What is this bizarre attachment to Gates?
He made the mistake of thinking his empire was
equivalent to Rockefeller's.  (The latter has naught to
fear even though it includes 7 of the largest oil companies in
the world).

BUT Gates is vulnerable--his monopoly status is ended.  He seems
to be disconnected from reality, his position is doomed, and with
good reason.
Bye, Bye Gates.

>
> Break Up Microsoft?
> By George Reisman
>
> The meaning of the government’s proposal to break
> Microsoft into two separate companies, the one
> confined to producing Windows, the other confined
> to producing application software, is that one or
> the other of these two major branches of personal
> computer software is to be closed to the productive
> genius of America’s most successful software
> innovator: Bill Gates. As the New York Times
> reports, "Under the government plan, Mr. Gates,
> the company’s chairman, would have to choose one
> of the two companies and divest himself of any
> financial interest in the other." (April 29, p. B4.)
>
> In other words, Gates is to be prohibited from producing and
> competing either in a major area which he has been responsible for
> creating from the ground up, namely, Windows, or in an area which
> he has been responsible for advancing beyond what other suppliers
> had achieved, for example, word processing and spreadsheet
> software.
>
> Thus, in the name of freedom of competition and the combating of
> monopoly, Gates’s freedom of competition is to be blatantly violated
> and one or the other of the two branches of software is to be
> monopolized against him—i.e., it is to become an industry, or part of
> an industry, reserved by means of the government’s initiation of
> physical force, to the exclusive possession of others.
>
> All branches of software production are to be open to everyone,
> except to Gates (and also, as The Times reports, his two most
> important associates, Steven Ballmer, the current president of
> Microsoft, and Paul Allen, its co-founder.) The result is that freedom
> of competition in software is to apply to everyone except to those
> with the ability to revolutionize software. It is though the automobile
> industry were to be legally open to everyone except to Henry Ford. Or
> the electric power industry were to be legally open to everyone
> except to Thomas Edison.
>
> What underlies such an incredible outcome is the utterly mistaken
> belief that overwhelming competitive success, to the point that one
> man or one company dominates an entire industry, constitutes
> monopoly. This, of course, is the kind of success that Gates and
> Microsoft have enjoyed.
>
> The fact is that such an outcome of free competition is not monopoly.
> But it is monopoly when those capable of bringing about such an
> outcome are forcibly excluded from an industry, or any part of an
> industry. The accompanying forcible reservation of an industry or part
> of an industry even to a mass of less capable producers is the real
> monopoly, as much as if the industry had been forcibly reserved to
> the possession of one man or one company. The essential element in
> monopoly is forcible exclusion and forcible reservation, not the
> number of producers.
>
> The destructive nature of the government’s proposed breakup of
> Microsoft is further indicated by one of the major reasons for
> advancing it. Namely, what The Times article describes as "A
> requirement that Microsoft share with other companies any technical
> information about Windows, including software interfaces that the
> system engineers are sharing with other people at Microsoft."
>
> What this refers to is the fact that an important reason that
> Microsoft’s application software is so often better than that of others
> is that Microsoft, as the creator and proprietor of Windows, has
> greater access to and knowledge of Windows than its competitors.
> This gives Microsoft an important competitive advantage when it
> comes to producing applications that run under Windows, because it
> knows better how to integrate them with Windows.
>
> What the government does not see, and what Microsoft’s
> unsuccessful competitors apparently to do not care to realize, is that
> this competitive advantage that Microsoft enjoys in application
> software was a major reason for its having developed and improved
> the Windows operating system in the first place. The prospect of
> profits from application software is a powerful motive for improving
> operating system software. But it is such a motive only when the
> producer of the operating system is free to produce application
> software too. Only then can he directly and most substantially profit
> from the resulting improvements in the application software.
>
> It follows, of course, that to break up Microsoft must undermine the
> incentives of the surviving Windows portion to continue to innovate.
> For it will not be in a position directly to profit from any major new
> applications that can be based on those improvements. That will be
> the monopoly privilege of others.
>
> At the same time, the surviving applications portion of Microsoft will
> be deprived of the benefits it would have derived from a free and
> motivated Windows division.
>
> Of course, the supporters of the government’s proposal expect that
> once others have the same access to Windows that Microsoft now
> has, those others will be in a position to produce and innovate more
> effectively. Indeed, they will—in the same way that buggy makers
> and gas companies would have had greater ability to innovate if they
> had not been put out of business by Ford and Edison or if they had
> been in a position to forcibly appropriate the advances made by those
> great innovators as of the mid-point of their careers.
>
> The consumers of computer software need the freedom of Bill Gates
> and Microsoft to produce and innovate in any branch of computer
> software they choose. That is, they need for them to enjoy the full,
> unbreached freedom of competition. They do not need the hobbling of
> this man by the breakup of his company, which would serve only to
> reduce the efficiency of both surviving parts and provide monopolistic
> protection to less capable producers, whatever their number.
>
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