To the casual observer, software giant Microsoft and Bill Gates seem to have been rather generous over the last year. Not content with his company offering to donate $2000-worth of licenses for its ‘Microsoft Office’ suite of software to a project trying to wire up Namibian schools to the internet¹, Bill Gates recently donated $550,000 to Peru's national school system².

But perhaps we should look a little more closely at these gifts. In the case of ‘SchoolNet Namibia’, it turned out that the $2000 ‘Office’ software license donation was conditional on the project spending $9000 to pay for ‘operating system’ licenses, and Microsoft attempted to get the project to spend a further $22,500 on equipment that would have mainly been useful as part of a Microsoft marketing campaign³.

Turning to Peru, we find that a bill had been introduced by the ruling party, Peru Posible, that would decree the use of so-called ‘Open Source’ software in all government systems⁴. Such software is regarded by Microsoft as the number one threat to their monopoly within the computer industry. A number of governments around the world are considering similar legislation. The chief sponsor of the bill, Congressman Edgar Villanueva has said that Microsoft are terrified of it. ‘They insisted once and again that Peru [represents] but an insignificant portion of their total income. What worries them is the cascading effect that could be triggered if a national state took such a decision.’⁵ A leaked email of November 2002 shows that Microsoft are attempting to track the use of ‘open source’ software by governments and respond to every such news story around the world, by gathering intelligence on potential forms of ‘leverage’ that they can use to snuff out the threat⁶. The story takes a further twist when you learn that the U.S. Ambassador to Peru, John Hamilton, wrote a letter to the President of the Peruvian Congress, applying pressure against the bill⁷.

A body called the Initiative for Software Choice has started lobbying governments in an attempt to oppose these moves, claiming that they would unfairly restrict competition within the industry. But, some believe that this organisation is really just a front group for Microsoft. According to Open Source advocate Bruce Perens, who has set up a rival campaign called ‘Sincere Choice’⁸, ‘Microsoft's new ‘Software Choice’ campaign is all for your right to choose... as long as you choose Microsoft.’⁹

So what's wrong with Microsoft? After all, although they have a monopoly with their ‘Windows’ operating system¹⁰, doesn't that bring about a level of standardisation which benefits everybody? Aren't they the heralds of a new Information Age in which ready access to information will empower us all?

Are you a big enough market?
Like any company, a software company has its own set of priorities which may or may not coincide with ours. The most important priority of a software company is ‘volume’ - the number of ‘units’ it can sell. A classic example of where this becomes a problem is in ‘localisation’ - the language the software uses to display messages on the screen, along with certain other conventions that vary from country to country, such as the way that dates are written. Most software is only available for a limited set of languages, since it only makes business sense to translate the software into the languages for which enough copies will be sold. But if you happen to speak a ‘minority’language such as Icelandic, Estonian, or one of the 5000 unofficial languages in India, you might be out of luck.

You might think that this wouldn't be a problem; after all, even though it might not make sense for a foreign publisher to, say, publish a translation of a work of literature into a minority language, it doesn't stop speakers of that language from translating it and publishing it themselves. But software differs greatly from books. It is fairly simple to translate a book into a different language, even without the co-operation of the original author. But most software is distributed in a form designed to be read by machines, rather than by humans; this form is called ‘machine code’, and looks like a random collection of ones and zeroes, rather like looking at a television that isn't tuned in properly. The designers of the software generally work in a different form (called the ‘source code’), which looks a little like a mathematical formula – this is like a blueprint for the program and is converted to machine code before it leaves the company. Although it's a technical process requiring some skill, it's fairly easy to deal with source code after a little training, whereas machine code is almost impossible for humans to decipher.

Most software companies zealously keep the source code to their programs secret as it is the key to the production of the software - most software companies guard it like the proverbial crown jewels! Since this source code never leaves the company it's very hard for someone else to translate the program to a new language, as they must work with the machine code, typically a frustrating, error-prone process, and illegal in many parts of the world.

Making computers more unreliable
Unfortunately, with standardisation, Microsoft's monopoly has brought a dangerous level of homogeneity to the world's computing infrastructure. In a pattern reminiscent of a monoculture crop being wiped out by a disease, a single malicious program can spread across the internet to millions of effectively-identical machines. ‘On July 19, 2001, more than 359,000 computers were infected with the Code Red worm in less than 14 hours. At the peak of infection, more than 2,000 new machines were infected each minute. Servers running Internet Information Services from Microsoft were propagating this worm across the Internet faster than anything has up to then or since.’¹¹

Stopping technological progress
After years of complaints and investigation, and lengthy court proceedings in the very room in which the Watergate defendents were tried, a US court ruled that Microsoft is a monopoly, and has repeatedly used its monopoly power to suppress competition. To quote from Judge Jackson's findings in this ‘antitrust’ case, ‘The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest’¹²

Unfortunately, the products they do come up with aren't necessarily any good either. To quote from an article in Fortune magazine: ‘...from its beginnings, Microsoft has been notorious for producing inelegant products that are frequently inferior to the competition and for bringing them to market way behind schedule’¹³.

