The Rise and Fall of Microsoft

a branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary works, such as the novel (Britannica.com).

By extension, also, we can apply the term to Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft. Although no one has compared the antitrust actions concerning the company to dramatic tragedy, this is an apt method for understanding the situation.

Dramatic tragedy, in the classical sense, involves a great hero, called a "protagonist" who is the main character. Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, Willie Loman are all examples of this type of character. The protagonist invites his own tragic downfall. In the case of classical tragedy, it is also necessary to have a secondary character, an "antagonist" whose function it is to thwart the protagonist at every turn. Likewise, all classical tragedies must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (Harris, 1978). We shall use this structure to discuss Bill Gates.

Bill Gates -- Act One: The Beginning

According to the extensive biography on the Microsoft web site William (Bill) H. Gates was born on October 28, 1955, to an attorney and a school teacher. In Seattle, he attended public and private schools, and developed a love for computers at 13, when he began programming them.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a fr

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monopoly comes from the Internet, described by Microsoft's CEO, Bill Gates, in May 1995 as "the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981" (Civil Action 98-1232, Online, Juris). Bill Gates -- Act 3: The End In classical tragedy theory, it is essential that the hero struggle against insurmountable odds. The odds were certainly serious. Arthur (1996) discussing the Microsoft/Netscape situation in terms of the broader concept of "information" as a commodity, argued that the Internet and its economy could be looked at in terms of the traditional economic theories considering product life cycles: new product; maturing product; standardized product. At what point is knowledge "new." Can knowledge as such enter the market at a reduced price? Can it be recycled and sold to another country? Under traditional economics, when a company develops a new product, it sells that product primarily to the domestic market in Stage 1 and begins exporting the product in Stage 2. In Stage 3, when the product becomes a "commodity" (standardized, with the same quality no matter where produced), the company can then become either a net importer or net exporter of the product. Arthur argues that a
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