| Tuesday, January
22, 2002
I have a lot of mail about the Microsoft case, most trying
to convince me that I am wrong about one thing or another. I remain
unconvinced. It is over: the lawyers keep hoping for some
enormous "settlement" that would give each of 100 million
consumers a $3 certificate and the law firms a few hundred million, but it
won't happen. Microsoft has the time, patience, money, and legal talent to
drag this on until everyone has forgotten what it was about, if they ever
knew in the first place. Second, it remains true that the
harm to consumers is theoretical, and the findings of harm all cite harm
to competitors. There are many theories, most originating with the
competitors, on why harm to competitors is equal to harm to consumers, but
the law is not written that way. It is not illegal to have a monopoly; it
is only illegal to use illegal means to acquire and keep it, or to have
legally acquired a monopoly and use it to the harm of the general public. Third,
those who seem to know more about my thoughts and beliefs than I do have
asserted that I must not believe in anti-trust. As I have said about a
hundred times (go back to Mail 26, or use the site search engine on
anti-trust), David McCord Wright used to say that the anti-trust act was
one of the things that upset Marx's calculations on the future of the
capitalist system, and I believe that thoroughly. Fourth:
the computer world changes, and often, and fast. Either Microsoft will
keep up with those changes, or it will vanish. Microsoft did not get where
it is by being extraordinarily clever, but the company was flexible to
changes. Its competitors were arrogantly stupid and unadaptive. I am not
at all convinced that I would be better off now had IBM won the war to the
death started when IBM walked out of the Microsoft OS/2 conference in the
presence of myself and most of the computer press and financial analysts.
I am not convinced that I would be better served by arrogant stupidity any
more than I am by whatever adjectives you care to use to describe
Microsoft. Fifth: we can all do more with these
machines than anyone I know including me ever thought we would be able to
do with them in 2002 back in the 80's or early 90's. The mass market
changed everything. Microsoft rode that wave. No one else did. For good or
ill, Gates's vision was the only vision large enough. We
come to a new phase now. We will see what happens. But the lawsuit is
effectively dead and will stay that way. The main outcome is that those
who started it now face a new level of tribute they must pay to the
government. Microsoft went from nothing to an enormous lobby effort. Their
rivals must match that. They can't really afford it, but it is they who
opened that front and it is they who must now pay. We live
in interesting times. And now Earthlink isn't working. For
a few minutes an hour all is well, then it just stops working. The
satellite connection is all right, but some router in the LA area isn't
connecting land lines. It was off much of the afternoon, then back on, now
dead again at 2010. No predictability, just one or off, and sudden. I
hate the Internet. It is less reliable than the telephone system was back
in 1950. It just periodically decides to die, and you can keep trying or
not to get back on.
Medal of Dishonor for America West
Joseph Foss got hassled by security guards at
Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport last week. These days that's
nothing unusual, but Foss is 86. He is a former governor of South Dakota
and a retired Marine general. And what made the crack security staff for
America West suspicious was the Medal of Honor he earned in 1943 for his
service in the Pacific theater.
"I was held up for 45 minutes, while
they decided what to do about the medal," Foss tells the Washington
Times. "I almost missed my flight, as they went back and forth."
Foss earned the medal for shooting down 26 enemy planes. Good thing he
didn't tell the guards that, or they'd never have let him fly.
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