by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley

As soon as the penalty was announced, I started getting mail from friends who, for legitimate reasons, have despised Microsoft for years -- Mac users, people with carpal tunnel problems, people aggrieved over the turgid speed of new application on old machines.

They were ecstatic over the lawsuit. All the crashes and upgrades, all the aggravation, all the money pouring from their pockets to help build Gates his $120 million home -- revenge is sweet.

I'll be in trouble with them for saying this, but I think the government suit is wrong.

First, Internet Explorer follows a trend that Windows, and for that matter, Macintosh's operating system has always followed: it is an add-on program that nests neatly within Windows. Though it can be marketed separately, it "belongs" with Windows just as much as Wordpad, Hyperterminal, and Minesweeper do.

Second, there is a political aroma about the prosecution. I mean, who cares about browsers. The announcement was made not by the antitrust team at Justice, but by Attorney General Janet Reno, herself. Janet Reno is better known for setting ordinary citizens on fire than for vigorous prosecutions of celebrity defendants. But Microsoft's Bill Gates is the exception. Despite all his riches and clout, or perhaps because of them, he makes an excellent scapegoat for an administration with its own antitrust (election fraud) problems. Gates may be the only baby boomer in the world people would rather see publicly spanked than the president.

Third, a part of me is sympathetic to Microsoft's predicament. They are under fire for the horrible crime of being competitive and successful. In Randall E. Stross's The Microsoft Way, recently released in paperback by Addison Wesley ($13), he makes the case that Microsoft is not like the antitrust targets of the past. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a vertical hierarchy, controlling the oil market from well to pump. AT&T in the 1970s was a government-tolerated monopoly.

Microsoft has unfair advantages in the area of software development -- it knows the operating system long before competitors do. But business is rife with that kind of unfair advantage. Meanwhile, customers, who could easily buy from Apple or Sun or Oracle or Novell or Corel, keep buying from Microsoft -- doggone them.

Stross, an earnest cheerleader for Microsoft, quotes Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand: "The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned upon when he wins."

I have spoken to a few acquaintances at Microsoft, and they feel, despite their company's eating everyone's lunch for breakfast, curiously like victims. The world is picking on them, in their view, because they're smart, and they work hard, and they do good work. They see themselves like that painting of the honest tiller in the fields, resting on their hoe between lines of C++. Yes, they also stole all of Apple's best ideas, but hey, Apple stole 'em from someone else.

Finally, I confess that I admire Bill Gates. I followed him on an interview program a couple of years ago when we were both flogging books. (His book, The Road Ahead, benefited from the regimen, whereas mine stayed flogged.) Stuart Varney, the early-morning CNN anchorman, expressed his dislike to me for Gates and all that Gates stood for. It was apparent to me, even at 5 a.m., that what the British-accented Varney really hated was computers, and that he was a bit of an idiot.

But he (Gates) is a very good businessman, who has made many very smart business decisions in his time. His products don't cause cancer, and they have changed the world in interesting and positive ways. And I admire his courage in being a public person, which must surely go against his essentially nerdy and therefore misanthropic grain.

That doesn't mean I don't still enjoy a good Bill Gates joke, the latest of which goes a little like this:

Bill Gates dies and finds himself face to face with God. Because of Gates' mixed record, God gives him a choice of Heaven or Hell. Gates asks to see Hell first, to check it out. When he materializes there, he finds it to be a clean, well-regulated place, with sandy beaches and tall mountains, and lovely nymphs in diaphanous outfits prancing alongside rippling streams.

"Hell is great," Gates calls out to God. "Please send me there immediately!"

Time passes and God decides to check on the billionaire. He finds Gates shackled to a wall in a dark cave amid bone-thin men and tongues of fire, being burned and tortured by demons. "Hey," God says, "how's it going?"

Bill cries out in anguish. "This is horrible! It's nothing like the Hell I visited! What happened to the place with the beaches and the mountains and nymphs?"

"Oh, that" God replies. "That was the demo."

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com