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What these young whippersnappers don't remember about computer history is that before all the good liberals hated Microsoft, they hated IBM. When I started in this field in 1965, IBM produced all the building-sized mainframe computers, the only kind that existed, used in the US. When you leased an IBM mainframe (it was very dificult to actually buy one) you were required to run IBM software on it. Computers and their software cost so much, even to rent, that only governments, insurance companies and universities had them.

Naturally, everyone knew that this situation had to be an Evil Monopoly. A huge antitrust suit was cranked up, costing the taxpayers a vast fortune, employing generations of lawyers as it plodded through the courts. Guess what? IBM's "monopoly" evaporated as soon as a new generation of lower-cost "minicomputers" came onto the market and began offering small amounts of computer power at prices that medium sized businesses could afford. Amdahl/Fujitsu cloned the IBM mainframe and began to skim the cream off the mainframe market. By the late Seventies, the microprocessor and integrated circuit had made it possible for small startups like Altair to introduce early personal computers. One of these startups, Apple Corp., introduced a model that became the most popular of its time. IBM, already a shruken remnant of its old self, observed Apple's success and introduced its PC design. Aha, said all the pundits: IBM is "copying" Apple by giving the market what it wants, "embracing and extending" so that it could re-establish its lost "monopoly".

The threat of an IBM monopoly on PC's evaporated once again as dozens of small manufacturers cloned the IBM design. Like Linus Torvalds today, young Bill Gates stepped in bto produce software that would break any incipient IBM monopoly in that area too.

And the rest, as the liberals would have us forget, was history.

Well, I'm just the reverse: I think the world of IBM, which in my view has innovated just about every important computer breakthough (have two of their laptops, used to have three), but I loath Microsoft because the stuff they sell is CRAP and IMHO stifles innovation. Besides, I have to clean up after the messes caused by their poorly designed products. I am no liberal, so you are clearly mistaken to continue the rhubarb that whoever is attacks Microsoft is somehow anti-American.

That way of thinking is exactly that which setup the mindset that allowed the Japanese cars to run General Motors into the ground.

One must never surrender values and ethics for the good of abstract economic philosophy. The big lesson I learned fron George Gilder and Milton Friedman is that the "right" path is usually the ethical path as well...

Monopoly tends to be on a different side from freedom and choice, that that is where I am against it.