Quotes on Microsoft's Destructive Monopoly

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-SAMUEL MILLER, U.S. Justice Department

"When people understand what Microsoft is up to, they're outraged."

-TIM O'REILLY, President, O'Reilly & Associates

"Microsoft has that certain confidence that comes from enjoying a monopoly and being very good at its business, which leads it to believe that it can do anything. Microsoft and its employees now think it is indeed the Master of the Universe."

-STEWART ALSOP, Fortune Magazine

"I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter."

-NICHOLAS PETRELEY, Sr. Editor, InfoWorld

"I take much of what [Bill Gates] says with a grain of salt because Bill would like to be ... the center of gravity for the whole world. He's totally dedicated to his work and will do virtually anything to kill the rest of us ... Bill Gates can be your partner and be your enemy at the same time."

-ROBERT ALLEN, Chairman, AT&T

"In a manner that would have left the robber barons of the late 19th century gaping in absolute awe, Microsoft is approaching something unprecedented: a monopoly that could well own the choke points of tomorrow's commerce and communications."

-DAN GILLMOR, San Jose Mercury News Computing Editor

"Most curious is the desire to standardize on one OS and one CPU architecture. Depending on a single company for all future OS innovation and on another for all future CPU innovation would be tragic for an industry driven by technology."

-TOM R. HALFHILL, Sr. Editor, BYTE Magazine

"The strategic goal here is getting Windows CE standards into every device we can. We don't have to make money over the next few years. We didn't make money on MS-DOS in its first release. If you can get into this market at $10, take it."

-BILL GATES

"They [Microsoft] are trying to use an existing monopoly to retard introduction of new technology."

-GARY REBACK, Antitrust Lawyer

"[Microsoft is] a potential threat to our nation's economic well-being."

-STANLEY SPORKIN, Judge

"I don't think that the world needs another market dominated by Microsoft. I have enormous respect for the company, but I really get nervous about markets where one vendor has such power."

-GEOFFREY MOORE, Marketing Guru

"Sometimes I think it's unfortunate that we compete the way we do."

-Anonymous Microsoft Middle Manager

"I think anybody who is savvy about this market knows that Microsoft is getting away with stuff it probably shouldn't get away with."

-GEOFFREY MOORE, Marketing Guru

"Microsoft is a company that is desperately resisting change. Its strategy is two-tiered. One is to desperately hang onto what it's got: making the operating system important even though we're moving into a world where the OS becomes steadily less important. At the same time, it is desperately looking for the next high-growth field that it'll make money on. So when the OS finally does start to decline, it will find a new field. It's targeted two areas: one is media and the other is services. Everything it's doing is going into that. It is a classic case of a change-hating company; it is desperately trying to retard change."

-PAUL SAFFO, Institute for the Future

"Microsoft has gotten so big that it can put out a Preview that will install itself without checking first to see if it has expired. The message here is that Microsoft's time is worth more than yours ... no start-up company could get away with being that arrogant."

-JERRY POURNELLE, Byte Magazine

"It's Microsoft versus mankind with Microsoft having only a slight lead."

-LARRY ELLISON, CEO, Oracle

"Microsoft's ability and willingness to control proprietary standards that span the world's computing resources is in fact dangerous."

-JOHN BLACKFORD, Editor, Computer Shopper [Click here for the full text.]

"'[S]trategic partnerships' are means to a single end: to enable Microsoft to learn enough about particular businesses eventually to dominate them. James Gleick, the respected New York Times journalist, has argued that Microsoft will soon become the biggest public policy issue facing the U.S. government, and he is right."

-JOHN NAUGHTON, Columnist, London Observer

"Appeasement, said Winston Churchill, consists of being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last. At the moment, the biggest crocodile in the world is Microsoft, and everybody is busy sucking up to it."

-JOHN NAUGHTON, Columnist, London Observer

"Nothing is worse than a piece of hardware designed by a software company with a monopoly."

-STEWART ALSOP, Fortune Magazine

"What we'll all end up doing if Netscape doesn't play better is we will have instantiated the Microsoft Network. We'll just call it the Internet."

