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Given the nature of the country we live in, it shouldn't be a surprise how much a person's credibility improves once his net worth gets into 11 digits, even when he's contradicting himself.
The contradictory fellow is Bill Gates of Microsoft, the giant computer software company which has been found guilty of anti-trust violations by a federal judge.
Now it's time to find a remedy for those violations.
Gates has been spinning about how he wants his company to
keep its precious freedom to innovate
when there's
not a shred of evidence that the company has ever exercised
that freedom in the past.
It's as if a common street thug, after being duly convicted of robbery at his trial, asked the judge not to send him to jail, because if he were free, he could continue his important work of assisting Mother Theresa's hospice in Calcutta.
Nobody would believe the robber, but that 11-digit net worth must convince millions of Americans to believe Bill Gates. Fortunately, a federal judge hasn't, and the court is considering a proposal to split Microsoft into two pieces: one for operating systems like MS-DOS and Windows, and one for applications like Word and PowerPoint.
This is a good idea, though the reasons are rather technical.
A computer operating system provides services to application programs. Suppose you're writing a program, and you need to write data to a file. You could write your own write-to-file procedure, but since most programs need this ability, and they should be able to handle each other's files, it makes sense for the operating system to provide this service.
That way, it's available to all programmers. All they have to do is look in the operating system's published documentation for programmers.
Suppose, though, that there are special procedures hidden in the operating system, things that aren't published bout could be quite useful. You're just a garage-shop hopeful who's writing a program, and you don't know about these. You've got to write your own routines.
You're competing against a programmer who works for the operating-system company, and because she works there, she knows about those unpublished but useful features.
Back in the MS-DOS days, Gates said that this didn't
happen. Microsoft application developers had no inside
unpublished knowledge about MS-DOS. There was a Chinese
Wall,
Gates said, and so programmers at Borland or Word
Perfect were competing on a level field against programmers
at Microsoft's applications division.
Even then, the Chinese Wall was porous. When you opened up a Microsoft application program with a debugger, you'd find undocumented MS-DOS functions.
Microsoft's developers obviously had and used insider knowledge that was kept from other programmers. That made other software companies less able to compete with Microsoft's applications. It wasn't because they were inept programmers or their ideas weren't good -- it was because Microsoft published one set of MS-DOS specifications for software developers, but had a different and more complete set for its own application developers.
This was unfair, so unfair that Gates used to deny that it happened. Thus his Chinese Wall.
He now contradicts what he said then. These days, he
says it's important that his application developers (the
folks who produce Microsoft Office, for instance) be able
to work as a team with his operating-system developers (the
folks who produce Windows 2000, which is supposed to be
13 times more reliable
than Windows 98, which makes
you wonder why they didn't make Windows 98 reliable since
they seemed to know how).
So how, then, could the Corel office suite, designed to run under Windows 98, ever fairly compete with Microsoft Office, also designed to run under Windows 98?
Who's going to invest the time and money into competing with Microsoft's application products when Microsoft's application developers are teamed up with its Windows developers? Where's the incentive for innovation?
That's the real issue in this. It's a benefit to have one operating system in wide use, because that greatly simplifies matters for application programmers who write the software we use. We get lots of software in a competitive market, and hey, there might even be some innovation.
But if the operating-system company rigs things in favor of its own applications programs -- which is what happens at Microsoft when Gates talks about teamwork between the Windows people and the Office people -- then we don't get the benefits of a competitive market in applications software.
Microsoft isn't being punished for being successful. It's being punished for cheating. And if you don't believe me, get out a debugger, step through a Microsoft application, and start counting the undocumented system calls.
Do note, however, that this is probably a violation of your software license agreement with Microsoft. The company does not want you to know how it does things.
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