In March 1997, the manager of R&D at Hewlett Packard sent a letter to Microsoft in which he argued that certain obligations that Microsoft had imposed on PC manufacturers were actually making computers more difficult to use. He backed it up by comparing statistics of customer support calls before and after the obligations were in place¹⁴.

The underlying problem is that by controlling the Operating System (Windows), Microsoft is effectively the gatekeeper of computer technology. Imagine if one company owned the rights to the design of mains electricity sockets, and could change the shape of the sockets and the voltage levels every few months. Companies wishing to make appliances such as televisions and microwave ovens would have to pay homage to the company that controlled the standard, and could be arbitrarily driven out of business by it if they stepped out of line. This is effectively the situation that Microsoft is in with its monopoly power over operating systems for personal computers. An operating system can be thought of as the underlying ‘plumbing’ or ‘wiring’ that makes software work, rather like the electrical system of a house, and it has ‘interfaces’ that let programs such as word processors work: a bit like plugging a television into a mains electricity socket.

It doesn't end there. To continue our electrical analogy, imagine if the company controlling the design of electrical sockets decided it wanted to make televisions. It would have immense power to drive all other television manufacturers out of business, simply by refusing to license the shape of an electrical socket to its competitors. Soon it would have a monopoly over television manufacturing, and be able to start dictating demands to TV channels. ‘There are numerous cases where Microsoft has wielded its monopoly in one area as a big stick in order to achieve a monopoly in another. An example is the deliberate hiding of certain parts of Windows, for use only by Microsoft applications (and not its competitors). In our electrical analogy, this is rather like having a secret extra pin on an electrical socket which, if you know about it, can be used to draw extra power. These were described by one technical consultant as ‘more the sort of thing one expects from a teenager writing a virus than from a multibillion-dollar corporation’¹⁵. Another example is an apparent attempt to include fake error messages into a version of Windows that would only appear when used in conjunction with Digital Research's DR DOS, to scare users into using Microsoft's rival product, MS-DOS.¹⁶ [footnote: Overdrive, p45-6].’

The point here is that in the electrical industry (at least in the UK), standards emerged informally by a process of consensus, administered by the trade body, the Institute of Electrical Engineers. The IEE has laid out the details of how electrical plugs and sockets should work in a code of regulations which has been through 16 editions since it was first written down in the early years of the twentieth century. This had no legal basis until it became an official British Standard in 1995, but had power and was widely regarded as the ‘standard’, in that it was generally cited within contract terms. It is a public document; any electrician needing to know some detail can simply look it up.

Microsoft have a history of taking open standards and perverting them so that only Microsoft products will work with them. They even have their own jargon for this process: a leaked Microsoft memo from 1998 has a list of tactics which includes the phrase ‘de-commoditize protocols’¹⁷. In normal English, what this means is that where the protocols used by components to work together are ‘commodities’ i.e. they lead to tradeable, interchangeable raw materials, Microsoft wish to pervert the market so that only their products will work.

An example is the Internet. You may have seen messages on websites saying something like ‘Best viewed in Internet Explorer’. In 1997 Microsoft made numerous agreements with leading web sites to only work at their best with Internet Explorer, with ‘acceptable degradation’under the rival Netscape Navigator. The websites were compelled to use technology specific to Microsoft when designing their sites, rather than commonly-agreed standards¹⁸.

Another example is Java. Java was created by Sun Microsystems, and was all the rage in the late 1990s. This technology promised that programs could be ‘written once, then run anywhere’, eliminating the confusing differences between, say, the Windows and the Mac versions of a product: instead there would be a single product, which would work on any computer. Since this was a threat to Microsoft's monopoly, they systematically attempted to thwart this technology¹⁹.

During its investigations, the US Department of Justice came across an internal Microsoft document which stated that Microsoft's goal was to ‘get control of’ and ‘neutralize’ Java²⁰. One journalist spelt out their approach to Java: ‘We will embrace it, we will make it ours, we will apply it to our operating system, and we will kill it. We will do what we must to protect the mothership - the OS [operating system]’²¹.

To give a flavour of its tactics, Microsoft was contractually obliged to provide details of a particular part of Java technology called RMI on its website. They did so, but attempted to hide the link. ‘Referring to RMI and any Java developers who might access Microsoft's site looking for it, a Microsoft employee wrote to his approving manager, 'They'll have to stumble across it to know it's there. . . . I'd say it's pretty buried.’²²

The ironic thing is that Microsoft's current big idea, called ‘.NET’, is essentially a clone of Sun's strategy with Java, with the all-important difference that Microsoft own it²³.