-GEOFFREY MOORE, Marketing Guru

"Microsoft now is in 40 percent of American households. If they can somehow insert themselves in as a piece of infrastructure in the next generation of televisions, they could go to 100 percent penetration of American households and eventually the world."

-BARRY RANDALL, Aanalyst, Dain Bosworth

"[Microsoft] is the fox that takes you across the river and then eats you."

-PETE PETERSON, Former Executive, WordPerfect

"You'll read that Bill Gates envisioned it all, which is a crock. He didn't invision any of it. Nobody did."

-ED ROBERTS, Inventor of the PC and Gates' First Boss

"Microsoft wants to control the operating system of the living room like it controls the operating system of the computer."

-GARY ARLEN, President, Arlen Communications

"There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."

-BILL GATES

"Ohio Gov. George Voinovich, incoming chairman of the [National Governors'] association, said he would try to convene a conference within the next six months to a year to focus in more detail on how state governments can use computer technology more efficiently. 'Microsoft would like to sponsor something like that,' Gates said."

-Associated Press

"'Are you going to bury Netscape?' asked a computer-trade reporter based in Russia. Another reporter asked why anyone, after receiving a built-in browser with their operating system, would bother to buy Netscape's $59 browser.

"'We do think it's a point of differentiation ... that for customers you provide a single solution,' said [Microsoft] product manager Yusuf Mehdi. 'It's a reason people will choose Internet Explorer over Netscape Navigator.'"

-SEATTLE TIMES, 26 June 1997

"Cash-strapped libraries that accept the millions Gates is waving at them may find themselves acting out the Microsoft billionaire's dim vision of our electronic future. ... [B]efore they take anything from the chief executive, they'd better examine the gift very carefully for strings. After all, what sort of public libraries can we expect from a man who calls people 'users' and to whom War and Peace and Gilligan's Island are both 'content?'"

-MARGIE WYLIE, C|Net

"Stop Microsoft through government antitrust enforcement now or say goodbye to new products and the openness of the Internet. Gates will own everything, and collect a fee on every imaginable product and service in cyberspace from home finance to a virtual visit to the Louvre. And forget about getting these products and services someplace else. Competitors won't exist."

-GARY REBACK, Antitrust Attorney

"[Bill Gates] not only wants to win, but he wants to kill the competition. He wants to bury the wounded."

-JAMES WALLACE, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"I hope we shall ... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

-THOMAS JEFFERSON

"[Bill Gates] definitely scares me. He embodies the very cultural and economic forces that have transformed American mass media from the freest and most diverse in the world to among the most cautious, greedy, and useless."

-JON KATZ, Hotwired

"Forcing PC manufacturers to take one Microsoft product as a condition of buying a monopoly product like Windows 95 is not only a violation of the court order, but it's plain wrong."

-JANET RENO, Attorney General

"[I]f the Java alliance were to topple Microsoft's dominance, Microsoft would lose the aura of invincibility and would be forced to compete very hard on the basis of pricing, quality, and service. The bottom line is Microsoft needs to, wants to, and will fight Java tooth and nail."

-SCOTT WINKLER, Gartner Group

"Why can't Microsoft solve [technical problems]? Complacency. Microsoft has no competition to speak of. No incentive to hurry. No urgency to its mission. If it misses its target by, oh say ... two years, what are we going to do about it? Put OS/2 on our machines out of protest? Throw our $3,000 computers away and buy Macs instead? Throw our software away and switch to Unix workstations?

Of course not. We're stuck. We're screwed."

-JESSE BERST, ZDNet AnchorDesk

"Only Microsoft would have the temerity to pick your pocket and ask you to thank it for the favor.

-JAI SINGH, C|net

"The idea that people know what they want is wrong. They need to be pulled through the Web."

-LAURA JENNINGS, VP, Microsoft Network [Click here for the full text.]

"The most important thing for the Web is to stay ahead of Microsoft, ... anything that slows down the Web reaching ubiquity allows Microsoft to catch up. If Microsoft catches up, it's far worse than the fact the Web can't do word processing. Those things can be fixed later. There's a window now that will close. If you don't cross the finish line in the next two years, Microsoft will own the Web. And that will be the end of it."

-STEVE JOBS, WIRED 4.02

"Microsoft should look in the mirror before they try to explain to people how open processes ought to run ..."

