Open Windows
Today Microsoft opens its defense against charges from 19 states and the Justice Department that it used monopoly power to require rivals and partners alike to use its Windows operating systems and Internet Explorer Web browser.
The government’s case against the Redmond, Wash., software giant is strong. Last week, for example, America Online Chairman Steve Case dismissed a key argument in Microsoft’s expected defense: that the proposed merger between AOL and Netscape Communications would create a competitor so formidable that Microsoft could no longer constitute a monopoly. Case told a Washington Post reporter that his company had “no flight of fancy that we can dent in any way, shape or form what is a [Microsoft] monopoly in the operating system business.” At the same time, consumer analysts accused Microsoft of using its power to bloat the price of its software, and industry experts said Microsoft was able to choke off the development of new Windows applications by vendors who wouldn’t bow to its terms. Pitiful giant, indeed.
Presiding over the trial is U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who was overruled by an appeals court after he ruled against Microsoft in a related case last year. The appeals court reflected a general reluctance among federal judges to apply vague U.S. antitrust laws against tough market players like Microsoft. In addition, federal regulators have not taken warmly to suggestions that Bill Gates’ Microsoft be broken into several “baby Bills,” fearing a breakup might throw one of the fastest locomotives in the American economy off track. And they know that cyberspace has been a home to staunch opponents of government regulation.
However, there is one way to reform Microsoft without dampening any free-market spirit: require it to open up its operating system to other software developers so programs can be written to work with Windows, with or without the approval and licensing of Microsoft.
Microsoft zealously guards its source coding, the actual commands that programmers write to create software, but while it might try to persuade Judge Jackson that its practice is standard in the computing world, the opposite is more and more true. Fueled by the growth of the Internet, freely traded coding, known as “open-source software,” has become so popular among programmers that many now regard it as a kind of moral principle. They profess a passionate belief in its ability to foster the kind of competition and intellectual exchange that’s essential to innovation, from creating more sophisticated software to fixing bugs and inefficiencies. Were Microsoft’s Windows to be opened, think of all the fresh air that would flow in.
