Write once, sue many II

LAST WEEK WE took a look at Allchin in Wonderland, the stylish romp through innovation in monopoly disguised as a court deposition. This week, as JavaOne begins in San Francisco and the Microsoft/Department of Justice remedy hearing continues in Washington, it seems timely to examine another classic of narrative fiction, The World According to Scott.

Like Allchin, Scott’s action takes place in the courtroom, or at least hopes to. The story opens as our beleaguered hero, Scott McNealy, struggles in the aftermath of the high-tech bubble bust. His company, Sun Microsystems, has gone from the dot in dot-com to roadkill on the information superhighway — all due to the machinations of super-monopolist Microsoft and world’s-richest-man Bill Gates.

The World According to Scott comes in two parts, a 76-page “complaint” and a 29-page “motion,” that detail the rise and fall of Sun’s Java language and platform for Internet computing. The tone throughout is apocalyptic: Microsoft is repeating history, just as it did with MS-DOS and Windows, transferring its illegally extended monopoly from Windows to its new .Net middleware layer.

Here’s how it works: “Microsoft’s unbridled monopoly over a critical node on the digital network — PCs — provides it the power to allow only such servers, PDAs, telephones, television set-top boxes, video game systems, or Web services that implement Microsoft-specific interfaces and protocols to interoperate effectively with Microsoft’s monopoly products.”

The plot thickens: “By illegally exploiting its PC operating system monopoly to acquire and utilize a choke hold over networked connections to PCs, Microsoft is dramatically expanding its power to deny consumers the benefits of choice and competition in adjacent markets as well.” This strikes home to me as I wait on hold for a half-hour on my Nokia cell phone while trying to convince Dish Network to give me a functional digital video recorder rather than another discontinued Microsoft Web TV replacement unit.

I continue reading. “Unless and until that power is effectively checked and ultimately eliminated, Microsoft’s past practices and insatiable ambition demonstrate that it will continue to destroy competition in each of these enormously important markets.” Surely this is a wake-up call to those who remain enslaved to subversive interfaces such as Microsoft Bob, the artificially intelligent help wizard.

The World According to Scott is both a history lesson and a primer on economic fundamentals. The “Complaint” chapter illustrates the rise of the Internet and its ability to allow communications across a variety of hardware platforms and software component models. This interoperability created an opening for a new pervasive middleware layer that could free users from their dependencies on Windows and Microsoft’s dominant applications.

“Just as Microsoft was able to use a ‘middleware’ version of Windows to gradually transition its MS-DOS users to a new platform,” the manuscript suggests, “competitors could use a ‘middleware’ Internet platform to transition users away from Microsoft Windows operation system, without requiring the users to give up their existing applications.”

Now the pieces start falling into place. First, Netscape creates the browser, rising to 70-percent market share by giving away beta versions of the product. When Sun creates the cross-platform Java and signs a deal with Microsoft to license the JVM (Java virtual machine) for inclusion in Windows, the revolution catches fire. “In order to break the ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem perpetuated by the applications barrier to entry, Sun needed to ensure widespread distribution of the Java platform.”

In one of my favorite parts of the work, “Microsoft, at the direction of Bill Gates, devised plans to ‘wrest control of Java away from Sun’ and ‘turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications.’ ” This is reminiscent of Microsoft’s earlier plot to hold Visual Basic programmers against their will in a web of lucrative consulting contracts and low-priced, easy-to-use development tools.

“To effectuate this anticompetitive scheme, Microsoft first needed access to the Java technology,” the book explains, “so it entered into a license agreement with Sun in March 1996.” This recalls the legend of the famous Trojan horse, where the Trojans tricked the Greeks into ending the siege of Troy by allowing a handful of Greek soldiers to sneak in and open the gates to the advancing Greek army.

But wait, there’s more. “In order to protect its monopoly position, Microsoft has repeatedly differentiated its products through the introduction of vendor dependencies designed to raise switching costs, rather than through superior performance or value to consumers.”

And finally, the endgame is revealed: “By illegally crushing the threat posed by the Navigator and Java middleware platforms, Microsoft bought itself years of time to copy the functionality of the Java platform.” The result: .Net, Microsoft’s killer app for the Internet. “But rather than allowing developers and consumers to make a choice based on the competitive merits, Microsoft has actively tried to tip the market in favor of the .Net Framework through illegal means.”

Sun’s commitment to preserving customer and developer choice through litigation, loopholes, and legislation rivals Microsoft’s prior work in the field. But we may not see a sequel to this book any time soon. In Washington, Sun attorneys want to close the remedy trial courtroom doors to protect strategic information from leaking out in cross-examination.

In the end, both Allchin in Wonderland and The World According to Scott are works of fiction. In the real world, the time and effort spent slicing and dicing these legal landscapes is of value only to the lawyers.