What annoys me is that few people separate their personal opinion of Microsoft's practices from their opinion of anti-trust law.

I, for one, think Microsoft is mostly Evil -- because a great deal of their effort is specifically applied to anti-productivity measures, not to make their own products better, but to use their influence over the context in order to make their competitors' often superior products worse. In competitive sports, this is called a Foul -- when you are playing soccer, it is not considered a positive application of skill to intentionally trip your opponents, and certainly not to stomp on their kneecaps when they're down. Of course, that's not quite how Microsoft works -- no, rather, I would find it entirely within their character to study the rule books, buy extra large shoes for their team, and then send someone to the field with a post hole digger the night before. And when the other team is carried off in stretchers with twisted ankles and broken legs, people would cheer "Microsoft, they're the best!"

Free-market types love to look at this sort of scenario and say "they're acting in the best interest of their shareholders, as they should!" Indeed, they won the game!

But this is just where the argument starts going in circles. One side says "what keeps giant company X from being slime bags?" and the other side retorts "nobody has to buy their products -- if they're slime bags, just don't patronize them". The implication there is that people won't patronize slime bags, but of course the truth is that almost everyone, including and somehow especially the people who give that retort, gleefully rationalize the issue away when there's a buck to be saved, or when there's only one browser on the market that will view their favorite web site "properly". "It's in my rational best interest to buy from whoever's offering the best deal." Never mind that the "best deal" may be substantially worse than what the best deal would have been in the absence of their destructive benefactor. "But prices have gone *down* since Microsoft entered the picture!" Yeah, so what? Of course they have -- there's no industry with greater economy of scale than software, prices were going to go down with or without Microsoft. So much so, in fact, that there's now plenty of *free* software, but since Microsoft obviously can't compete on that extreme, they've got their post-hole-diggers running full time to fuck up the free software community as much as they can -- hopefully long enough to get their own, proprietary, pay-for technologies adopted as the next wave of standards before the competing open-source standards can take hold. If they could make free software illegal, they certainly would (they're trying!), and while you may acknowledge that the law should not allow that, I ask you: Why are you all so happy to patronize a business that would do such a thing? Is it any different than choosing to keep friends who you know would steal from you if they thought they could get away with it?

Worse than patronizing them, in the name of supporting the notion of a free market (and perhaps not wanting to feel they were coerced into buying their own collection of Microsoft software), people *defend* Microsoft, and go so far as to tout the quality of their products -- a strange delusion that inevitably belongs to people who, in my experience, have either never tried anything else, or refuse to acknowledge that an uncanny number of the "problems" they had with their other software came down to incompatibilities with Microsoft's versions of "standards". Perhaps it's unfair of me to make this claim about people's reasoning, but it's certainly the impression I get -- that people's emotions follow either the chain: free market = good; Microsoft = free market; ergo Microsoft = good; or: all the software I use is Microsoft, ergo Microsoft = good.

So what's my point in all this? What *I* want from this is for people to start giving me better arguments for why the free market (the "no anti-trust" version) is ubiquitously Good, because the "Microsoft is good for you" argument doesn't cut it. Microsoft is evil, they explicitly and intentionally sabotage any technology which they can't match or buy, and they are *far* more concerned that all the world be beholden to them than that the world be a better place. Yes, that's the nature of business. But say that in the same breath as "monopolies are ok".

Or is that the nature of business? One line of argument says that a business only succeeds by providing value and fostering progress. The alternate view says that *small* business (i.e., when competition applies) only succeed by providing value, but past a certain level of market domination, it is possible to succeed by *destroying* value and hindering progress. In a sense, that is the premise behind anti-trust law, and I would like to hear that rebutted. Is the free-market argument that a business, no matter how large, cannot profit through destructive practices? Or is the free-market argument that a business can never stay that large for very long? Or.. what? It seems like the argument is always changing: "Microsoft is evil, they will fail." Oops, they didn't fail. "So what if Microsoft dominates the world? Microsoft is Good."

I think Microsoft is Evil, and they do dominate the world. And that might seem like an overstatement, but I really will not be surprised if in seven years I cannot use my Linux machine to access my bank account any more because my bank is running a patent-protected MS/IP instead of TCP/IP. And will people be upset by this? No, they'll just laud MS for their innovation, and use it as justification that "free" software just can't keep up with commercial enterprise. Pay no attention to the carcasses of better solutions littering the sides of the road.

Do I advocate anti-trust law? No, probably not, though I can't say I have a certain conviction about it. I'm sorely disappointed by the hand-waving that goes into defending the free market view, though -- most of the arguments I've heard ought to be preceded by "I bet". I wish someone would really nail it -- present an argument of logical necessities that shows that left unfettered Microsoft would not eventually dominate the market so thoroughly that we would all be paying annual licensing fees for software that never changes. The current denials of that possibility sound too much to me like claims that the Dark Ages can never happen. Well, they did, and once we were there it took a really really long time to get out.

The closest I've heard to logical arguments come from the Objectvist or similar camps, and they typically include miraculous juxtapositions like "the inefficiency of large corporate overhead gives smaller companies a competitive advantage" with "even in the peak of its market domination, costs were lower than ever due to economy of scale". "I bet."

Rich Drewes had it right when he said the worst thing about the anti-trust case against Microsoft is that it keeps us from witnessing the natural evolution of things. (He was more optimistic: declaring that Microsoft would eventually lose ground to, e.g., Linux or Java or whatever, and end up "just another player" in the market. And his point is that now if that happens, people will use it to support anti-trust law even though the outcome was inevitable.)

Too bad we can't clone the universe and try both scenarios out.