By Joe Barr
Originally published in November, 1996

monopoly 1. a malignancy springing forth on the world from Redmond.

What if you got up tomorrow and the headline in the morning paper read "POWER COMPANY REPORTS RECORD INCOME AND ANNOUNCES RATE INCREASE"? More than a few angry callers would be lighting up the switchboard, I'm sure.

The funny thing is, almost exactly that situation just occurred. Not only did it not warrant a headline, nobody seems too upset by it. Well, it is the tres duh press, after all. It can't be expected to note things like incongruous announcements from the dominant firm in the industry.

Microsoft has just announced its first quarter results. Revenues are up 14% and net income is up 22%. At the same time, they have announced new pricing for its office suites which mean a 15% increase in cost to corporate customers.

Why? Because it can. Because MS operates as an unregulated monopoly. Thanks to a DoJ that lacks the balls to do its job, MS can set prices however it likes. Microsoft likes it like that. Its dominant position in the marketplace makes it immune to what the competition is doing. If it needs to give away a product for a couple of years, no problem. In fact it is doing just that as it kills Netscape. You think I exaggerate? It's been reported that Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates' right hand goon, tried to get a group of customers to follow his chant of "Kill Netscape! Kill Netscape!" at a recent get-together. What we are seeing with the nearly simultaneous announcement of record income and price increases is the other edge of that "free browsers today!" sword. It is how MS will behave in the browser market when the competition is dead.

The Redmonian death-grip on the PC operating system market, which equates to a sale with every new PC sold, is the goose laying all that gold at Gates' feet. Janet Reno and the Clinton administration seem to be dedicated to maintaining that status quo. Gates sneers at their half-hearted, meaningless investigations and conclusions. Who can blame him. At his request, Reno gladly emasculated the only fed who had enough of the right stuff to tell MS to shut up and sit down.

If you think this is going to self-correct, you're wrong. It's way past that. Microsoft makes the rules, they own the market, they own the press, and they appear to own the administration. At least when it comes to (not) enforcing laws governing anti-competitive restraint of trade.

How much more blatant can you be than MS was in its licensing of NT to eliminate the use of the workstation version as a host for competitor's web servers? All the while lying through its teeth about why it was doing so. How much more evidence is needed than the revelation that the MS employee who came up with the idea of using vaporware to stall the market while it sought to catch up with a Borland product was given the highest evaluation possible for an employee for that notion? So what, you say? Well, MS is now picking the last bits of flesh off the skeletal remains of Borland. They have cherry-picked two of Borland's best and brightest executives in the past month alone.

Where the stinking carcass of Borland lays today, so the rest of the competition will be tomorrow. A grinning Gates and his gang of thugs will be picking those bones, too. Unless and until enough people become fed up with his greed, his dishonesty, his disdain for the law of the land, it will only get worse.

So what'cha gonna do? Are you going to write the president, to the DoJ, to your state attorney general, and demand they do the job we put them in office to do, or are you just going to wimp out and play lemming? How about the next time the headlines read "RECORD PROFITS/PRICES GOING UP"? Or the time after that? Or the time after that?