WASHINGTON - Like the private jet that carried Scott McNealy away from National Airport on Thursday, much of the corporate posturing that marked Day One of Ralph Nader's Microsoft conference also left town before Day Two. As a result, today's final sessions, which lapsed only briefly into conspiracy theorizing, brought a refreshing dose of the dialog Nader said he was seeking.
"When we talk about Microsoft being a non-threatened company, remember: Every technology company eventually hits a wall," the Yankee Group's Howard Anderson said during a session about Microsoft and the media. That wall may well be the recognition by people outside the West Coast technology centers of exactly how powerful a force Microsoft can be.
"It seems like the problem is that by the time the government has been able to put down the law, Microsoft has already beaten them to the spot," said Eric Noriega, a technology manager at the National Institutes of Health, who attended the conference.
Noriega's assessment echoed one delivered this morning during a session on antitrust law by Lloyd Constantine, a lawyer and expert on the issue.
"My conclusion is that the US does not have what it needs," Constantine said in regard to the government's ability to attack companies that engage in monopoly leveraging and violate Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the landmark statute enacted during the trust-busting years of the early 20th century.
"Monopoly leveraging is the willful use of a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in a second market, whether the first monopoly was gained legally or not," Constantine said. But he charged that during the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, antitrust law in the United States had been eviscerated, and that the Clinton administration was doing little to reverse that process.
Former Federal Trade Commission member Christine Varney, who now represents Netscape in private practice at the law firm Hogan and Hartson, reviewed the history of the various FTC and Justice Department antitrust investigations in recent years.
"It's not a witch hunt. I don't think Microsoft is a good company or a bad company - it's a company of people," Varney said, suggesting that sometimes, those people will push things too far.
"There are a lot of allegations about Microsoft engaging in predatory behavior. If you have evidence, come forward. The larger anti-trust issues will come later," she said.
That call echoed an earlier plea for cooperation from Samuel Goodhope of the Texas state attorney general's office. Texas and attorneys general in several other states - along with antitrust authorities in the European Union and Japan - are investigating Microsoft for anti-competitive practices.
Today's wackiest Microsoft allegations came from overseas.
During the morning's antitrust session, British technology analyst Graham Lea told the audience, "Microsoft really doesn't understand business."
Then, during the afternoon panel discussion about Microsoft and the media, British author and "futurologist" Ray Hammond suggested that Bill Gates displays symptoms of a medical condition he labeled "Asperger's syndrome," a high-intelligence form of autism. Hammond pointed to Gates' investments in various biotechnology ventures and warned, "This is not an American argument. The future of mankind is at stake. We must stop Bill Gates."
