Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free. But the dynamics of the situation belie the charge of predatory conduct. Netscape's browser, Navigator, became the most popular software application in history, landing on 38 million computers in just 18 months, thanks to its free distribution on machines running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Naturally, Microsoft countered. This is just the way Adam Smith drew it up on the chalkboard.
Firms thrive on issuing death threats to rivals.
Netscape had reason to think big. Clearly, determining where honest rivalry ends and anti-competitive predation begins can be a tricky business. Fortuitously, we know from another case what a real smoking-gun memo looks like, and the Department of Justice has nothing close in the Microsoft case. Ironically, we also know that the government's own economic expert in the Microsoft case thinks even a real smoking-gun memo reveals absolutely nothing. While testifying for the defense in the 1994 case of Leza Coleman, et al.