Letters

Reason, Feb, 2002

Anti-Antitrust

Hurray to Joseph Bast and David B. Kopel for their common sense on the Microsoft case ("Antitrust's Greatest Hits," November).

As one who writes for the computer industry and consumers, I find it's often necessary to underscore a really obvious point about this case: Every single customer of every single Microsoft product has alternatives. Apple sells computers and operating systems, as does Sun. Numerous versions of Linux and the BSD operating system are available for free to those who would rather not use Windows. Lotus, Sun, and Corel sell competing office suite products.

In contrast to other purported monopolies, such as Alcoa or Standard Oil, Microsoft has no ability to constrain supply in their market. If I wrote an operating system and everyone in the world wanted to buy it, I could set up an Internet site from which people could download it. Microsoft could do nothing to stop them. If you actually have a better product, barriers to entry in the software business are low.

The simple truth is that many Microsoft products have large market shares because consumers have chosen to buy them. This was even the case for Internet Explorer. It wasn't until version 4.0 that Explorer became a clearly better browser than Netscape Navigator and acquired significant market share.

We should all be thoroughly distrustful of the government and Microsoft's competitors when they tell us that we are forced to make the decisions we have been making. The surest way to lose my respect is to insult my intelligence.

Larry Seltzer

Maplewood, NJ

Once desktops included independent products like WordPerfect and Netscape. They are now replaced by Word and Internet Explorer. RealAudio is being consumed by Media Player as you read these words, and Microsoft is fighting in the courts to replace Java with Csharp. Microsoft took none of the market risks to pioneer these products, yet they were able to clip the shoots when they were ripe by building their own versions into the operating system. A utility minded customer is not going to repurchase that capability separately.

There are glaring factual omissions in the article regarding the Microsoft case. The authors failed to discuss Microsoft's pattern of using its operating system monopoly to steal markets from competitors in the applications software business. This distinction is crucial to understanding the case against Bill Gates & Co.

The diatribe about takeover of the Internet, the article's central point, is an unrealized fear. But what about these past crimes Information technology is vitally important to a free society, and it would be a disservice to freedom to put a single corporation at the gate of society's information flow.

L.L. Williams

Manitou Springs, CO

David B. Kopel replies: L.L. Williams is incorrect. As I detail in my book Ant Antitrust After Microsoft, Microsoft has never been able to use its operating system to defeat superior applications competitors.

The Windows Media Player has been bundled with Windows ever since the early 1990s. This bundling did not prevent the Real Networks media players from being preferred by most consumers during the long period (by computer industry time standards) in which the Real products were clearly superior to WMP.

As Mr. Seltzer points out, Internet Explorer did not begin to seriously erode Netscape's market share until version 4.0, when most computer magazines rated it superior to Netscape. Explorer had been bundled with Windows since the day Windows 95 was released. But because early Explorer releases were inferior, Netscape was able to achieve a 90 percent market share for its $49 product, even though Microsoft was giving its browser away for free.

As for WordPerfect, this once-fine product was nearly destroyed by its incompetent acquirers, first Novell and then Corel. Windows 3.0 was introduced in 1989, but not until 1992 did WordPerfect produce aversion for Windows. That version was unstable, prone to crashing, and bug-infested, as were subsequent releases.

Ground Zero

Anyone interested in American cities should read Sam Staley's nuanced account of Cincinnati's woes ("Ground Zero in Urban Decline," November). Staley looks at what other accounts have either ignored or misunderstood. Almost alone among those who have written about Cincinnati's troubles in the wake of last year's rioting, Staley recognizes the failure of large-scale rebuilding efforts in other cities.

His focus on the "Digital Rhine," the high-tech companies that have sprung up in the riot-torn neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine, is similarly a welcome relief. Most other accounts stress the local corporate giants like Procter & Gamble at the expense of grassroots economic activity. My one quibble: I wish he had talked more about whether there is a connection between Cincinnati's dysfunctional politics and its economic woes.

Fred Siegel

The cooper Union for Science and Art New York, NY

Many decades ago, while working at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a colleague, Don Phares, and I wrote a piece on housing in Cincinnati, to see what relevance it had to St. Louis. I also worked with the late Norton Long at the university, who predicted that the then-proposed light rail system for St. Louis would hemorrhage money. Indeed it does.