Deja vu all over again

摘要

Another year, another anti-trust showdown for Microsoft, the world's biggest software company. It all sounds horribly familiar. Once again, the company has fallen foul of regulators who accuse it of exploiting the monopoly of Windows, its desktop operating-system software, in order to dominate adjacent markets. Four years ago, American trustbusters argued that Microsoft had crushed makers of rival web-browsers by building its own browser into Windows, thus ensuring its ubiquity, since Windows is installed on over 95% of PCS. This time around, its opponent is the European Commission, which is soon expected to issue a ruling that Microsoft has done the same thing again with its media-player software, and is using the dominance of Windows to monopolise the market for software on bigger "server" computers as well (see pages 72-74). The victims and the investigating police force may be different, but the perpetrator, murder weapon (Windows) and modus operandi are identical. The European case is, in effect, a re-run of the American case in which Microsoft was found guilty four years ago.