By Gary Kirchherr
September was a good month to catch my breath. No computer-industry bombshells erupted that grinded my gears to any great degree.
I did, however, get a chuckle from an Associated Press story about the ongoing saga of Justice Department vs. Micro$oft. This was early in the month, when both sides were asking that the trial be postponed to Oct. 15, and Micro$oft was asking that the lawsuit be dismissed. Postponement granted, dismissal refused. Get ready for the show!
Anyhow, the Sept. 11 article said government lawyers suggested the existence of a collusion between the great crapware companies of our time - Micro$oft and America Online. The feds produced internal M$ documents from the desk of Bill Gates himself, who suggested that AOL agreed to distribute Micro$oft Internet Explorer in return for Micro$oft's including AOL with Windows. But this is more than a simple business quid pro quo. The arrangement took place even though, one, AOL Chief Executive Huckster Steve Case is quoted in court documents as saying that Explorer wasn't as advanced as Netscape Navigator, but was "good enough"; and two, Micro$oft Network was competing directly with AOL in the online-market business.
Now think about this a minute. AOL opted to use its competitor's product, even though AOL's boss himself said it wasn't as good, and M$ in return included its competitor's product with its omnipresent OS. Hmmmm.
Hey, why should AOL care if it's forcing its customers to use second-best? AOL has a chance to pull in more suckers by getting its software included with the OS with a de facto monopoly! And it's not as though AOL has a reputation of great software it has to protect! Further, why should M$ care if it's hurting its own online service by giving a competitor one of its products? By offering AOL a deal it can't refuse, Micro$oft extends its own monopolistic reach with an arrangement M$ didn't deserve. Not if one buys the M$ apologists' claim that the company is a success because of its "superior products."
Yup, Micro$oft and AOL truly is the other tawdry relationship of '98. Two class acts that deserve each other. Their respective users, however, deserve better.
Of course, more dirt than this came out in the last month, and not all of it related to the Department of Justice's case. For starters, a witness in the separate antitrust lawsuit Caldera filed against Micro$oft says documents were deleted from computers in a Micro$oft office during a federal investigation. The former Micro$oft employee says this took place from 1991-93, when Micro$oft was under scrutiny on charges it was engaging in antitrust measures to defeat DR DOS, a product that dared to compete with Micro$oft products. The full details are in a Sept. 2 article of Red Herring Online.
Also, on the heels of reports that Micro$oft bullied Intel into not developing competing products (a tidbit I mentioned in my September column), now Digital Equipment is saying Micro$oft forced it to abandon development of its own Internet product that - gasp! - didn't require Windows. CNNfn's Sept. 10 article also says then-Digital CEO Robert Palmer told Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison, whose company also was working on the project, that if he, Palmer, were subpoenaed by the Justice Department, he would "tell the truth." Hey, Justice Boys, are you listening? A Sept. 21 article in U.S. News & World Report said the New York Times reported that Gates told Palmer, "You have to decide if you're Larry's friend or my friend." So much for Micro$oft being a model of free-market capitalism!
The Digital story isn't even the first report of this kind of bullying. Check back to my Aug. 1 column to see what Micro$oft allegedly did to Acer America, or my Dec. 2, 1997 column for what Steve Ballmer, currently M$ president but then executive vice president and sales and service, told then-Pacific Bell CEO David Dorman. Micro$oft has all the subtlety of a rabid pit bull. Perhaps it's time to put that pit bull down.
But the most potentially incriminating news I read on Micro$oft this month was a ZDNN article of Sept. 14, which had some juicy morsels regarding Micro$oft's antagonism toward Sun's Java technologies, and the threat M$ suits felt from the combination of Netscape and Java. One M$ suit, a Moshe Dunie, e-mailed thusly: "To make [consumers] switch away from Netscape, we need to make them to upgrade [sic] to [Windows 98]." Further, he said, "[W]e can leverage these assets to convert the Navigator installed base and eclipse Netscape's browser market share leadership. But if we rely on IE4 alone to achieve this, we will fail."
Yeah. Heaven forbid you rely on details like product quality to gain market share, when you can ram it down Windows users' throat on the new, overpriced bug fix package. And then tell the judge at your antitrust case that M$IE isn't an illegally tied product, it's a "feature."
My favorite quote in the article is from another suit, one Jeff Raikes, who spake in a memo thusly: "Netscape pollution must be eradicated." Sheesh, these guys really take arrogance to a new level! I sure hope the Justice Department can knock them down a peg or two. For the sake of the industry, someone has to.
Before signing off this column, I'd like to take certain computer "experts" in the media (you and I know who they are) and rub their smug little noses into the overwhelming success of the iMac. In my September column I chastised those who wrote the iMac was a dismal machine because Apple made the bold move of abandoning the floppy drive, as well as the connectivity ports other Macintoshes have had since the original model. Well, give the buying public some credit for recognizing the unimportance of those Jurassic features, especially when the port replacement is the far-superior Universal Serial Bus. A Sept. 22 article in CNet notes that the iMac was the second-best selling computer in August. And the iMac was available for only 17 days in that month! Imagine Sammy Sosa coming in second in this summer's home-run race - if he had been on the disabled list until the All-Star Break.
Well, you naysayers, your ignorance is showing. Still, I'm so sorry that the iMac doesn't measure up to what you think a computer should be. Perhaps you'd prefer to stick to something "simple," without all those newfangled new features you obviously don't understand. WebTV, anyone?