"There are no two ways about it: The settlement that
the United States Department of Justice reached last week with
Microsoft Corporation is only barely better than the one the
parties reached in 1995. Microsoft, adjudged guilty of essentially
hijacking the software industry, has agreed not to do it anymore
unless it wants to.
The settlement's announcement lit a fire under the tinfoil hat
crowd (details here), which was quick to come forward with
speculation as to the motives of secretive government officials,
the exchange of money, and other fanciful things that have no basis
in evidence, let alone fact. The actual explanation is a lot
simpler: Microsoft has flummoxed the Justice Departments of two
consecutive administrations -- in both cases after the judiciary
had decided that the charges against the company were more than
valid.
(I'll digress just a bit. Part of the job of prosecutors is to
make cases go away. That is why we have plea bargains and
settlements. In the current case, the judge strongly encouraged the
parties to settle. Any settlement at all provided the government
lawyers a tick in the win column, which is paramount to them.
Microsoft's lawyers had far stronger motivation to be tough
bargainers than did the government lawyers. And if you think that
all of this has nothing to do with justice, well, you're entirely
right.)
Indeed, the settlement actually has the government agreeing with
Microsoft that there is only one operating system in the world
today, and that operating system is Windows. It deals with opening
standards to the extent that non-Microsoft applications developers
can develop for Windows on an even field with Microsoft's own
application writers (yeah, right), but makes no provision for other
operating systems. Especially unaddressed is the matter of
preloads, meaning that computer buyers will pay the Microsoft tax
whether they use Microsoft's execrable (and, arguably, excreted)
software or not. In its purported attempt to limit Microsoft's
monopoly, the settlement in fact codifies it and if anything
extends it."
