Once again I'm starting to fall behind on my journal writing (will this never end?). In tech news the Department of Justice will not pursue a Microsoft breakup. It's already been proven that they're a monopoly, it still remains what to do about it. Without recourse to a breakup you're left with asking Microsoft to "play nice" and follow specific rules -- both of which it has ignored in the past. Disappointingly, it looks like Microsoft will just continue its unfair business practices.

To be fairer, the question for the government is whether Microsoft's monopoly is a bad one, i.e. one that does not promote the public good. Do we really need a bunch of different operating systems which just fragment the computer sector? (You can go farther and ask "do we really need other word processors or spreadsheets or whatever than what Microsoft offers? Wouldn't everybody be more efficient overall if there were only one choice?") Does Microsoft unduly inhibit competitors? Is there not a balanced playing field?

You can argue either way because "public good" is different for different people. My feeling is that it doesn't matter how a company becomes a monopoly or whether it's a good monopoly or a bad monopoly. Once you are a monopoly you have to be broken up (or at least drastically reduced in size, and a break up into multiple companies is more humane than "fire half your workforce and get rid of half your assets"). Once you have a monopoly, it doesn't matter how good it's trying to be, eventually the negatives outweigh the positives.

I say this even though I work for Oracle and we do have close to a monopoly in the Enterprise Database sphere. (Though once you define a category that specifically maybe it's not really a monopoly.) It's a great company and does a lot of things right and it's pretty conscientious. But once Larry Ellison is gone who knows how the company will change. And that's the problem, no matter how good the company is, eventually there's new management and new philosophies and there's no where to go but down.

Now, you may ask "isn't this different that your Totalitarian State theory?" I believe in the rule of one person. It has the greatest potential for good and for evil. The problem is, most companies are not really ruled by one person, but by a committee. You have a board of directors and stockholders to make it into a mob rule. Nothing wrong with rule by the people, but it generally turns out that rule by the people means "lowest common denominator" and "middle of the road". Larry Ellison rules Oracle -- he has both the stock (25% of the company) and the force of will and personality to say "this is how it's going to be" and it is. But most companies don't and once Ellison is gone there's no one at Oracle that can step in, though someone will try of course.

Back to Microsoft. If you can't break it up, how will you rein it in? You can't really give out 100 little things it has to do ("don't include IE in the base OS, don't force PC manufacturers and large companies to buy a copy of Windows for every computer whether they use it or not"). You make specific rules like that, they'll just find a way around them. It's too much a battle of words and definitions. But what else can you do? Make them pay a penalty, make them sell of certain properties, government oversight? None of these hurt a big company, there's just minor annoyances. If you don't hurt them, they're not going to learn. Our law system makes punishment a deterrent, it's supposed to scare people into obeying laws. Once Microsoft realizes "hey, they're not going to punish us" they'll just push and push more and become worse and worse.

So you have to break them up. It's not going to get better. Rather negative I know but I believe it will happen. Break them up into and OS company and an Applications company, or OS and Enterprise and Consumer companies, with a small hardware company since they also make some hardware. MSN and WebTV would be another company since it's just a glorified ISP. I'd also make the Development tools division into a separate company. Ok, so I'm in favor of breaking them up into tiny little pieces, but that's because they have so many major areas that they're involved in.