-SCOTT McNEALY, CEO, Sun Microsystems

"Every single thing that Microsoft says and does is designed to protect their monopoly."

-ALAN BARATZ, President, JavaSoft

"Like medieval peasants, computer manufacturers and millions of users are locked in a seemingly eternal lease with their evil landlord, who comes around every two years to collect billions of dollars of taxes in return for mediocre services."

-MARK HARRIS, Electronics Times

"Our engineers were treated like shit by the Microsoft people. They were forced to suffer daily indignities in the face of these obnoxiously arrogant programmers. One of my friend referred to them as the Hitler Youth."

-BOB METCALFE, 3Com

"We've noticed the same things. Around here, though, you learn to ignore that kind of thing and keep your eyes on your own monitor. Sometimes it feels more like we're working at the CIA, instead of a software company."

-Two Microsoft employees on anti-competitive behavior [Click here and then click here for the full text.]

"If Microsoft is innovative in any area, it is in creating new forms of intimidation."

-RALPH NADER, Consumer Activist

"Microsoft now has the ability to virtually annihilate any competitive product it wants by bringing it into the next version of Windows. There's evidence that they are aggressively seeking to extend that monopoly to the Internet, and policy-makers have to be concerned about it."

-ORRIN HATCH, U.S. Senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee

"Microsoft does not like negative or even objective press coverage and they have a tendency to be a bully about it. If something appears that they don't like, they have the ability to punish the publication.

-BOB INGLE, President, Knight-Ridder New Media

"A few weeks ago, a member of the audience at a [Bill] Gates speech in San Francisco asked simply this of the world's richest businessman: 'Can you make a list of things you won't be doing? ... I just want a little piece of something to pass on to my kids 20 years from now.'"

-San Jose Mercury News, 26 Oct 97

"This is not about browsers. Our competitors are trying to create an alternative platform to Windows."

-BRAD SILVERGBERG, Senior Vice President, Microsoft

"Microsoft has this belief that if they don't control everything, they will control nothing. They have a total zero-sum view. With their 90 percent control of the operating system, which generates spectacular profit margins, they can use the money from this monopolistic position to leverage their control into one area after another."

-RALPH NADER, Consumer Activist

"Nobody lives under the watchful eye of Microsoft's Ministry of Truth more than we journalists. Write a story that doesn't spin in the right direction and next thing you know there's a battalion of information officers on your doorstep just dying to gently educate you on the 'facts.' What usually ensues is a technically perfect soft-shoe around the truth that is so hypnotic, you'd turn your own mother in for pinching a copy of Word by the time they're done."

-Anonymous

"No one -- not Microsoft, another company or the government -- should be allowed to deprive Americans of real choices in how they spend their money."

-BOB DOLE, Retired U.S. Senator

"They're [Microsoft] hell-bent on dominating the entire information infrastructure of the world, and it scares the living daylights out of me."

-GARY REBACK, Attorney, Netscape Communications

"[Bill] Gates is trying to make sure that he has a proprietary position in controlling the tools that allow you and me to access information. And that's profitable by definition. How would you like to own the printing press?"

-CHRISTOPHER DIXON, Media Analyst, PaineWebber

"To heck with Janet Reno."

-STEVE BALLMER, Microsoft

"We are challenging old and established businesses like newspapers, travel agencies, automobile dealers, entertainment guides, travel guides, Yellow Page directories, magazines, and over time many other areas ... We must devise ways of working with them or winning away their customers and revenue streams ... We must be aggressive."

-Microsoft Internal Memorandum

"To hear Microsoft tell it, you'd think the Computer Age had changed the rules of commerce. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates has argued that the government is trying to structure an industry it knows little about. This is nonsense. What Gates is attempting is as old as the efforts to monopolize the steel, rail, oil, and telephone industries in the robber baron era."

-ROBERT KUTTNER, Business Week

"The question is, are we looking forward to the Information Age, or will it be the Microsoft Age? It's kind of like Microsoft vs. mankind -- and mankind is the underdog."

-LARRY ELLISON, CEO, Oracle

"This is very Borg-like. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

-SAMUEL GOODHOPE, Texas Attorney General's office

"The difference between John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates is Gates recognizes no boundries to his monopolistic drive."

