Microsoft and the Anti Trust Issue
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In late May, 1998, Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates (the richest businessman in the world) and Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (the richest investor in the world) gave a special speech (to be aired by PBS this fall) about competition in American business in general and the computer industry in specific. At one point, the moderator asked what was the appropriate role for antitrust law in American business? Gates answered that the essential role of competition law is to "protect consumers and to make sure that new products get created and that those products are very innovative" (Schlender, Buffett & Gates, 1998, 48). From Gates' point of view, there were serious antitrust violations in the computer industry before Microsoft came along: "Once you bought a computer from Digital or IBM or Hewlett-Packard or anyone else, the software that you created only ran on that computer" (Schlender, Buffett & Gates, 1998, 49). Against this situation Gates envisioned a "democratizing software" that would destroy the barriers of incompatibility and allow software to run on any platform. At last he came to the point: I think antitrust laws as written are fine. There are people who will debate whether they should be weaker, but that's of academic interest. When I come in to do business, I'm very careful to check with our lawyers to be sure we're steering a hundred miles away from anything that would be questionable
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value, such as telephones and so on.
If Microsoft is guilty of "monopolization" or "trust" actitivity, then several concepts would have to be proven. It is not the purpose of this paper to analyze those in detail, but it is essential to discuss the concept of software as it relates to the "rivalry" status of the hardware manufacturers. A primary goal of software manufacturers today is to develop "compatibility" among computer "platforms" a term which also must be defined. A platform is a set of binomial program codes that establish the structure of the operating system.
For instance, MS-DOS, the most commonly-used PC platform stands for Microsoft Disc Operating System, which is confirmation that the DOS platform as it is known was created by Gates and his team in the early 1970s. Other popular platforms are CPM (devised by Steve Jobs for Apple Computers) and UNIX, (a cross-platform coding that operates multi-tasked software).
The importance of platforms is that they are one more level of compatibility required (DeWitt, 1996, 58). In other words, not only must all components of the computer (drives, motherboards, processors, etc.) be compatible, the software for those compatible components must also be compatible (Peril
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2386
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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