Maybe the courts won’t actually split Microsoft into two large chunks (Windows and applications) – sometimes referred to as Baby Bills. If the breakup does happen, the process will be long, painful, and wrought with confusion and surprises. But it also could be good for customers, particularly on the applications end. The Baby Bill that owns the Windows operating system would remain the centre of the computer industry. It would still be a near-monopoly, formidably funded and entrenched, able to yank the chains of almost every company in high tech. Would its fight against Linux, the Mac OS, Unix, and all the big back-end Web machines be changed much? Maybe not. Does this part of a breakup matter much to me as a customer? Probably not. Windows 2000 is a perfectly good operating system and Windows ME should be “good enough” for those of us on the consumer side whose expectations have been lowered by years of running Windows. Microsoft will get fierce competition from Linux and the Mac, and it has no lock at all on what runs all the new handhelds and Net appliances. But the apps Baby Bill, which would own such programs as Office and Internet Explorer, is a different case. It can offer us a wider choice of applications – starting with the basic desktop packages. Now, if you buy a business PC you probably also buy Office 2000. Office 2000 is a classic monopoly product. In some important ways, it improves on its predecessor, but in other important ways it does not. As we rolled it out internally, there were screams of protest about the new clumsiness of Word 2000 (which takes far longer to handle some basic tasks than Word 97) and the general level of bugs. We’re a computer publication, so many of us had discs around to quietly reinstall Office 97, Lotus SmartSuite, or WordPerfect Office applications. Guess what, though? We can’t buy any of that from our PC supplier. Many consumers figure this war is over. They will buy whatever Microsoft is selling in desktop suites, and they’re scared that an antitrust action might put that simple solution in jeopardy. But we want real choice. Despite all the hype about running applications off the Net, for years to come we’ll be running word processors, spreadsheets, personal information managers, and other vanilla applications on PCs. And despite some of the blind alleys Office 2000 wandered into, those applications will evolve in interesting ways as speech recognition and other technologies get more useful. We’d like to see Corel, Lotus, and a thousand other companies feel they have a shot at this again. An apps Baby Bill would be another gorilla, also with enormous financial, technical, and marketing muscle. But its products would not be bundled with Windows, it would not operate in Internet time, and it would leave a lot more oxygen in the PC marketplace. It’s true that the outcomes of major antitrust cases seem just about impossible to predict. In the US the break up of AT&T in the early 80s paid off big-time. If it hadn’t occurred, firms wouldn’t let users call long distance at 5 cents a minute. Microsoft probably will dodge this bullet, and nobody really knows what the landscape will look like if it doesn’t. But worse things could happen. Competition is good. Even for Microsoft.
