Microsoft Pilloried For Doing Logical, Useful Things Well

If you think that my uncle, his wife and two children were murdered just because some people were greedy, you might be wrong.

At the time his family was transported from a small town in Slovakia to Auschwitz, you see, he was part of a problem. About 40 percent of all businesses in World War II Slovakia were in Jewish hands.

Isn’t that a monopoly? Wasn’t that a problem? Wasn’t his neighbor right to turn my uncle in and claim his bakery?

Of course the neighbor did not want my uncle’s family murdered. He didn’t know they would be. But things got a little out of hand.

That kind of reasoning is still present in some circles in Slovakia.

In this country, I think, it is demonstrated in the case against Microsoft:

Split Microsoft; it is too big.

Sixty years ago, very few people in Slovakia would have said so what if 40 percent of businesses are in Jewish hands? It’s not a problem.

Why should they say so if they could grab the bakery across the street? For people who are after bakeries they did not build, logic is not a friend.

I would like to hear an explanation of how and who would benefit from the breakup of Microsoft.

Many years ago, IBM was the king of computers. It still is to some extent. Did it produce the cheapest and fastest hardware? Certainly not. Did it develop the most efficient operating system? Not necessarily. Were its programming languages by far the best? No.

However, the fact that the hardware platform, operating system, programming environment and later on, the database system, could be acquired from one company and supported by one service unit was an unbeatable advantage - and it still is. The corporate world loved it for good reasons. It worked and still works for the customers. Were there any reasons to break up IBM? You know the answer.

Microsoft is much more aggressive than IBM was. It is hardly a market where Microsoft has no stakes: Internet servers, Internet entertainment, Internet browsers, development tools, office tools, databases. In addition, of course, there is the flagship product, operating systems.

Having developed the operating system, Microsoft has an inevitable advantage in developing, for example, a word processing program, while an outsider like Corel may be at a relative disadvantage tailoring its competing WordPerfect to the operating system. There is no doubt about that.

What are the consequences? Not necessarily negative.

Enter the Internet. Using Microsoft products and a technology called Active-X, you can send an application to the customer via Internet. The word processor can be part of that application.

However, everything must be in sync - the operating system, the browser, word processor and programmed shell. Do you really think somebody would benefit if those parts were from different vendors?

Let’s ask it this way. What is more important, to make it more difficult for Microsoft to couple its products with its operating system by breaking up the company or to support the seamless merging of functions that until recently nobody thought could be merged?

If you think Microsoft is mean while everybody else is nice, why is it then that Netscape does not support the Active-X technology? Borland is another competitor of Microsoft. Try to get technical support from that company and compare it to what you get from Microsoft.

The push to break up Microsoft is not about leveling the playing field for browsers or word processors. The market will not and cannot support dozens of word processors and scores of browsers. Yet if the company is broken up we will see an increase in confusion, especially in the Internet business area. That, of course, will generate business opportunities for companies that are unable to beat Microsoft today.

Whether these companies will benefit from it, I don’t know. The new owner of my uncle’s bakery went out of business.