Michael writes:

> Microsoft is not, and never has been, a "monopoly" by any rational
>  definition.  They simply don't have the ability to force anyone to stop
>  competing with them.

Michael is correct. I too find the judge's findings disconcerting and a poor
precedent, with the obvious exception of any illegal Microsoft operating
practices. But I have no complaint about hard ball competition.

There was a time in the middle/late 1970's when I could say that I was
"richer than Bill Gates" and actually have it literally be true. During that
time, when I was a new assistance professor in the electrical engineering
department at our local university, I talked to Bill and Paul Allen and Monte
Davidoff often. They were only a little ways away -- and I was quite excited
about what they were doing (little did I know at the time that they had
"appropriated" almost all of their BASIC code). As I've said here before,
when Bill and Paul told me that they were going to drop out of school, I told
my wife that I was very worried about these guys. If things didn't work out,
they were going to be in a lot of trouble.

However, things began to work out almost immediately. After they moved their
operations to Redmond, the next time that I saw Bill was at a meeting held in
San Francisco, a meeting held basically for the purposes of stirring up in
interest among venture capitalists. The year was either 1980 or 81 or
possibly 82. Everyone was there on the dais: Gary Kildall, George Morrow,
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Ben Rosen, among a few others, I'm
sure.

At the end of the meeting, after everyone had their opportunity to spin their
version of the future, Ben Rosen returned to microphone and tried to put a
friendly summary on all of the divergent viewpoints. He said something like,
"Well, we've now heard from everyone and it's clear that there's going to be
a lot of choices out there in the future." Before he got much further, Bill,
who was still a scrawny punk kid at the time, jumped up and grabbed the
microphone from him and said, "No. That isn't true. There's only going to be
one winner."

Bill's comment greatly impressed me because, just by chance, that semester I
was teaching a graduate-level evolutionary biology class for engineers as an
experiment -- and that was precisely one of the morals that I was trying to
drive home in the class. In the absence of little differentiation in
fundamental purpose of being, there can only be one ultimate survivor. The
technical details simply don't matter that much. What does matter is who gets
the lead first and exploits it. I was very impressed that Bill understood
that moral that clearly.

An operating system is the form of construct that inherently leads to only
one survivor. Having only one common operating system is so advantageous to
everyone concerned that its appearance was inevitable. Michael's right. That
isn't a monoply, rather it was (and still is) an inevitability.

The common operating system now may not be Windows, or UNIX, or MacOS, or
BeOS, or anything else. It's more likely to be a common set of operating
standards that allow interoperability, an aspect of computing that was
completely unforseen in 1980. Nonetheless, having that common base is -- and
always has been -- inevitable, and it's foolish for any form of government to
try to impose those standards from the outside. That would be the worst
possible outcome of the recent ruling, if it sets a precedent for such
interference.

Wirt Atmar