Volitional Science

The US Government wants to split Microsoft into two parts.

And who is in charge of making the plan to split Microsoft into two parts?

Microsoft.

The proposed remedy actually requires Microsoft to make the plan to split itself up.

I told you that the regulated party always gets to regulate itself.

Now, I actually read on MSNBC an article that talked about how breaking the company up would increase choice.

But there is one choice that, under the US Government's plan, is not on the menu anymore - and that's one-stop shopping.

Never mind that the US Government's plan is stupid and doesn't make any intelligent distinctions about how to break up the company. For instance, the new Applications Business (which I will call The Microsoft Company) and the new Operating Systems business (which I will call The Windows Company) are allowed to share intellectual property from the start, except in the case of an Internet Browser.

In this case, the "browser" is required to be part of The Microsoft Company and not The Windows Company.

What exactly constitutes the browser? Sure, in Windows 95 you could buy an add-on pack that contained additional browsing capability. But since the release of any of the Windows 95 Service Releases ("OSR"), and Windows 98 (both versions), the browser really is integrated with the operating system.

The shell, or desktop user interface, has all kinds of buttons and dialog boxes that directly support browsing the web, or your file system, or your local intranet directly without launching "the browser".

I hate to break the bad news to the US Government, but there are a lot of shipping applications that depend on Internet Explorer being installed on the computer in order to function correctly. And there are far more that have been built by businesses to support their internal applications. Who's going to pay the expense for converting or upgrading all the applications built for internal use, by businesses all around the world, that depend on the functionality exposed by Internet Explorer? Web surfing APIs are as natural in an operating system as file system APIs were 40 years ago.

But back to one-stop shopping. Many consumers and businesses have made it clear both by their shopping patterns and in recent polls that they prefer to buy one integrated software product from Microsoft that is immediately useful, out-of-the-box, without a lot of add-ons. Many consumers and businesses prefer the so-called monopoly.

The US Government, in its stupidity, is trying to remove the choice of a single, strong, reliable, reasonably predictable source of operating system services (including lots of user interfaces) that a lot of individuals want. Most software businesses prefer a stable delivery platform - Windows - to which they can target their software. And there several alternatives with the most famous right now being Linux. (Don't even get me started on Java - MS has the fastest implementation of Java [at least on PCs] hands-down - Java is a viable alternative to the Windows APIs. Sure you have to code with care for portability - that's true for Windows too.)

The US Government is trying force a single HDTV standard on us and failing miserably. But here is a company, Microsoft, that has created a single useful standard that anyone can develop on, and done a great job of it, and been rewarded with tons of money because lots of people want that functionality and the US Government wants to punish them for it. Unless you've been in the trenches working on this kind of stuff, it's hard to know what an exceptional achievement the creation of the Windows platform is.

And if Microsoft's management of this so-called monopoly is too heavy-handed, guess what - there's Linux waiting in the wings with many fewer restrictions. If Microsoft's Windows platform is to be replaced, it will be because clever programmers like Linus Torvald and others write a replacement, not by US Government intervention. Why not let Windows be useful while it is useful and let something else take over when Windows time is up?

And of course, this whole proposed remedy doesn't address the real problem that is not Microsoft-specific, namely, that big corporations squish little innovators.

And the reason that any statist-solution won't work is that the "owner" of the solution is going to be a bureaucrat who doesn't really own the solution or the process, and can make arbitrary and stupid decisions without getting into any trouble for it. The "Compliance Committee" that Microsoft would be required to create by definition in the proposed remedy must not consist of any owners of Microsoft. This Compliance Committee is going to consist of morons with no proprietary interest in doing the right thing. In fact, by definition, this committee will have an anti-proprietary interest in breaking up Microsoft.

And then there is the problem that Gates only gets to be a stockholder in one of the companies. Who is going to compensate him for the billions of dollars of value the US Government wants to steal from him?

Well, one bit of good news is that Microsoft, faced directly now with the idea of having a Compliance Committee in their executive offices is finally outraged at what is being done to them. Hopefully they will get off their asses and really start to fight this thing. They've treated the whole idea of US Government interference with their business as some kind of minor irritant, not recognizing how damaging the bureaucrats can be. Gates should let Balmer run things, put this "Chief Software Architect" stuff aside, and take on the title of "Chief US Government Butt-Kicker" and really fight this thing with all the tenacity he's ever fought anything in his life.

I can tell you by reading the proposed judgement that the people who drafted that thing don't know anything about running a business or about the technology of web browsing, and I don't want those morons making choices for me. I'd rather have a Microsoft so-called monopoly any day, because Microsoft is kept in check by market forces that result in clever things like Linux, while the US Government is constrained by very little at all.

Here's another funny thing - the proposed remedy to anti-competitive behavior requires Microsoft to stay in business and continue to remain profitable. How is that for muddled thinking? The proposed remedy to "slow down" and "restrain" Microsoft requires Microsoft to continue to maintain itself as a profitable business to their best of their ability. I thought that's what they'd been doing the whole time.

Microsoft would not be allowed to simply close the doors and shut down.

You know what that is? That's slavery and I thought we outlawed that in 1860's. *Sheesh*.