About your recent (May 5, 1998) column about Microsoft:

Your basic ideology is correct. But your description of Microsoft's situation has some errors. Let's see if I can do some debugging:

Microsoft DOES in fact have a virtual monopoly in operating systems. So much so that Bill Gates is willing to bail out Apple to at least keep up the appearance of competition. This bailout is really a takeover in disguise.

But the two entities will be kept separate, to keep up the appearance of competition. Just like capitalism and communism were kept separate for so long, keeping up the appearance of competition, while the world was gradually developed so as to become more and more interdependent, so that today, no country is free of the global banking and corporate oligarchy.

Bill Gates is by no means an outsider to the media oligarchy. Note his partnerships in MSNBC and in Dreamworks (the movie conglomerate with Speilberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen). Look on your Microsoft Internet Explorer browser 4.0: Notice under the "Favorites" menu: You'll find "Channels" preprogrammed in to lead the user to (guess who!) the mainstream media corporations' web sites!

Bill Gates is very much an insider to the corporate oligarchy! That is why nothing will actually come of all this "antitrust" sabre rattling by the Justice Department. They'll just keep making noise, but never actually do anything. Just like the UN does with the State of Israel.

About some part-timer knocking Bill Gates off his throne: just Windows (not counting MSWord, Superbase, or Excel) currently has somewhere around 20 megabytes of code, written not in plain English, or even Fortran or Basic, but in highly compressed form using special characters. By comparison, your column is coming in at about half a megabyte of text per year, uncompressed. This comparison should give you some idea of the workload that would be involved in competing against Microsoft.

The real monopolism is not in Microsoft's current activities, but in its actions ten to twenty years ago, when Bill Gates purchased through a back door some software from his main competitor, and made a deal with IBM to load their machines with it. He was given a big favor by IBM when they agreed to pay him the price of Windows for every desktop computer they shipped, whether it had Windows on it or some other operating system.

This exactly the same kind of deal that gave John D. Rockefeller control of the oil industry in the 1870s! The railroads paid Rockefeller a rebate for every carload of oil they shipped, whether the oil was Rockefeller's or somebody else's!

How did Gates and Rockefeller get such favorable deals? Connections, and sometimes bribery! Bill Gates is the son of a prominent Seattle attorney. He certainly had no trouble making connections!

The internet has made it very easy for anyone to become a media outlet. Like Matt Drudge! (Or like me! http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/8796) But it also makes it easy to track who is viewing what web sites! Internet providers can easily keep records of what sites their customers are looking at. And they in fact do keep such records! It would be very easy for somebody to sort these databases to see which people are in the habit of looking at politically incorrect web sites! Laws against "hate speech" are creating new categories of "thought crimes." These databases will make such laws very easy to enforce.

George Orwell's "1984" depicted a future where every person is monitored by government TV cameras. What kept that from happening is the fact that watching what hundreds of millions of cameras are seeing would be an unachievable workload. But with the internet, that monitoring can be automated! And is!

We should not retreat from the internet because of fear of being purged by some future regime going back over the databases that are now being built. We need to use the internet, as well as every other media available to influence people to support policies that guarantee ideological freedom and economic freedom, as well as personal responsibility. In short, Christian principles. ANY restriction of ideological speech would eventually be turned around and used against us!

I'm sure this letter has given you a lot to think about. Your columns do the same for me. I shall enjoy continuing to read them.

Jeff Putman
Dayton Ohio

Charley Reese sent me a reply, but I'm having a hard time accessing it. (Dang Microsoft software!) Basicially, he said that the above comments were very interesting, enough so to make him reconsider his position.

There are a number of sites on the net that compare the quality of Microsoft software with that of their competitors. You can do a search. Go to http://www.altavista.digital.com/ then, try key words like Microsoft, competition, competitors, free market, monopoly, etc.

It should be noted that, while the Justice Department is considering anti trust action against Microsoft (most likely writing their memos with MS Word), the U.S. Government is buying millions of copies of Windows, and even requires that contractors submit data in MS Word format!

So that's pretty much what I have to say about Microsoft.

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