Microsoft Trial Update

This is being closely followed by Macs Only! because the principal issue is critical to the future of personal computing and the internet.

Simply put, Microsoft believes that it should have the freedom to do whatever it wants with its products and if consumers don't like them, they won't buy or use them. On the other hand, Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system has been so successful for whatever reasons that it is essentially a monopoly in personal computing. From strictly a business enterprise perspective, Microsoft has achieved the ultimate goal. But our ethics and, indeed, our laws require different practices from those that thusly succeed. Not using their tremendous leverage to impede competition or consumer choices of better products is one of them and at the heart of the trial. Microsoft's practices in competing with Netscape are bringing more government intervention to the free-wheeling personal computing "industry" and to the freedom of the internet. If Microsoft believes this is bad, it is causing it. However, perhaps such is inevitable because simple economic dynamics force successful businesses to press the limits of laws policed by the government into the gray and eventually into the black determined by a court.

If Microsoft beat Lotus 1-2-3, the formerly leading spreadsheet application, with a better product Excel (I think so), then did it beat WordPerfect with a better Word or by bundling Word in a heavily discounted so-called "office suite" with Excel and PowerPoint thus basically giving it away free? Is Word today better than Word was then? Would Word be even better today if WordPerfect had been able to sustain the competition? Is Microsoft's Internet Explorer beating Netscape's Navigator because it is better or because it is free and priority-bundled with Windows 95? With its Money financial application, Microsoft has its sight on Intuit's Quicken--if Microsoft succeeds, will it be with simply a better product or by some other but non-competitive forcing mechanism? Microsoft's business practices on these fronts and many others and its reactions to governmental policing of those practices are causing a backlash of public opinion. Here's a NY Times article (the ID and password are free) on the backlash and Microsoft's reaction to it noted by Joel Mueller and another provided by Dana Baggett.

Here are some software updates first spotted on Version Tracker:

• DataViz' MacLinkPlus v9.7.1
• OtherMenu 2.0