Certainly, public sentiment toward Microsoft is volatile. Nearly 70 percent of our survey respondents predicted that if Microsoft continues on its current path, five years from now customers will no longer have a general sense of respect for the company. Microsoft and Bill Gates have moved beyond the early hero status accorded to companies perceived to have parlayed their smarts into deserved market success. The company and the man are now at the stage where their tremendous wealth engenders a degree of bitterness and envy--the point at which billionaires find it wise to begin nurturing a benevolent public image.
 As I see it, it's time for Microsoft to take voluntary steps to safeguard its reputation. If Microsoft were to make dramatic concessions now, odds are that the DOJ and the states would call off the legal beagles. Count me in with the 40 percent of our readers who believe now is the time for Microsoft to make those concessions--that it should invest in technology, not lawyers.
Granted, 56 percent of respondents urge Microsoft to stand firm and go to the mat with the DOJ and the states. But think carefully about this: A whopping 83 percent of our respondents believe Microsoft should voluntarily publish all of its APIs for Windows, the Windows GUI and NT. What if Microsoft offered timely and wholly open APIs as an upfront concession in a consent order? This would certainly spur innovation, and more and better applications have always fattened Microsoft's wallet. There's a chance that such an action could dull Microsoft's applications edge--but then again, how much of an edge does Microsoft need? It already has an advantage in that the same individuals developing applications can be directly involved in its OS API development. In fact, Microsoft has so many advantages that the brute force with which it uproots competition makes it seem almost churlish.
Near the top of the list of Microsoft's advantages is that it can kill whole market sectors by including an application in Windows or NT, and then requiring hardware vendors to ship only the application as part of the OS. Why buy another product, even one that is superior, if you get something similar from Microsoft for free--and you'll need to support the overhead for Microsoft's OS application anyway?
This point wasn't lost on our respondents. Almost 73 percent said that even if Microsoft cut back its applications edge by opening up all its OS APIs and erecting a wall of silence between its OS and applications businesses, it shouldn't be allowed to tell hardware providers what applications must be shipped integral to the OS.
That raises some ticklish issues. Should hardware vendors, then, be allowed to define the OS? Microsoft, after all, can attribute much of its success to creating uniformity in a chaotic computing world. On the other hand, what real incentive is there for hardware providers to include new applications for which a free OS counterpart exists?
|
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
