2005: A Microsoft odyssey, the final chapter

By Christine Burns
Network World, 03/22/99

This is the third in a series of three articles exploring what might lie ahead for Microsoft should the Department of Justice win its antitrust case against the software giant. So far we have considered what might happen if the judge split Microsoft into different companies or forced the company to give Windows source code away for free. In this final installment, we take a look at what could happen if Microsoft was forced to operate under the constant scrutiny of government regulators.

"Bull's-eye!" declares Bill Gates, springing up from behind his cluttered desk. He hurdles over boxes of bound government regulations to give the letter opener a firm tug, pulling it out of the makeshift dartboard on the back of the door.

"I've only managed to nail that three other times in five years," Gates squeals. His dartboard is a laminated copy of "The Five Tenets of Really Fair Trade" as authored by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

Gates laments his fate as he recites the forced consent decree credo: "No bundling. No bullying. No coercion. No collusion." But he chokes on the fifth binding provision, the one with the three dart holes: "C . . . Cus . . . Customer choice."

Gates put up a separate building on his Redmond, Wash., campus to house the 143 government employees who traded Washington, D.C. for the Pacific Northwest. This internal software-auditing team makes sure that every product Microsoft ships runs on at least three hardware platforms, supports an average of 54.3 third-party applications, has a formidable competitor already on the market and comes in four colors.

Gates doesn't like to think about all the time and money this whole idea of customer choice costs him annually. Microsoft's development costs have more than doubled since 1999. But what sticks in his craw is that 85% of those increased costs has been spent on clerical resources - not engineering ones.

But Gates tries not to get caught up in the numbers. He's left the compliance stuff to his trusty right-hand man, Steve (Ballmer, that is).

Steve can worry about filling out the government forms in triplicate, about the bureaucratic delays in getting the products to market and about explaining ba-sic computer geek terms to the policy wonks.

"I'm the get-around-guy," thinks Gates, as he sits down to plot his next move around the government regulations.

He openly mourns the loss of his company's nimbleness due to government interference. He fears that Microsoft is going to get so entangled in red tape that it will miss the next big turn the software industry takes. "I've got to find a way to get back in control of the flow of technology," Gates decides.

What about a shopping spree? These auditing guys just make sure there's competition when we ship a product, right? So say we slip some little start-up in Kansas a few million lines of code from one of our research and development projects. By the time we cut through the red tape and get ours ready to market, they'll have doctored up their own code for a similar product and will be selling it as our competition. We'll wait a few months. Then we'll offer them a nice price to close their doors. Next we'll move on to a start-up in Alabama to begin the process again with another product we have brewing in the labs.

Gates smiles and rubs his hands together: "I'll be the behind-the-scenes supplier of all the best ideas without any of the legal responsibilities. That's beating the government at its own game."

After all, what hasn't managed to kill Microsoft has only made it stronger. Gates smiles and aims his letter opener for another crack.

Editors note: A special thanks to all the industry sources who contributed ideas to this series. Thanks goes to, but is not limited to: Hillard Sterling, senior litigator at Gordon & Glickson P.C.; Daniel Kusnetzky, analyst with International Data Corp.; Tom Ferris, network engineer with a Washington, D.C.-based financial firm; Jon Oltsik, analyst with Forrester Research Group; Stephen Bacon, systems integrator with Cambridge, England, NetConnect; Travis Berkley, systems engineer with the University of Kansas; and Randall Kennedy, director of research at Competitive Systems Analysis.