The Microsoft Decision: The Real Meaning of Internet Time

You know the strangest thing about this jangly end to the Department of Justice's action against Microsoft (MSFT)? At least, about this finding of fact, marking the end of the trial stage?

The endgame has become so meaningless.

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We babble a lot about "Internet time." If ever anything should teach us about the pace of change in the e-world, and about how circumstances can change so much that something that once seemed massively important becomes peripheral, it ought to be this damned Microsoft trial.

• A year ago when this got underway, the computer industry was shaking with fear over the continuing dominance of Microsoft, whose Windows products were clearly going to control every computing device before long.

• A year ago Netscape and its future, and the market pressure Microsoft's (superior) Internet Explorer was putting on Netscape's Navigator browser, were big issues.

• A year ago, it looked as if whatever problems for its competitors were solved by the DOJ's attack on Microsoft -- and make no mistake about it, this was always an action in which the DOJ allowed itself to become a gladiator for the hard-case "Get Microsoft!" people, such as Oracle's (ORCL) Larry Ellison and Sun's (SUNW) Scott McNealy -- it would also set important and enduring guidelines for the entire industry.

  And today?

• Today, Microsoft and Windows are under assault on many fronts, and CEO Steve Ballmer is managing pulling in the walls at Fortress Redmond. Unix, in the form of its offspring Linux, has begun to get real traction in the business network operating systems market, and genuinely worries Microsoft's Windows NT product managers.

• A decent if unspectacular -- but free -- office-applications suite, Sun's StarOffice, is threatening Microsoft's lucrative Office 2000 franchise.

• Free "Web applications" from other corners look better and better -- have you seen Desktop.com? -- and are reminding us that we really don't need a Godzilla of a word processor just to write letters and reports.

• Windows CE still hasn't come to dominate the palmtop market, as 3Com's (COMS) Palm division licenses more and more third-party hardware shops to use its market-leading Palm OS as a platform for pocketable computing devices.

• Today, Netscape is gone, R.I.P., a non-issue -- and not because of Microsoft. The company sold itself to America Online (AOL) and Sun for a very nice gain, and except for a couple of software packages bought and tweaked by Netscape, now being sold by Sun, it's hard to find much evidence of Netscape's footprints. Lots of people still use Navigator, now of course owned by AOL. But heck, lots of people still use Lotus 1-2-3 version 1a and even Wordstar. So what?

• So-called "Net appliances" are about to get very hot. Free of "legacy" requirements -- that is, the need to run Microsoft Windows and Windows applications -- these boxes are about to appear in a dizzying variety of shapes, sizes, functions and prices. What they have in common: They connect quickly to the Web, without a Microsoft operating system or a Microsoft browser, and give their users complete access to the riches of the Web. Oh, and did I mention that there's no Microsoft software inside?

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Today, the buzz is not about Office 2000, nor even particularly about Windows 2000. The Linux flavors, principally those from Red Hat (RHAT) and Caldera, are getting a lot of attention; Berkeley FreeBSD is still an immensely popular Unix variant. Those "Web apps" are attracting a lot of attention. Internet appliances are on the horizon.

You tell me even one of those developments -- healthy, every one of them, I'd say -- which was driven or even aided by the DOJ's suit?

Yet if at the outset of the DOJ's venture against Microsoft, I had written here that any of those conditions would obtain today, you would have immediately thought that could only have happened as an outcome of a successful DOJ action.

You'd have been wrong, of course; The market brought all that about.

You know -- that same market that the DOJ doesn't trust, that Judge Jackson obviously doesn't trust, the one that Microsoft allegedly so powerfully and utterly controls.

Uh-huh.

And remember -- this happened in just a year.

Now tell me again about Internet time.

More: Whatever Jackson finally comes up with as his proposed remedies, and whatever happens to that laundry list on appeal, does anyone really believe this decision, looking so far backwards, will form an enduring code, a case-law organizing principle that computer-industry companies will use, going forward, to guide their behavior?

Of course not. Today, in Internet time, we realize that the outcome of any legal action can be viewed only in the context of the situation of that moment. And that with the ground constantly shifting under our feet, looking backwards to decisions such as this one -- ideas and outcomes formed in the crucible of a market and competitive environment no longer remotely the same -- is about as useful as looking at the calendar to see what the temperature is outside -- interesting, but hardly determinative.

Indeed, it just may be that the most important legacy of this incredibly expensive foray by the Department of Justice against the real and imagined bad behavior of the boys from Redmond -- and make no mistake about it, bad behavior is very much in the DNA of some Microsoft managers -- will be that more of us in this country recognize that Internet time has simply become our time: the pace and rhythms of change which we have brought about, and by which we will now live.

Did we really need this curious public entertainment to learn that lesson?

Maybe.

But I doubt it.

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