Vicious competition is tough on the competitors, but it is wonderful for consumers, and it has been the general state of affairs in high technology for the past two decades. Sign a contract for a small monthly ISP charge and you can now get a computer for free. Such glorious returns were reaped without the Justice Department s help, thank you. Joel Klein s intervention three years ago came on behalf of Microsoft s competitors not America s consumers. Of course, competitors didn t like Microsoft.
Consumers are another matter.
They have consistently held a strongly positive view of the company. A survey by Zogby America earlier this year, for example, found that, by a margin of 55 percent to 16 percent, respondents believed Microsoft s business practices have helped rather than hurt consumers. In high tech, dominant market shares are extremely precarious, which is why Microsoft always held its prices down hardly the activity of a traditional monopolist. And at the time the government filed suit, Microsoft was beginning to effect a remarkable and dangerous transition to the Internet. Its management understood, as Klein apparently did not, that operating systems, housed inside a computer cavity, were not the wave of the future.