aggression, but when you're in the dock calling the judge a doofus, that's gotta be a bad strategy.
Trying to isolate, surround, and pick off Neil Barrett, the EU's technical expert, is also a dumb
idea. While I'll be the first to admit that Microsoft's mass is great enough to bend the paths of
passing photons, the company has a misplaced sense of its own leverage. Microsoft has
nothing on the EU, or, for that matter, on Barrett. Rove-like techniques of doing background
research on the individuals involved, hoping to find some useful dirt for blackmail, are likely to
blow up in the company's face.
Years ago, when the U.S. Justice Department case was still on, I asked Steve Ballmer whether
the company shouldn't have a "Plan B," one to cover the contingency that the government might
break up the company and separate the Office and Windows divisions, perhaps splitting Internet
Explorer off from Windows. The idea was that if a breakup were to occur, and Microsoft had taken
no steps to divide the products technically, and then needed six months to make them work, and
therefore had no functioning legal products on Day 2 of the new world, then the company's lack of
action could be interpreted as a breach of fiduciary responsibility, and the firm would be open to
civil suits, since it could have reasonably anticipated such an outcome. Ballmer's answer was,
"There's no Plan B. We're going to do the best thing for our customers, shareholders, and
employees." End of discussion. And the take-no-prisoners strategy worked. Here in the United
States.
But it's time for the software giant to take a more conciliatory approach toward the EU. While in
our country, Clarence Thomas can shout indignantly that of course he didn't do any of the things
that Anita Hill accused him of and have a bunch of dunderheads believe him, in Europe, things
are different. Shouting and insisting won't sway people. U.S. companies and our government
have long maintained that our way is the right way and those old fashioned, socialist economies
over there just need to see the light, but actually, having been through two major wars on their
territory in the past century has given the Europeans a more enlightened perspective. They see
their societies as holistic and view private companies' motives with suspicion. Even though
much of the European safety net has eroded in recent years, the ideas of Rousseau persist: to
forestall revolution, societies need to think about fairness and the greater good.
Microsoft has been operating as a convicted monopolist with impunity in the United States for
years now and has gotten used to the idea that it has a right to hook an economy up to an
intravenous feed and siphon money into its private bank account. Understandably, the EU feels
differently. It would like to nurture a native software industry to keep some of the money at home.
What Microsoft needs to do, at a minimum, is generate usable documentation, disclose plans to
change functionality and APIs in a timely fashion, and show some open-handedness and
cooperation about letting its products interact with open-source initiatives.
It's pretty thin to go into the judge, swinging insults and bombast, and then hand some free
software and IP (which didn't cost anything anyway) to some European government entities,
hoping to blunt the efforts of European regulators. C'mon, guys. Change the channel.
© 2006 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
