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Browser wars & Cola wars:
Microsoft's battle to keep Coke's secret formula.

By Scott McCollum
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
February 15, 2002

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. <>

Email your comments to scott@worldtechtribune.com
 

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