Proof You Really Can be Too Rich

by The Cranky Media Guy

Bill Gates

"Waaa!" says Bill, the poor little rich boy.  "No one understands me.  The mean judge says I have to break up my nice company into two parts.  I don't wanna!  Waaa!"

If the Microsoft defendants were half as smart as they were arrogant, they could have won their anti-trust case.  They weren't though, and it's gonna cost them.  As they say in the former Soviet Union, "Toughsky shitsky."

"We're being punished for being too successful" is the mantra around Redmond these days and the assholes on the right, who never saw a monopoly they didn't want to give a big, sloppy, wet kiss to, chant it right along with Gates' Heaven's Gaters.  Trouble is, it doesn't bear examination.

The Microsofties walked into the federal court room cocky, convinced that they could bluff the judge who, they assumed, wouldn't know an operating system from a hard drive.  As a result, they fucked up in spectacular fashion.  They let the Feds see the memos that vowed to run Netscape out of business; they had the gonads to introduce as evidence videotape--not once, but twice--that had obvious edits.  When the judge asked them to produce a copy of Windows without Internet Explorer, they whipped up a version that couldn't even boot up.  Gee, I wonder why the judge said that Microsoft "wasn't acting in good faith".  Go figure, huh?

Microsoft was the Keystone Kops of defendants, falling on their collective ass time after time.  The judge went out of his way, again and again, to give them the opportunity to work out a deal with the Feds, but they were too arrogant to see the life preserver he was trying to throw to them.  

Now, even after he rightfully lost the case, Bill still can't see where he went wrong.  He's still on the offensive, taking out full-page ads in the Washington Post and USA Today, whining about how Microsoft is being punished for being "innovators".  It is to laugh.  Ask any real computer geek you know about that; he or she will tell you that Microsoft couldn't innovate a cardboard box.  For years now, their strategy has been to let others lead; then, when they see what's successful in the market, they either blatantly copy it or they buy the business that created it.  Remember, until only a few years ago, Gates was saying that the Internet wasn't where the money in computing was going to be.  Good call, Einstein!

Bill, you aren't being punished because you're "too successful".  You're being punished because you're an arrogant, megalomaniac monopolist.  You tried to bullshit a federal judge and he didn't like it.  Be a man, you sniveling little shit and take your medicine.

Bust up Microsoft into two parts?  Screw that!  Smash 'em 'til they look like a jigsaw puzzle that got knocked off the kitchen table.  Let them serve as a lesson to the next corporate bastard who wants to shove his product down the public's gullet by any means necessary. 

Hey Gates, you whiner, know that ridiculously big Jetsons-style appliance-equipped house you've been building since about the 12th Century?  Go sit in the corner in one of the rooms of your cyber-Xanadu and don't come out until you're ready to apologize for what you've done to the consumers, you friggin' weasel.