-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- and everyone thought I have been blowing smoke over the few years over the need to dismember Micro$haft. More aye-sayers than naysayers have joined the fray, some even eloquently. even the opinion polls are against BadBillyG: bubba is more trusted! as is the government... Mickey$lop no longer generates terror in the hearts of everyone --just the OEMs who can not afford to even testify for fear of retaliation --and it is a real fear. keep your fire extinguisher handy. Maureen is really smoking! January 21, 1998 NYTimes OpEd Columnist LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD Revenge on the Nerds WASHINGTON -- I figured things were way out of perspective in the Other Washington when I heard that Bill Gates had put an inscription from "The Great Gatsby" around the domed ceiling of the library in his new $100 million pad: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." Bill Gates was obviously unaware of the magnitude of the truth that he had unwittingly admitted. When he read about the blue lawn, he must have imagined computers with glowing blue screens stretching to infinity. And he must certainly have liked the proximity of the words "dream" and "grasp." With a judge who is likely soon to hold Microsoft in contempt for petulantly defying an order designed to give its rivals any chance, Mr. Gates's dream may at last have exceeded his grasp. The Justice Department never came down on Gatsby. This Washington has disabused that Washington of its arrogant presumption that what's good for Microsoft is good for America. This Washington has stripped that Washington of its image as warm, tender, flannel-and-soyburger pioneers of the new economy, and properly pegged Microsoft as an egomaniacal, dangerous giant that has cut off the air supply of competitors in a bid to control cyberspace. "The only thing the robber barons did that Bill Gates hasn't done is use dynamite against their competitors," Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, told John Heilemann of The New Yorker. The disheveled college dropout who used to get adoring headlines like "A Regular Guy Who's a Legend: Bill Gates Puts a New Face on the American Dream" now looks like a spoiled rich brat. When they treated the Justice Department and the judge with the same contempt with which they treat competitors, the masters of the virtual universe got hit with a grim truth: People hate Microsoft even more than they hate the Government. Mr. Gates has gone from Horatio Alger similes to virus similes. Frederick Warren-Boulton, another antitrust expert, told The New Yorker: "Gates is like smallpox. You have to go in there and you have to nail it. If you leave it lying around, it will just come back." When asked who they thought had done more good for the future of America, Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, more Americans chose Mr. Clinton. (Even though portfolio-obsessed Americans would still rather have their children grow up to be more like Mr. Gates than Mr. Clinton, by 47 to 24 percent.) As Jacob Weisberg plaintively wrote in Slate, Microsoft's on-line magazine: "A few months ago, everyone I met seemed to think that working for Microsoft was a pretty cool thing to do. Now, strangers treat us like we work for Philip Morris." The Times's Timothy Egan explored the angst that has gripped the Redmond campus since Microsoft lost its sheen. Some fret that the fate of the entire Pacific Northwest is at stake. All the instant millionaires in thermal shirts, droopy drawers and sandals with wool socks are suddenly Wondering If It's All Worth It. They have staggered out of the Seattle fog long enough to listen to their inner browsers. This has been a rude shock to them because they honestly believed that our Washington was full of anti-business, careerist bureaucrats, and their Washington was full of imaginative idealists and entrepreneurs who buy and sell to the beat of a different drum. They didn't reckon smokestack laws could apply to high technology. As Mr. Gates's lawyer, William Neukom, told Steve Lohr of The Times, "We sincerely believe that we are a force for good in the economy." Actually, Microsoft has been a force for greed in the economy, more brilliant at marketing and purloining and crushing than it has been at innovating. The company saw the fight with the Justice Department as a defense of its way of life. And that way was hardball on software; anything it decided was a core threat to Microsoft was sucked into the operating system. These are Darwinian nerds. Besides, Microsoft couldn't even save the universe in "Independence Day." It took an Apple to do that. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: latin1 Comment: No safety this side of the grave. Never was; never will be iQBVAwUBNMZSQ7R8UA6T6u61AQH2fgH+OQT3p1cE1lRxSzMvhyt9AvvH2N3jFUmO UZzpqRbrn9pB1VPxZLKG2lgBwOW4hPIlpFRWg8Fp+Uu6KoL6kKObuw== =n+/c -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----