IN THE WEEKS SINCE Judge Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft’s a monopoly, a lot of blather of varying degrees of insight and coherence has been written about what will and/or should happen next.
Microsoft itself, and the people who are paid to like Microsoft, insist the company should be left as-is, with the “freedom to innovate” (which is apparently something on the order of the right to do what you’re not doing now, but still want the option to do in the future).
Others want the Feds to create a bifurcated or trifurcated MS. They offer up various schemes for splitting the empire. Some schemes would leave one “Baby Bill” in charge of the Windows OS; others would have two or three companies that would sell their own versions.
And, natch, the “digerati” pundits in Silicon Valley couldn’t stop gleefully anticipating a future in which the pesky northern threat to total California control of everything “E” would be finished once and for all.
Meanwhile, back up here in my neck-O-the-woods, things have been, to say the least, “interesting.”
Local daily papers that seldom find a bad word for anything Gates-related have willingly run (out-of-town, syndicated) commentaries suggesting that Redmond’s Masters of the Cyber-Universe deserve all the comeuppance they’re gonna get.
MS cult members are even more true-believer than ever. They’re being taught to treat the federal and state antitrust cases as heathen attacks that only prove the total righteousness of the MS cause–doing everything one can for Bill (and for one’s own stock options).
Some of those Seattleites closest to MS are privately anticipating the excitement and drama a drawn-out divestiture dispute would bring; while publicly expressing concern about the future value of all the MS stock they and their pals hold.
In the fancy-schmancy restaurants and hoity-toity shops dependent upon MS hotshots’ spending power, and in the local arts groups and charities increasingly dependent upon cash from MS and from MS people, nobody’s talking publicly. Privately, few seem directly worried. They apparently figure the MS wealth machine will just keep on funnelling cash from the world into Western Washington, even if the machine’s eventually re-engineered into multiple smaller components.
Seattle, for better or worse, will never go back to its pre-MS status as a quiet, industrious town of aerospace engineers, sportswear vendors, and import/export lawyers. If there are Baby Bills, they’ll all likely stay based here. Indeed, if certain stock analysts are correct, the sum of the parts could come to be worth more than the whole. That means still more office and condo construction in town, more office and subdivision construction in the burbs.
These Baby Bills could be less monolithically institutional than today’s MS; more attuded to the rugged-bad-boy uber-capitalistic Attitude-with-a-capital-A seen in the rest of the software biz (including the companies founded here by MS refugees). Results: Even more monster SUVs crowding our roads. Even more silly “cuisine” restaurants. Even less affordable housing.
The computer world would face more profound changes–depending on how any breakup or set of restrictions on MS’s practices emerges. In one of the more radical scenarios, the Windows “standard” would dissolve as different Baby Bills offer different successors to the OS, each with its own add-on features. Application-software makers wouldn’t worry about getting run out of business by MS, but they would have to worry about making their stuff work on different post-Windows systems. (Of course, if they do that, then they’ll have code that’s probably also more easily portable to MacOS, Linux, etc.)
But if the video-game industry can still support between three and five platforms, then so can the “productivity” software industry.
TOMORROW: More on MS’s S/M.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper said he’ll retire in March, following public hue and cry over cop violence against peaceful WTO protesters last week. Already, the conspiracy theorists are wondering aloud whether the street cops had deliberately gone abusive last Wednesday night as an opportunity to force out Stamper. (The chief had taken pains in the past to forge a liberal, gay-friendly, community-friendly image. This stance caused many rank-‘n’-file cops to complain loudly about Stamper on hate-talk radio.) Since I’m not a conspiracy theorist myself, I have trouble believing this notion, but feel I should report it nonetheless.
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