It's getting tougher and tougher to believe in the justice part of our justice system. Now, it's the Justice Department's turn to make a mockery of what's fair in its preening and crowing about busting the Microsoft-Intuit deal. Anne Bingaman - Janet Reno's antitrust hatchet person - proclaimed Microsoft's dropping of the Intuit deal as a "major victory for American consumers." Hello? Has she ever used a computer? To me, this smells like a giant setback to consumers, who will be subjected to delayed benefits they might otherwise have received through the efficiencies of electronic banking, shopping, and other transactions.
What really burns me up about this position is that Bingaman and Co. are presenting the American public with a cynical deception. In the guise of defending the American consumer, what the Justice Department has really done is defend one of America's special interests - the banking industry - which uses extremely heavy-handed anti-consumer business practices.
Have we already forgotten the savings and loan debacle? Government and the banking system have long been in collusion to take advantage of hapless consumers; I'm sure we've all had dismal experiences with the banking industry that make general support problems with Microsoft look trivial.
I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips, but fairly simple arithmetic demonstrates that Microsoft simply isn't that big of a company to warrant the kind of antitrust paranoia that the Justice Department has been promulgating. If you look at Microsoft's annual revenues, it's apparent that it only controls a small, single-digit portion of the computer industry. It's hard to make a case that a company with a small piece of the pie is capable of such egregious violations of antitrust law.
My dad was an IBM lifer, and when I grew up, IBM really did control most of the worldwide computer market - yet its antitrust suit was ultimately dropped by the government. Today's market is much more diverse and open to competition, as evidenced by the rapidly changing fortunes of the various computer companies. Remember, it was only a few years ago that Lotus dominated the industry with twice the annual revenue of Microsoft.
Certainly, Microsoft isn't lily-white - the per CPU license deal with original equipment manufacturers definitely went over the line - but Microsoft is far from being a monopoly. Maybe, if it ever gets to the point where the company has 80 percent of all software revenue, we can accuse it of monopolization. In the meantime, it's just incredibly successful, which has a lot of people in a jealous rage.
The Justice Department's attitude is a wake-up call to the computer industry. Despite the contributions we're making to the economy and to culture, the government doesn't like us. Instead it's out to protect its vested special interests, such as big banking, rather than support what I think is the most dynamic force, not just in our country but on the planet today.
My cynical thought is that government will remain a dirty business for some time to come; and the only way the computer industry will be able to get what it deserves is to do a better job at playing along. I have to believe that the banking lobby somehow influenced the Justice Department, and yet the only lobbying the computer industry can respond with is the Systems and Procedures Association. What a joke.
Now that computers are playing a broader role in society, it's even more critical to educate the government about the issues we face, and how the system can work with us rather than against us. I hate the idea of lobbyists manipulating the system, but if we don't fight fire with fire, we're the ones who will wind up getting burned.
The computer industry had best start playing banking's lobby game.
