REDMOND, Washington, April 5 -- The verdict is in. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has decided that Microsoft violated antitrust law with its efforts to drive Netscape and other software vendors out of business. Big deal.
No matter what remedy Judge Jackson imposes, it's a guarantee that Bill Gates and his lawyers will appeal -- and that the appeals process will probably take so long that the final outcome won't matter much.
However, if Judge Jackson is looking for ideas on what kind of sanctions to impose, I've got a suggestion. But first, let's summarize the problem we're trying to solve.
Would you like some brittle with that?
I'm not an antitrust lawyer, so I have no idea how Microsoft compares with the other great monopolies of American business, stretching back to AT&T, Standard Oil, and others. But I do know this: Microsoft's success, over the past 15 years or so, has led it to become a fat slob of a company that produces bloated, slow, buggy software that costs businesses billions of dollars a year in lost productivity.
I've complained about bloatware many times in this space -- but it bears repeating, because the problem keeps getting worse and worse every year. Software gets bigger and slower with each new release. What's worse is that it gets buggier and more crash-prone -- "brittle," as the software engineers say. When you have a big blob of code, written by hundreds of programmers, it's almost impossible to make it run efficiently. So Microsoft has basically given up -- instead of fixing the software, they keep tacking on more and more features no one really needs, and forcing users to upgrade their PCs every year or two.
Turning their products' flaws around and claiming they're the user's fault epitomizes Microsoft's "We can do no wrong" attitude.
A recent letter to the editor in PC Week noted that Windows 2000 requires several hundred megabytes of disk space just to get up and running. Awhile back, I upgraded my machine to Windows 98 (in a vain attempt to fix an e-mail problem -- see I hate software!, 11/22/99). But I've found that although some applications run a bit faster than they did under Windows 95, the system crashes more often than it used to.
What irritates me the most about the system crashes is the message you get when you reboot. This message captures, in a nutshell, what's wrong with Microsoft:
Because Windows was not properly shut down, one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it. To avoid seeing this message again, always shut down your computer by selecting Shut Down from the Start menu.
The problem, of course, is that there was no way to select Shut Down from the Start menu, or to do anything else except hit the power switch, because the system was frozen! Turning this around and claiming it's the user's fault epitomizes Microsoft's "We can do no wrong" attitude.
Last summer, I worked for a client that used a network of Windows NT workstations. I can say without hesitation that this was the most sluggish computing environment I've ever worked in. It typically took 15-20 minutes just to boot the machine, log into the network, and get ready to start working. I calculated that in the five months or so that I worked at the site, the money the client paid me to sit there while the machine booted would have been enough to buy a brand-new PC -- at retail prices.
Eat it and like it!
Industry leaders, in any segment of the computer business, tend to get fat and self-satisfied -- this is nothing new. In the mid-1980s, I spent a couple of years on the editorial staff of a magazine that covered Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), back when DEC was "the world's second-largest computer company." DEC was, at the time, the world's largest producer of minicomputers.
With market dominance, however, came arrogance. Ken Olsen, DEC's founder and CEO, showed symptoms eerily similar to those now exhibited by Bill Gates. When third-party companies started introducing DEC-compatible peripherals that were better, faster, and cheaper than their genuine DEC counterparts, the company responded not with partnerships, but rather with lawsuits. Covering a press luncheon, I once asked Olsen why his company assumed such a confrontational posture with companies who were helping DEC by making its computers work better. He replied, "We make a lot of money selling disk drives." The fact that his customers wanted the best products they could get didn't seem to concern him.
Olsen's short-sighted attitude was one of the reasons DEC collapsed of its own weight in the early '90s. Their products were too expensive, and the company wasn't responsive enough to its customers' needs. At that same press conference, Olsen stated, "The beautiful thing about Unix is that it doesn't do anything." He felt that if it wasn't a VAX/VMS system, it wasn't worth bothering with. Well, he may have felt that Unix didn't do anything -- but these days, Unix systems constitute the vast majority of servers and other minicomputers, while VAX/VMS, for all its technical virtues, is all but dead. And these days, DEC is a division of Compaq -- a PC company!
Judge Jackson should stipulate that for the next five years, Microsoft will not be allowed to introduce any new features or products -- the entire budget should go toward making each existing product smaller, faster, and less crash-prone than its current version.
IBM was the same way, in the PC market. For years, their products cost at least a third more than anyone else's, for the same amount of product. They got by with this for a long time, simply because they got into the market first and grabbed a market share that became self-fulfilling: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," went the saying. Eventually, though, people smartened up and realized that the PC had become a commodity -- so they started buying on the basis of price instead of brand.
How, then, has Microsoft managed to succeed where DEC and IBM failed? The difference is that MS has managed to get so big that you don't have much choice but to use their products. Where nobody used to get fired for buying IBM, nowadays, nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. So the company keeps growing like a snowball -- and rolling right over its competitors.
Get the lead out!
The Department of Justice's case against Microsoft, which emphasizes the company's tactic of giving a Web browser (albeit a fat, buggy one) away free and bundling it with Windows, misses the point. Sure, Microsoft did manage to sink Netscape (or at least drive it into the ground, to the point of being acquired by AOL). But that's only a small part of the story. The bigger problem is that MS has simply become so big, and reached the point where it makes so many easy sales, that it no longer has to make good products. It can get away with putting out fatter and fatter code that crashes more and more often, without facing any consequences.
Now that Judge Jackson has decided to throw the book at Bill Gates, however, he's got a golden opportunity to do something that would placate the "What's good for Microsoft is good for the country" libertarians and save the company's customers billions of dollars a year in hardware upgrades and lost workplace productivity.
Jackson should stipulate that for the next five years, Microsoft will not be allowed to introduce any new features or products -- he should impose a functional freeze, as they say in engineering departments. No new bells, whistles, Easter eggs, whizzy banners, or multimedia junk. No, the entire software development budget should be directed toward making every existing product smaller, faster, and less crash-prone than its current version.
Compliance would be easy to verify -- simply measure the amount of memory and disk space required by the present versions of Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and every other product that comes out of Redmond. Subject the software to thoroughly documented torture tests and see how often it crashes. Bang on the thing until its flaws are well-known. Then, with each new version, repeat the tests. If the new version is smaller, faster, and less likely to crash than its predecessor, it gets a thumbs-up; if not, it's back to the drawing board.
This remedy would accomplish much more, for those of us who use Microsoft products, than would be gained by breaking up the company, forcing it to play nice-nice with its competitors, or imposing hefty fines. If we could boot up Windows in the morning and have reasonable confidence that we'd be able to work all day without having to waste time with the Ctrl-Alt-Del three-finger salute, and that the software would run fast and efficiently, without bogging down every time we started another application, this would do more than any other remedy Judge Jackson could dream up. In the long run, it would even be good for Microsoft itself -- because it would stem the tide of customers and companies grasping for alternatives to the fat, slothful, brittle code coming out of Redmond. People might stop complaining and learn to love the Microsoft monopoly, if it made some decent software!
Copyright © 2000 John J. Kafalas
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