Four Microsofts? Not under this scenario
 
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Lots of people have written lots of stuff about the possible outcome of the Department of Justice antitrust suit against Microsoft, but the screwiest proposal I've seen comes from something called the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF).
In a report by Vice President for Research Tom Lenard, called "Creating Competition in the Market for Operating Systems: A Structural Remedy for Microsoft," the PFF proposes breaking Microsoft into four separate companies - one for applications and three for operating systems.
Lenard proposes that the operating system products be subdivided among three equivalent "Windows companies." Each of the new Windows companies would have full ownership over all the relevant intellectual property, and would be allocated an equal share of employees, contracts and other resources to go with the intellectual property.
These three companies would be severely limited from talking to each other but would compete to sell the exact same products. They'd also have to maintain, update and evolve those products independently.
The result, of course, would be something similar to the Unix market, with a number of different operating systems that are superficially alike, but unable to interoperate.
It's a "solution" that would cost everyone a huge expense in time and money - the operating system companies, third-party vendors and users. Meanwhile, the single applications company would be selling Office, Exchange, SQL Server and all the other tools people use daily - and at far better profit margins than the operating systems.
The old adage says that the cure is oft worse than the disease. That's certainly true of this "cure," which could end up killing the patient and infecting everyone else.
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Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at Virtual Quill or by e-mail at info@vquill.com
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