turn; it was John who signed Magna Charta. Mind you,
Ellis Peters shows these arrogant old Normans in their BEST light, and
indeed some of them were brave and admirable but nice was not in their
makeup.)
If Penfield Jackson's decision stands, there may be no way back to the
Constitutional Republic, let alone the self-governing Republic that has
always been our ideal although almost never achieved in practice. We may
be rushing toward a choice: the Barons at Runnymede, or Empire pure and
simple. I probably won't live to see the outcome, but then I never thought
I would live to see storm troopers with machine guns rushing into a
private house to seize a child, trample on reporters, shout obscenities
and death threats -- and walk away, not merely unpunished but anonymous.
Anonymous. Like the Storm Troopers in Star Wars.
There is more at stake here than Windows. Or so I believe.
Everything happens at once. Today arrives the NEC MobilePro 780, a
Windows CE system that looks like they did it all right: the keyboard is
large enough to write with, the unit is small enough to fit in a brief
case, and it just looks GOOD. We'll see: I'll take it to PC EXPO.
If any of you are or know PR people, PLEASE: fancy press releases with
Java motion, attachments, links to web sites that have to be activated
(meaning that if you are not on line when you try to read the press
release things hang up forever before they time out) and all that stuff
SHOULD BE RIGHT OUT. Please. Journalists who would be impressed with that
stuff are not people readers trust anyway.
XEROX recently sent one that I have not been able read. I erased it. It
came from Xerox [3125-1098@121.INNOVYX.COM]
but I can't send them a complaint because mail to that address is returned
as undeliverable. This thing was horrible, I don't know what it wanted to
tell me, and it cost me time I don't have. I will in future set all mail
from Xerox to go into the Spam filter until I get some assurance from
their people they won't DO this again. What did they think they were
doing?
And either the Netwinder is going South, or Earthlink has done
something very odd. My connection is dropped ten times an hour or more
now. The Netwinder redials, and eventually it gets connected, but it makes
keeping up the site difficult. I'd buy ISDN just to not have dropped
lines, only I can't get it, and my execrable Cable Monopoly doesn't offer
cable modem. I presume all this will change in a few months. I can
hope, anyway. And maybe Earthlink has a bad modem? I changed modems
to a US Robotics, but that hasn't done any good. Sigh.
THIS IS DRIVING ME MAD. Earthlink didn't used to do this to me. Now we
have to dial every couple of minutes. It makes it sheer hell to get things
up on the web. This is driving me nuts, as is the next item:
Does anyone know Windows 2000 Server and Professional well enough to
know how to make my server, Imperator, stop sending messages to my work
station, Princess, every time a print job is done? The things pop up and
take the foreground even when I am writing, so the next thing I hear is
bong-bong-bong-bong as I try to type, until I tell the stupid message
"OK". Why the HELL Microsoft thinks I want to know this, or that
I must respond to it before I can do anything else, is way beyond me.
Cursory plumbing around in the Administrator Tools didn't help, so please
DO NOT SPECULATE: if you know how to fix this please tell me, and if you
don't, wait until we find out. I can't deal with a hundred guesses today.
I just received Norton Personal Firewall UPS express. I'll have to try
it, but with the Netwinder I don't really need it. Readers who have used
it welcome to comment, and I'll try it when I get home.
Now to wind down for catching an airplane...
Earthlink has decided to drop me every minute now. Constant redialing.
Nothing here has changed. There are times when I really hate ISP's. Only,
it turns out, this was NOT Earthlink's fault. It was sort of the
Rebel Netwinder, and sort of a bad phone line needing a better quality
modem. I'll put it all in the column, but the remedy was: 1) change
modems, to a US Robotics, to deal with a line gone noisier than it used to
be; and 2) go into the Netwinder's scripts, because once it detected a
different modem it reverted to dial on demand rather than by hours; change
that back from demand to "stay up until I tell you it's OK to
drop"; 3) reset the machine. Now I have to do some funny magic
regarding the ftp barrier, but that's not so hard. Hurrah. I seem to have
managed it. And my problems are ended. Earthlink, you have my apologies,
and I hope I can withdraw all those curses I have sent off into the aether...
Well, I spoke too soon. Earthlink keeps dropping me anyway. Sigh. Now
at least I am not dropping myself. I changed modems because Earthlink kept
throwing me off. So I guess those curses didn't need to be
withdrawn...
Changed phone numbers. Let's see if that helps... Well, I can't
be sure that it's dialing a different number, unless I reset the NetWinder;
not sure how to force it to reinitialize the script. But I am sure getting
thrown off Earthlink every couple of minutes. Blast. Double blast.
And of course it's today when I need to get things done. Why not?
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