To: The Anti-Trust team at the Department of Justice I understand that there is still time to submit public comment/ recommendations on the Microsoft antitrust settlement. Summary: * The software industry is so complex, and Microsoft so dominant, that administrative and procedural remedies will be a complete waste of time for the government and Microsoft itself. There are too many loopholes and back- doors to ever regulate the company as structured. * Splitting the company up would work to an extent, but over the long run would simply create two or more monopolies, rather than one big one. * Perversely, the industry actually prospers when there is a near-monopoly to drive de facto standardization. The software industry does *not* thrive on the chaos of small players. So the industry would be best if there were a quasi monopolist that didn't do economic harm. * The only way to actually neutralize a monopoly in the software industry is to fundamentally alter the economics of the monopolist. With the incentive gone, the behavior and damage to the industry would fade away. * The operating systems market for Intel-based PCs is brain-dead: it exists, but it does not function in any meaningful sense. So there is an opportunity to neutralize the bad effects of the Microsoft monopoly. * The government can use the argument of eminent domain to declare the PC OS "marketplace" as property that will be taken over in the public interest. The government then grants this "marketplace" as a dead-zone in which only Microsoft can be a commercial supplier. The government pays Microsoft one dollar a year, and the fees paid by PC vendors for their operating systems goes to the US treasury. (An alternate form of this recommendation is just to put Windows into pure open source, where many vendors can work to make the system more secure and reliable while no vendor can charge for the product.) * Microsoft thus has an incentive to keep their OS innovations going (to make their applications business prosper, but they get no monopoly profits from the OS. They also have little power over the PC vendors or application vendors. Now that I've written the "summary," I'll spare you the details. Regards, and good luck. David O. Taber DOTnet Consulting 555 Bryant Street, Palo Alto CA 94301 voice: +1-650-326-3405 (rolls to voicemail) page: dtaber-page@forte.com (keep your message just one line ! !) fax: +1-650-326-1475 mail: DOT@D-O-Tnet.com ICQ: 138661538 www.D-O-Tnet.com