Making offers you can't refuse
Behind the benevolent image portrayed by their PR department, Microsoft are viewed by industry insiders with more than a little suspicion. According to Intel Vice President Steven D. McGeady ‘Microsoft is a f**king evil corporation’²⁴. Marc Andressen, the co-founder of Netscape, likened a meeting with Microsoft to a scene from The Godfather: ‘It was like a visit by Don Corleone. I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.’²⁵ Speaking of the antitrust case, David Boies, the chief lawyer for the prosecution joked: ‘It's been very difficult to convince [a PC manufacturer] to appear in court without a hood’.²⁶

The PC manufacturing companies are dependent on Microsoft to provide them with legal licences for Windows to sell with their equipment. ‘[Microsoft] charges different [PC manufacturers] different prices for Windows, depending on the degree to which the individual [PC manufacturers] comply with Microsoft's wishes.²⁷

A similar story was told by Joel Klein, US assistant attorney general: ‘Most of the major [PC manufacturers] are simply afraid. A lot of them said to us 'What you're doing is terrific, but we just can't afford to stick out our necks'. The power that Microsoft has over these people with the Windows license and the Office license is simply extraordinary’²⁸ Bill Gate's former girlfriend Ann Winblad said of the Department of Justice: ‘These people have no idea who they're dealing with’²⁹

Microsoft has taken the notion of competition in business to an extreme. According to Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems: ‘You know what Machiavelli said about foreign lands: you either take it over, or you destroy it. That's Microsoft.’³⁰ The judge of the antitrust trial, Thomas Penfield Jackson, compares Bill Gates to Napoleon: ‘I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company. An arrogance which derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses’. ³¹

At a dinner in 1993 Bill Gates claimed ‘Of course, I have as much power as the president has’; he attempted to play it off as a joke after his wife-to-be kicked him under the table³².

US assistant attorney general Joel Klein described Microsoft's response to an injuction issued in December of 1997: ‘Usually the phrase 'contempt of court' is metaphoric. In this case, it was literal’³³.

Hawking their wares
There is something of an analogy between some software developers and drug pushers. Both give away early versions of their software, either as explicit gifts, or by having insufficient safeguards against software piracy. Having established dependency amongst the users of the product, they then ratchet up the price and enforcement conditions.

Chris Williams, Microsoft's director of product development, explained his attitude to software piracy in the Far East: ‘We're just flooding the market with copies... The goal is... that when people actually end up having to buy software, they [will] already know our software and it's the one they will have to buy when the laws get passed. We're basically getting market share. As soon as we start to get a return on that investment, it will be humongous’.³⁴

Governing the industry?
In the summer of 1999, whilst embroiled in the biggest antitrust trial since the 1911 Standard Oil case, Microsoft lobbyied the US Congress in an attempt to get $9m cut from the Antitrust Division's proposed $114.3m budget for the 2000 fiscal year, whilst at the same time (according to a New York Times report) they secretly funded non-profit groups that made supposedly independent recommendations to Congress that it should make such cutbacks.³⁵

Microsoft had a contract with Ralph Reed, a key adviser to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, with a brief to lobby Bush and his other advisers to oppose the antitrust lawsuit.³⁶

Microsoft has only started paying large sums of money for political influence in the last few years, although it has rapidly become one of the largest corporate donors of ‘soft money’, spending more than $3m on the 2000 election in the US³⁷. Even before this, throughout the 1990's Bill Gates courted the US political elite; for example he played golf with Bill Clinton at least twice, has dined with Newt Gingrich, and hosted Al Gore on a visit to Microsoft³⁸. In 1992 Microsoft tentatively began using an attorney at a Seattle law firm as a lobbyist, ‘not so much to win special deals as to learn how to communicate with the government.’³⁹ They now have an extensive lobbying team, which has included former members of both Al Gore's and George Bush's campaign teams⁴⁰.

But I need my Microsoft Word fix! How can I break my addiction?
Unfortunately it appears that Microsoft's attempts to curry favour within Washington have borne fruit, and the U.S. government is unlikely to apply any significant remedies that might improve the company's behaviour.

So how should someone concerned about Microsoft's dominance of the world's software infrastructure react? It's become traditional at this point in articles to suggest that you try an alternative operating system to Windows, such as the free operating system Linux. Unfortunately, although great progress has been made over the last few years towards making Linux easier to use, it's still something I can only recommend if you're fairly knowledgeable about computers. There's plenty of information on the internet about Linux

A much easier step that I would like all readers of this article to consider is to use OpenOffice.org. This suite of software runs on Windows (and on a wide variety of other operating systems) and boasts a complete word-processor, spreadsheet, and so on, compatible with the Microsoft equivalents - for example, it will happily load and save Word documents. It has numerous advantages over Microsoft Office and Word: you don't have to pay for it, the full source code is available for hobbyists to play with and businesses to work with, and the file formats it uses are fully documented. It was also used in writing this article. If a substantial number of people moved from using the ‘Word’, ‘Excel’ and ‘Powerpoint’ formats for exchanging their documents, and instead used OpenOffice.org formats, it would undermine Microsoft's control of electronic documents, and threaten one of their major sources of income.

In fact, I'd like to stress this: if you're running a ‘pirate’ copy of Microsoft Office, or of ‘Word’, regarding it as free, please consider moving to something genuinely free: OpenOffice.org. Visit their website today! (http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.2/index.html) Microsoft have used software piracy to achieve ubiquity; they now want to ‘turn up the heat’ and get people to start paying for the software they've become dependent on. So don’t fall for the phoney ‘upgrades’ which take up more space on your hard drive without actually doing anything useful; don't pay money to perpetuate a monopoly - switch to something free!