Strategy

Executive Profiles

Board of Directors

Company Background

Be Investor Relations

Be Branding

Contact Be

Jean-Louis Gassée Column

The Victim Microsoft July 12, 2000 Found in Reason magazine, under the pen of James Hankins, Professor of History, Harvard University, jhankins@fas.harvard.edu "... if an issue is sufficiently complex, you can lie with impunity. Neither the public nor the press have the patience to sort out complicated issues regarding regulations and legal procedure. You can laugh in the face of the 10 percent of the people who understand the issues if 90 percent of the people dismiss any discussion of them as the incomprehensible legal jockeying of paid flacks. If matters seem in danger of coming into focus, obfuscate and complexify with an air of injured rectitude." A thought experiment: At the dawn of the video age, the consumer technology giant Megabit invents software for a video recording and playback system. The invention is, primarily, an algorithm that can digitize and compress video data and write it to an optical disk, and that can read the compressed data and reconstitute the image on your TV set. Although Megabit makes a fair bit of money by licensing its technology to videodisk hardware manufacturers, it doesn't take much foresight to realize that while every household in the TV-mesmerized world is going to want a (as in *one*) videodisk player that uses Megabit technology, each of these households is going to buy (or rent) hundreds of videodisks every year. In anticipation of this demand and the turn-of-the-crank revenue it represents, Megabit buys up as many movie libraries as it can and starts stuffing Megabit brand videodisks into the retail channels. Megabit nearly corners the video market; but it can't buy *every* library -- and, on closer look, the quality of the Megabit-encoded picture, while good enough for the junk your neighbors watch, makes the cinephile cringe. Furthermore, licensing the Megabit encoding format is too expensive for independent studios. Luckily, a handful of new technology companies come along that offer smaller, cheaper encryption schemes and faster, cleaner decoders. The movie studios are overjoyed, the consumer is delighted, and videodisk manufacturers, always looking for another bullet on their features lists, step up plans to include multiple decoders on their videodisk players. Great, says Megabit to the manufacturers, we're all for competition! Just remember that the Megabit license says that if you include any other decoder on your hardware (which you are, of course, free to do), you have to use the Megabit Decoder Chooser to switch between them. And, one more thing, do try to keep in mind that under the terms of the Megabit Decoder Chooser license, you may only use the MDC to choose from among Megabit-provided decoders...   ----------- I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it. While I rambled on about peace on the hard disk, Microsoft made it lethal for a PC OEM to factory-install BeOS (or Linux, or FreeBSD) next to Windows on the computer's hard disk. If you, as a PC OEM, don't use the Windows boot manager or configure it to load Linux or BeOS, you lose your Windows license and you're dead. That's why you can't buy a multi-OS machine from Compaq, Dell, HP or anyone else for that matter. (Yes, you can buy a Linux laptop from IBM, but not one that runs the Windows Office applications you need or that can switch to Linux or BeOS when you want.) But what if PC OEMs had always been free to offer multi-OS PCs? Would it matter? Would we have seen the emergence of Ausländer-OS applications that could solve the problems that Windows doesn't handle well -- little problems such as stability, configurability, media creation and rendering, to name a few? Feel free to speculate. What we know for sure is that Microsoft treated the PC hardware platform as if it owned it, and thus hurt consumers, software developers, PC OEMs, OS competitors, and the industry in general. That's a layman's definition of abusing a monopoly. Microsoft has carefully avoided public comment on this, preferring to portray itself as an innocent victim. In private, PC OEMs acknowledge the stranglehold Microsoft has on them -- but, in public, they have to take care of their shareholders (and their own families). We welcome conduct remedies if they will prevent Microsoft from unfairly and illegally abusing their position of power.

Past Columns: March 7, 2001 Intemperance Makes the Suit Look Bad February 7, 2001 The Web Device of Choice at Home January 17, 2001 Transfer of Power December 6, 2000 One Step Closer November 15, 2000 Thoughts on Comdex 2000 November 1, 2000 Watching the Pendulum October 4, 2000 Plus çà change... September 6, 2000 Connected Appliances: A Field Report August 16, 2000 Sub-PC vs. Appliances July 12, 2000 The Victim Microsoft June 7, 2000 The Power of Words May 31, 2000 The First Be Shareholders Meeting May 24, 2000 Intellectual Property and Internet Appliances May 17, 2000 Spreading the Virus May 10, 2000 Numbers and Feedback May 3, 2000 Manufacturing Consent

About Be, Inc. | Be Products | World of Be | BeOS Support | Jobs | Developers | Press | Partners | Investors

Copyright © 2001 by Be, Inc. All rights reserved. (Legal Info)
Comments, questions, or confessions about our site? Please write the Webmaster!