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The Boston Globe OnlineBoston.com Boston Globe Online / Business
PLUGGED IN
Rolling over for Microsoft

With competitors opening doors to Windows, antitrust concerns often get lost

By Simson L. Garfinkel, Globe Staff, 05/21/98

icrosoft Corp. may indeed be operating as a monopoly, but the concessions demanded last week by the US Department of Justice and 20 state attorneys general wouldn't have made things any better. The real battleground for the future of the information economy is not being fought with desktop operating systems and Web browsers but over desktop applications and Web servers.

In these battles, the rest of the computer industry have been willing coconspirators with Microsoft, helping to make Windows a monopoly of unprecedented proportion.

Consider IBM, which recently introduced version 4.1 of its acclaimed Lotus Organizer. One of Organizer's new features is the ability to upload calendars and address books to a Web server. This is a great idea; you can check your calendar, once uploaded, over the Internet from any Web browser. But like a growing number of products in the Web marketplace, Organizer's Web server functions only work with Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which only runs on Windows NT.

IBM's decision to support only Windows NT effectively forces organizations that want to use this feature to buy and install the Microsoft operating system. What really seems counterintuitive about IBM's decision is that the company sells a competing operating system called AIX. Many people (including me) think AIX is better.

IBM, through Lotus, is basically telling its customers: ''Don't buy our products, buy Microsoft. '' This is an especially shortsighted strategy, as Microsoft has two programs, Outlook '98 and Exchange, that compete with Lotus Organizer and Lotus Notes. Once a company starts installing Windows NT, it's that much easier to jump from Lotus's products to Microsoft's.

In antitrust law there is the notion of an ''illegal tie,'' in which a company that has market control forces its customers to purchase a secondary product as a condition of purchase of a primary product. But IBM's actions can't constitute an illegal tie, since IBM is forcing its customers to purchase products from Microsoft.

IBM is not alone.

Earlier this year I reviewed three project management packages: one from Microsoft and two from its competitors. All of these companies are now moving to Web-based access of project management information. And you know what? They are all using some combination of Windows NT server and Microsoft's ActiveX technology to do it, effectively locking the customers into Microsoft Web servers.

Integration between desktop applications and Web servers doesn't need to be anticompetitive. The software vendor just has to support more than one Web server. A good choice of server would be Apache, which is running on more than 48 percent of the Internet's Web servers, according to the May Netcraft Web survey (www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey). Microsoft, meanwhile, lays claim to just 21.8 percent of the Internet's servers.

What's driving Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop isn't the power of Windows, but the power of the application programs that run on Windows. I know many people who would like to run Linux as their desktop operating system, but they can't, because Microsoft Word, Excel, Quicken, 3Com's Palm Pilot Desktop, and many other programs will not work with that platform.

And while there are ongoing efforts of hobbyists to build an ''emulator'' that will let Linux run Windows applications, these efforts will never be completely successful because so much of Windows is undocumented.

So in steps the Justice Department with two key demands: Microsoft must include a free copy of Netscape Navigator on each copy of Windows 98 that is shipped, and it must let computer manufacturers customize the ''first screen,'' which at present is essentially an advertisement for Microsoft. In effect, Justice has said that Microsoft has won the battle for the desktop, and the company should not be able to use this victory to gain control of the Internet and the rest of American business.

Netscape's attorneys have spent a lot of money digging up documents to help the Justice Department, so it must be nice for Netscape stockholders to see this kind of payback. But it's important to remember that Netscape isn't the underdog: Today more than 60 percent of the people browsing the Internet use its Navigator browser. Forcing Microsoft to bundle Navigator would merely allow Netscape to maintain its market position.

A few years ago, Microsoft used undocumented functions in Windows to make its applications perform better than the competition, but today it's the reverse: Microsoft is using its dominance in the world of applications to strengthen its position in the world of operating systems.

But the desktop is not lost. One way to halt this vicious cycle would be to prohibit Microsoft from selling applications that do not run on multiple platforms.

Instead of ceding the desktop to Bill Gates, Justice would do better to demand that Microsoft port its Office 97 application suite to operating systems such as Linux, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and AIX. (Although Microsoft does sell a version of Office for the Macintosh, it does not include Microsoft Access or Outlook.)

Meanwhile, if the Justice Department is really interested in competition for browsers, it should force Microsoft to bundle other, lesser-known browsers such as Opera by Opera Software (www.operasoftware.com) on the Windows 98 CD-ROM. If you haven't tried Opera, you might want to download it and give it a try. But be warned: Unlike Navigator and Internet Explorer, Opera isn't free.

Any settlement between federal and state officials and Microsoft must look at the facts on the desktop today, rather than the hope that the Internet has to offer tomorrow.

Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.

This story ran on page C04 of the Boston Globe on 05/21/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

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