"We want to do it all." 


Come again. 

Being a "Mac-person"--sometimes the term is pejorative, other times it's endearing--people often expect me to be in the cheering box of the US Justice Department and the EU competition commission in their crusade against Microsoft, Apple's oldest and chief nemesis. The truth be told, I don't hold such a vile contempt for Microsoft as many of my Mac brethren do, and I respect the company for its keen business strategies and marketing techniques. I don't think very highly of a foreign intergovernmental organization (the EU) levying fines of millions upon millions of dollars on an American firm, either.

So where do I come out on this issue? I do recognize that MS has definitely engaged in anti-competitive practices vis-a-vis their web browser and their media player among other things, but I also recognize the amount of people that MS employs, the dependence that most of the world has on its products and that there are indeed viable alternatives in the operating system and other software markets. MS did not become the supplier of 95% of the world's PC operating systems by selling a completely incapable product. To be sure, I hold my Macintosh and Apple software in extremely high esteem, bragging about its superiority to MS's products at any chance that I can get, but people would immediately abandon the MS platform in droves if it were to become completely ineffective in the purposes for which people use it. As it stands right now people do have alternatives, not only with Apple but with Linux and other open-source software. The bottom line is that I have faith in the free market: any imperfections in MS's products will cause demand for them to decrease and demand for its alternatives to increase. Thus, prices go down and competition and innovation are once again taken seriously by MS in order to regain its lost market share.

Speaking of market share, I read an interesting article on ZDNet news today about Microsoft's refusal to admit that they are copying Apple's new OS (Mac OS X v. 10.4, 'Tiger') and putting ideas that are in this soon-to-be-released operating system into their 'Longhorn' OS, scheduled for release sometime next year (and if their luck continues how it's been, that deadline will keep being pushed back). MS claims that market research by both companies shows them what consumers want and I have no choice but to accept her hypothesis on this matter even though I know just how much of a lead MS has taken from Apple in the past, all of the way back to the GUI and the mouse (taken by Apple from Xerox, for "bad artists copy...good artists steal", so goes the Picassoan proverb).

Back to the point: in my mind it is one thing to find yourself providing the personal computer services to 95% of the computer-using planet, but it is quite another to specifically target for assimilation 100% of the market. This statement from this article says it all:

"We're not happy about losing any market share," Crossley said. "We worry less about 'losing share' and more about what else we can get into... we want to do it all."

Cynthia Crossley, a Windows officer in the UK, was responding to a question asking her whether she's seen any type of 'halo effect' from the iPod that has become an incentive for Windows users to switch to the Mac.

"We want to do it all." That's a telling statement. Perhaps there's more of an anti-competitive fervor in MS than I thought. 

Posted: Tue - April 5, 2005 at 05:02 PM          

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