Letter to the Editors of WSJ: Grotesque Ignorance
By Spencer Kittelson
Date: November 2, 2001
Your assertions of Microsoft's importance in bringing us
the web display a level of ignorance which is breathtakingly grotesque. How such
otherwise knowledgeable persons as the editors of the WSJ can spout such
reckless hyperbole is beyond comprehension.
Microsoft is a marketing and control company par excellence. As shrewd, cunning
and inexorably relentless businesspersons the top team at Microsoft is perhaps
without modern peer. As for technical skills, they are followers and not
leaders. When threatened, they bludgeon their way to success, lying, cheating,
coercing and buying their way to a point of control so that they may develop a
new revenue stream and control point.
Microsoft has counted on the plodding, agonizingly slow response of the legal
system to never quite be able to catch them in time to undo the damage they have
caused or prevent the furtherance of their dominance. This provides a veneer of
legitimacy their defenders use to great effect and which is very difficult to
counter. More than one pundit who has admitted their huge market distortions has
thrown up their hands at a remedy by saying it is just too late to do anything
about it. The same goes for the feds. The keystone cops in the DOJ completely
botched their early attempt at reigning in Microsoft and it certainly looks like
history is about to repeat itself.
All this time, Microsoft's enormous monopoly derived profits have been used and
will be used to entrench themselves ever more deeply into our psyches and
systems of communication and commerce, so much so that it will take decades of
effort to free ourselves from their ever increasing hegemony. This is an
enormous threat to our citizenry. Your editorial position mocks both recent
history and the tenets of governance by law and freedom of choice.
Microsoft did not invent the PC operating system MS-DOS. It was purchased and
subsequently slightly refined from a hybridized product developed by others to
mimic minicomputer operating systems. Had IBM insisted on a solid contract or
Apple computer had the sense to build more competitive hardware Microsoft would
have remained a minor player in the burgeoning technological revolution. Even
such now lost products as the Oasis operating system would have made MS-DOS and
early versions of MS-Basic look silly had they been marketed effectively.
Microsoft has never, not once, created a product category which in and of itself
they invented and drove to success. (The bundling of separate products into a
"suite" is a successful marketing ploy that some would now consider to be a
product category.) Even their vaunted "Visual" series of products came from
outside the company. Of course, their contributions to the fundamental
developments of the Internet are essentially zero. That's right, zero. That you
credit them with making "the Web revolution take off" demonstrates a lack of
intellectual integrity that amazes.
Microsoft did not invent the "windows" concept. It was appropriated from the
work of others and added on top of the unstable MS-DOS OS. Thus we have had a
decade or more of the three finger salute. The lost productivity alone is
perhaps in the trillions. (Of course, there is the benefit of requiring a new
legion of support persons to keep these brittle, failure prone systems working.
That is probably a form of economic benefit. I wonder what great things our
country could have done had such considerable talent actually been put to
productive use.) Had a legal case regarding patents on fundamental concepts gone
a slightly different direction, a direction much more likely in today's patent
law climate, Microsoft would have been dead in the water with no future in
graphical operating systems.
Microsoft did not invent the browser and their early efforts were comic.
However, they are persistent and can hide their development losses behind their
enormous monopoly profits and by controlling the desktop force their product
into such an opportunistic position that it is nearly impossible to ignore.
Along the way their exclusionary contracts with manufacturers effectively denied
competitive choice to hundreds of millions. The same ruthless exclusionary
tactics are now being applied against Real, Kodak and any other companies which
refuse fealty to the Redmondians. The intentional and illegal integration of the
browser (which is after all merely an application which uses the underlying OS)
into the OS and then providing a horribly broken version to meet the court's
requirements should have landed someone in jail on a contempt citation. The
testimony regarding the OS, its features and their anticompetitive actions
should have garnered a perjury conviction. How can you support such persons
without throwing away your own integrity?
Microsoft did not invent any form of secure networking but have borrowed from
and then co-opted various standards with the intention of creating a new, unique
standard which works better or only with other Microsoft products and services.
This is an enormous violation of the spirit of these days and although not
directly illegal is the most detestable form of theft. That they are now trying
to direct everyone and all future transactional data through their own servers
should raise a cry of alarm and not the absolutely foolish accolades you have
heaped in your editorial.
The increasing level of functional and application tie-in is of great alarm.
Microsoft completely missed the beginning of the Internet era and they are now
using their new desktop OS to drive uninformed users into giving up their
identity to a company which has proven itself unable to secure its own systems.
This creates the specter of gross loss of privacy and freedom, not to our
government, but to a demonstrably ruthless private company. That a monopoly is
now being used to create another monopoly that has knowledge of a great amount
of our private and behavioral information is a travesty and abdication of common
sense. Where are you editors on this matter? Do this not give you pause?
This is only a small analysis of how badly you have mischaracterized Microsoft.
When will you take your blinders off and look deeply into the long term
consequences of your position? Eventually it will be clearly seen that have
lauded a monster and will rue the day you failed in your duty to sound a warning
and support those who do see and have attempted to take reasonable and timely
action.
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Spencer T. Kittelson
CEO
Advanced Business Automation
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