What is to be done about Microsoft?
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
(06/02/99)

Supposing the company loses the trial and is declared a monopoly, the government could declare that starting one year from that date, it will not purchase any Microsoft software for the next five years. The reason for the one-year wait is to give alternative vendors time to get going. The five-year period would ensure the vendors a decent market.

It would be a very simple solution. No regulators hovering around, no lengthy hearings on how to break up Microsoft, no reviews of them opening up their source or APIs or contracts, etc. Simply a guaranteed 10-20 percent market for non-Microsoft software.

Perhaps the most important outcome would be that Microsoft products would have to interoperate with the rest of the world. Not only would government workers have to save documents in nonproprietary formats, but people who communicate with the government and still use Microsoft products (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) would have to save in non-Microsoft formats, such as rich text, plain old ascii, html, or something else. It would break Microsoft's monopoly faster than any other remedy I can think of.

But getting the government to make the decision -- that's another story altogether, methinks.

-- Felix Finch

I made the same arguments Scott Rosenberg does in my 1998 SRI report, "After Microsoft." The five "Baby Bills" I described, the offspring of Microsoft's inevitable devolution, would do well on their own, though each would travel its own trajectory.

Like Scott, I foresee other benefits in a voluntary breakup for Microsoft's shareholders -- not least, avoiding potential legal unpleasantness related to Microsoft's Ponzi-like employee compensation schemes.

The social reward for dissolving the monolith will be a renaissance in creativity among software developers, who could find a thousand new ways of combining and recombining, designing and redesigning software to meet the specific needs of individual customers, free from having to serve one corporation's imperial fantasies. Even the Baby Bills will benefit by this creative surge.

The allusion in Scott's title to Lenin's famous question (regarding the establishment of a communist empire) is properly ironic. Only the dissolution of the Soviet state could free the energies of hundreds of millions of individuals formerly enthralled by an abstract "greater good." Unfortunately, for most of the newly freed, the result has been enslavement to poverty. Dissolving Bill Gates' empire is no panacea for reactionary business practices.

-- Bob Jacobson
Redwood City, Calif.

Microsoft is and has been a dubious enterprise of uncertain legality. Starting with VisiCalc, Lotus and Apple, they have ripped off innovators, and what they couldn't steal they leveraged by making competitors "an offer they couldn't refuse." The best thing for the software world, promoting innovation, high-quality software, ease of use, true power and all the things we expect from good software, would be to kill Microsoft outright, liquidate it, seize all its assets, and bar any officer from working in the industry for five years and any other employee for three years.

-- John Glasscock

Shivering penis
BY GARY KAUF
(06/02/99)

I underwent a vasectomy in 1961, uneventfully, painlessly and with no compulsion whatsoever to tell anybody about it -- except for the rabbi, in whose temple I happened to be preaching that very night, lest we be mutually guilty of violating one more of those arcane prohibitions in Leviticus about men whose testicles had been smashed. Your correspondent should have asked for a complete anesthesia, or at least one of those anesthetics that cause people to forget -- and shut up about -- what they've undergone.

-- Robert A. Mackie

Eleven years ago, after 18 years of marriage and three offspring, I decided to have a vasectomy rather than subject my mate to a much more risky sterilization process. It wasn't a big deal. I shaved well, stepped into the stirrups that women use in order to be examined, and received the local anesthetic needed for the easily facilitated birth control procedure.

The giant needle? Sex was out for a week? I was advised to wait until I was out of the stirrups; I went home and had sex with my wife the same day. I think you are a fake, a comic or a wimp; you surely gave some misinformation, as well as making us men sound foolish. I hope that you were being facetious or attempting to create humor surrounding this relatively painless and risk-free sterilization process. And as you know, it isn't our penis that is the target of the surgery, but rather our testicles. Please tell me you were just making light of a certain situation.

-- Allan Beane
Oakland, Calif.

Only models matter
BY CINTRA WILSON
(06/02/99)

While Mariko Mori's work has left me feeling absolutely nothing (blasi and shiny -- talk about a one-liner), I have been incensed by critics' reviews that begin with two paragraphs or so of Mori's days as a model, and follow that with a lengthy description of her physical attributes. Oh yeah -- somewhere near the bottom they actually mention the art.

Tracey Elmin appears to be the obnoxious pissed off teen that many of us were before we realized things like subtlety, depth, intricacy and original thought. I can't wait till she forms a band and starts dating an actor.

It would be nice if more mature, visceral, intelligent artists actually were noticed because of their contributions to art and not as Cosmo cover girls.

-- Karen Benson

Is it peace yet?
BY LAURA ROZEN
(06/03/99)

Rozen cites author and Balkans specialist Anna Husarska as saying "the devil" in any peace accord reached will be in the details. This is indeed the most critical issue of any peace accord. Refugees who have survived beatings, rapes, psychological torture and the witnessing of murders certainly have a human right to be free of any leering, threatening visage from the very units that terrorized them, the same military forces (Serbian army and paramilitaries) that have united NATO and Europe in this costly endeavor.

-- Lawrence Brohkahn