THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 5, 1994 TAG: 9408050010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 38 lines
Your July 28 editorial about the Microsoft antitrust settlement was all too typical: You didn't like something the administration did, and you didn't stop to learn the facts first.
You portrayed Microsoft crime only as providing low-cost superior goods in a way deemed harmful to competitors. Not true! Microsoft's crime was forcing computer manufacturers to pay a royalty for every computer sold, in order to ship Microsoft's MS-DOS with any of them. A manufacturer who might want to sell, say, a million computers, half with MS-DOS and half with another operating system, had to pay Microsoft for a million copies of MS-DOS anyway.
What if Nissan forced its dealers to pay not just for every Maxima, but also for every Plymouth they sold. You would scream about such blatant strong-arm tactics.
This was not Microsoft's only crime. A jury of ordinary citizens recently found that Microsoft sold software from another company, and awarded damages of $120 million dollars. The damages fit the scale of the crime.
Did any of this harm the consumer? Absolutely! If you bought a computer with MS-DOS, you paid more for it because of Microsoft's extortionate pricing scheme. If you use any other operating system, you paid twice: once for the software and once for your share of Microsoft's ransom.
The Justice Department's action was really mild, making Microsoft stop the most egregious of its monopolistic abuses.
DAVID GRAHAM
Norfolk, July 31, 1994 by CNB