The real problem, of course, is that Microsoft is guilty as charged. MS has made a long term practice of predatory actions against other software developers and incorporating those competitors creativity into newer versions of the operating system.In some few cases there may have been a better product generated as a result, but overall, product quality has lagged and operating system complexity has increased as innovative entrapreneurs have gone under.

Not a single long-time cmputer executive fails to remember the original (pre-antitrust worries) Microsoft motto of "DOS isn't done until Louts won't run". The MS attitude is the same today as its always been - only a little more circumspect and, to use a current word, nuanced.

The function of an operating system is to provide a platform on which applications can run. Microsoft changed the operating system to include applications with the main code using private unpublished calls which made it easier for their own application software to run while making it harder for the competitions.

Lotus, Wordperfect, Harvard Systems, Novell, Real Systems and Hayes were all innovators who pioneered and brought spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, networking, audio/visual and modem connections respectively to the computer industry. All have been co-opted by Microsoft as MS loaded their functionality into the operating system. As a result the leading products is these areas today is Excel, Word, Presentations, Windows interal peer-to-peer networking, Windows Media and Dialup Networking - all Microsoft products.

Are these better products for the consumers? More functional? Better priced? Time and the rapid progress of technology obscures the answer. With the possible exceptions of the networking products, none of this functionality best fits within the operating system. The operating system needs only minor functionality in each of these cases to perform its function.

If Microsoft had produced applications on the same basis as the innovators and their products proved better or more successful, my sttitude would be different. But as a professional who has lived though the Microsoft age, I can tell you that in each case, Microsoft used its operating system to create an unlevel playing field so that the innovators could not hold onto their position of emmance and the lower quality MS product could assume dominance.

The elephant in the MS room, however, is what the inclusion of these programs has meant in the area of unintended consequences.

With the loading of additional functionality has come a ballooning of features and code complexity. If you put three dots on a page and connect each dot, you get 3 line. But you add another dot and connect each of the dots, instead of 4 lines, you have 6 lines. And with 4 dots you get 6 lines, etc. With thousands of lines of interreltating code needing to be kept functional, the whole system soon falls due to the interralational complexity.

And that is the problem with Windows. So much complexity has been written into the system that security holes and bugs have developed just because the of the interrelationship requirements.

The best way to counteract these problems is to define general interfaces which mark the way program segments interchange data and processes. This reduces the complexity in each sub-system so that the sub-system itself becomes the universe for developing code. These interfaces are termed APIs (application program interfaces). If the APIs are shared among all the developers, those with the most efficient code and innovative application ideas being offered at a fair price tht the public is willing to pay should come out on top.

And this is where MS has rigged the game. All the APIs are not published. Some are kept secret so that only MS software developers are privving to them. So the competitors must write pages of code with possible errors to be debugged just to do what MS developers with a single call.

Secondly, if an MS developer has reason to frequently need a specific API, MS may decide to develop it for him within the operating system.

Third, even if MS is willing to publish a particular API, timing is everything. The API can be published concurrently with the application that uses it; making it impossible for the competition to anticpate and use the same API.

Fourth, APIs can also be replaced with new ones in new versions. So the competition can be kept busy rewriting old code to use current interfaces while MS own developers already had time to insert the new calls which had been custom made for their own calling needs.

If a competitor has been overrelying on existing APIs or other non-API system features, changes are a good way of inviting their rework.

Thus by constantly changing (of course the marketing arm will call it "improving") the system calls, a competitior can be kept off balance while MS drives toward product domination.

The basic concept of conservatives, and the libertarian business think-tank Cato (and some other libertarian thinkers), is that competition comes only thorught the marketplace and the government has no business in getting in the way of the marketplace mechanics.

The liberals, of course, take the opposite view that government should be the sole arbitrator of marketplace disputes.

My view has always been that its the governments job to provide fair rules for all to follow.

The Constitiution has provisions that provide protection for innovators in many areas. We have patent and copyright protection which have strangely been restated over the years to lock in the innovator's advantage far beyond what the founding fathers intended. It is ironic that in the area of technology, government is using its influence to lock the innovators out.