In response to
Megan McArdle's screed on the Microsoft decision:
While I don't have to like (and don't) the entire question of the anti-trust trial against Microsoft, I do have to push back against the notion that "one platform for everyone" is beneficial to consumers. Greater competition and pressure to innovate is beneficial to consumers. My principal complaint about Microsoft is that they almost single-handedly turned personal computing from a revolution that was focused on the individual to a mere extension of corporate computing: we have PC's, not so that we can extend our own intellectual capability, but so that we can compatibly take our work home with us, thereby making the longest working hours of any developed nation even longer.
To have gone from the IMSAI and its brethren in the mid 1970's to the level of stagnation that we have circa 2000 is at least tragic, if not criminal. It's easy to understand why some people feel that something has to be done. I harbor those feelings at times, but I feel the need to temper them by considering the possibility that perhaps, given Moore's Law, this was inevitable: the increase in personal computing power far outstripped any increase in our collective imagination as to how to take advantage of that power that might have resulted in a more competitive personal computing market. I do most definitely feel strongly that the mismatch between Moore's Law and any similar increase in quality of our development tools has impeded competition: it's far more difficult than it should be to write software that fully leverages the massive amounts of power that the hardware now affords us unless you have accumulated the resources that Microsoft has.
So while I'm sympathetic to the concern that many people share about Microsoft's role in the industry, it's not clear to me as a technologist that having the government define what is an "application," what is "middleware," and what is an "operating system" is at all desirable for reasons that should be crystal clear to any technologist, but also frankly because I'm largely persuaded that Microsoft were aided and abetted by natural causes.
Hmm. Part of me also feels, however, that once you are, in fact, convicted of a crime, you should be punished accordingly. So on the same principle that disgusted me when the impeached Bill Clinton was not removed from office, seeing the illegal monopolist Microsoft walk away with a slap on the wrist rankles.
Finally, Megan, you keep talking about the Macintosh and Unix as if Apple weren't the largest commercial Unix vendor in the world, and as if you couldn't get one of these UNIX systems for $800. Apple has given the industry IEEE 802.11 wireless networking and IEEE 1394 high-speed serial connectivity, both of which have enjoyed wide-spread adoption by other vendors. Apple also gave us QuickTime but has largely squandered their early lead in that market. More recently, Apple has included ZeroConf networking in their operating system—and open-sourced their implementation, sans GUI, for others to benefit from. I mention all of this not so much to praise Apple per se as to give concrete examples of what the actions of a genuinely innovative, customer-focused computer company can look like. I could easily have done the same for Be if they had survived.
Bottom line (for me) is that it's vitally important that Microsoft have competition, and I have concrete examples as to why. It's an open question as to how best to ensure that they do.
