Have any of you ever referred to a carbonated soft drink as a "Coke"
even though it was not a Coca-Cola product? You have? Great! From
this information I'm pretty sure we can make a case in Federal court
that the Coca-Cola Company has a monopoly in the soft drink market.
There's no way Coca-Cola can refute those claims in the face of their
blatantly anti-competitive monopolistic practices! We can get some
completely partisan and totally anti-free market academics to be
"expert" witnesses in the case. When we're done we can ask the judge to
force Coca-Cola to give their competitors the secret formula to Coke!
Then, when we see how haphazard and foolish the science behind Coke's
secret formula is, we can all laugh at it and use only the good parts to
make a better soft drink!
As childish (and downright stupid) as this sounds, it is the same
attitude evident in the new demands made by the nine hold out states
that refused the Microsoft antitrust settlement offered in November. If
you'll recall, one state involved in the lingering antitrust suit, New
Mexico, settled with Microsoft completely, while nine of the remaining
eighteen states agreed to the proposed settlement. In the settlement,
Microsoft would concede many of the licensing demands made by the states
in the antitrust suit. The nine remaining states, homes states for those
tech businesses who would rather sue than compete, said the
settlement wouldn't go far enough to ruin Microsoft's business and
continued to sue.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the no-nonsense judge assigned to the case
after original judge Penfield Jackson was found to have a strange grudge
against Microsoft, ordered that the nine states settle the mess by
March. In early February, the nine hold out states demanded that Judge
Kollar-Kotelly force Microsoft to give up the intellectual property
rights of their Windows operating system code, strip away their
immensely popular Internet Explorer web browser from all new versions of
Windows and insert Sun Microsystems' Java program into Microsoft's
Windows operating system. The states claimed that without seeing the
source code to Windows, the states could not prove that the Internet
Explorer web browser (the application that former Internet monopolist
Netscape could not compete with and filed the original antitrust
suit over five years ago) was truly integrated into the Windows
operating system as Microsoft says.
Here's where I want to give you a fact that is shockingly underreported:
Microsoft proved to Judge Jackson in the antitrust case four years ago
that Internet Explorer is integrated into the Windows operating system.
What is commonly reported is that in 1998 Princeton University computer
science professor Dr. Edward Felten and his "two young assistants" came
up with an Internet Explorer uninstall program that kept Windows intact
that he demonstrated for the court. The shocking part is how Microsoft
VP Jim Allchin immediately proved that there were almost a dozen ways
users could still access Internet Explorer after running Felten's
"uninstaller" and how portions of the Windows operating system were
damaged in the wake of Felten's program. Allchin's evidence was not
demonstrated live in the courtroom, proved the government's expert
witness wrong and therefore must not have been deemed newsworthy by the
majority of the tech press.
Still, four years later, the states are claiming that Internet Explorer
is not really an integrated part of Windows and Microsoft needs to show
them the millions of lines of programming code to prove it. Microsoft
replied that it was ridiculous to freely hand over their valuable
intellectual property to the people that passionately hate them. I
found no reports of property rights protections offered by the state AGs
to Microsoft if they gave them the Windows source code. Without some
kind of non-disclosure agreement signed by the state AGs and any
so-called disinterested third party technical experts, what's to keep
Microsoft's competitors from taking the good stuff out of the Windows
code and using it to make Red Hat Linux, Oracle 9i or Sun Solaris
operate more efficiently? The anti-Microsoft techies will immediate
claim that Windows' "bloated" code is no good, but if that were truly
the case why do they all want it so badly? Why, to make it better,
silly! I'm sure that's exactly what the chemical geniuses at Pepsi
would do with Coke's secret formula too!
Microsoft also noted they had evidence that executives from one of their
biggest competitors, the Microsoft-bashing database software giant
Oracle, helped draft the nine states' new settlement demands. Oracle,
who was caught hiring private investigators to dig through garbage bins
at Microsoft's offices in an unsuccessful attempt to find some kind of
incriminating evidence in the antitrust case, didn't deny that one
of their currently employed VPs wrote some of the states' demands.
Caught red-handed in their dirty tricks, the states' amoral lawyers
cried that Microsoft was attacking them by pointing out they were
colluding with Microsoft's hated enemies.
Microsoft is going to have to stick to their guns on this one, but they
cannot just say: "No, we're not gonna give you our stuff." The
perception many have of Microsoft is they are a monolithic and arrogant
corporation that stonewalls any investigation. Personally, I'd rather
see Microsoft go on offense in 2002. The facts speak for themselves
when it comes to the inherent hypocrisy of their enemies like Sun
and Oracle ø use those facts in Federal court and (most importantly) in
the court of public opinion. If Microsoft doesn't do something about
these nine states' frivolous lawsuit soon, we should all brace for the
States vs. Coca-Cola antitrust litigation sponsored by Pepsi.
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