Creative Insecurity

The complicated truth behind the rise of Microsoft

Virginia Postrel from the January 1998 issue

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What Microsoft has delivered is pretty much what most people want: a way to use computers easily, for many different purposes. Its software isn't always elegant, but that's the criterion of programming elites, not everyday users. And though Microsoft is clearly the big kid on the block, it has enabled, and encouraged, lots of other software developers. Microsoft accounts for a mere 4 percent of industry revenue. As Eamonn Sullivan of PC Week notes, "A lot of companies are making a lot of money on the ubiquity of Windows, providing users with a lot of choice where they want it--on their desktops. That isn't the expected result of a monopoly."

From 1969 to 1982, the Justice Department carried on a similar trust-busting crusade against IBM, which had behaved in many ways just like Microsoft. (An earlier antitrust action against IBM had been settled by a consent decree in 1956.) Millions of dollars were transferred from the taxpayers and stockholders to lawyers and expert witnesses. Enormous amounts of brain power were dissipated. Having to monitor every action for possible legal ramifications further constipated IBM's already-centralized culture.

The suit was a complete waste. Whatever quasi-monopoly IBM had was broken not by government enforcers but by obscure innovators, working on computer visions neither IBM nor the Justice Department's legions of lawyers had imagined. Big Blue is still big, though it's smaller than it once was. But nobody thinks it could control the world. The world, it seems, is beyond that sort of control.