-RALPH NADER, Consumer Advocate

"PC Makers won't even talk to us. They're scared to death of Microsoft."

-SCOTT McNEALY, CEO, Sun Microsystems

"This kind of product-forcing is an abuse of monopoly power -- and we will seek to put an end to it."

-JOEL KLEIN, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, on Microsoft's coercive bundling of Internet Explorerer with Windows 95

"Whatever the general public may think, it's easy for me to sum up opinions of knowledgeable industry types: Microsoft is a bully. Microsoft is trying to hoodwink nontechnical people. Microsoft is showing disrespect to [Judge Jackson] and to the federal government. At the very least, Microsoft is splitting hairs, when in the past it has always focused on core issues."

-STEWART ALSOP, Fortune Magazine

"The best way to make people switch browsers is to make sure they have to, in order to get the best content."

-BRAD CHASE, VP, Microsoft

"It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me."

-BILL GATES

"Both the PC industry and consumers alike would be better off with some modest limits on Microsoft's zeal."

-JOHN BLACKFORD, Editor, Computer Shopper [Click here for the full text.]

"Microsoft's goal is domination of the global information business, which is to say all business. Phone companies, cable television companies, post offices, stock exchanges, banks, treasury departments -- all of these are viewed by Microsoft as future competitors."

-ROBERT X. CRINGELY, PBS

"1. Ensuring that we leverage Windows. I don't understand how IE is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything that Netscape does packaging and product wise ... My conclusion is that we must leverage Windows more. Treating IE as just an add-on to Windows which is cross-platform [is] losing our biggest advantage -- Windows marketshare. We should dedicate a cross group team to come up with ways to leverage Windows technically more ..."

-JIM ALLCHIN, Microsoft executive, in an internal document, "Concerns For Our Future"

"Asked how small software companies could compete on products that Microsoft wants to fold into Windows, [Microsoft chief operating officer Bob] Herbold told Bloomberg News they could either fight a losing battle, sell out to Microsoft or a larger company or 'not go into business to begin with.'"

-Newsweek

"The best system is the one with the fewest operating systems."

-BILL GATES

"The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English or Chinese or Spanish, because then I could charge a $249 right to speak English. And I could charge you an upgrade fee when I add new letters like N and T."

-SCOTT McNEALY, CEO, Sun Microsystems

"Once he's explained his position, Bill sincerely can't understand why you don't want to do what he wants you to do. On the other hand, when you make the point that the best deals are 'I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine,' he's ready with a list of reasons and excuses why that isn't possible in this case. I rapidly came to realize that Bill found it difficult to meet another person half way."

-GILBERT AMELIO, On the Firing Line

"When you taunt the referee, he usually watches you even more closely. That's what happened to Microsoft, whose 'up yours!' attitude toward the Department of Justice has inspired investigators to dig even deeper. Now they're looking at Microsoft's efforts to take over Java. These relentless investigations sap Microsoft, and distract the DOJ from worse dangers such as Intel. And Microsoft's childish, insulting behavior is largely to blame."

-JESSE BERST, ZDNet AnchorDesk

"Microsoft giving Sun advice on open standards is like W.C. Fields giving moral advice to the Morman Tabernacle Choir."

-SCOTT McNEALY, CEO, Sun

"You're either a friend or a foe, and you're an enemy now."

-STEVE BALLMER, Executive VP, Microsoft, to Pacific Bell CEO David Dorman after he signed a contract with Netscape

"Last month, [Bill] Gates insisted to the U.S. Senate that his company is perennially vulnerable to new competitors snapping at its heels; this month he's holding the national well-being for ransom by insisting that any government interference with a single product release will unleash doom upon us all. Out of one side of its mouth, Microsoft tells us it's no monopoly; out of the other, it insists that it's the sole engine driving our economy. Well, Bill, which is it? You can't have it both ways."

-SCOTT ROSENBERG, Salon Magazine

"To make a claim that the failure to introduce new software, a new operating system on time, is going to affect the economy ... that's just unbelievable."

-DANIEL BACHMAN, Sr. Economist, WEFA Inc.

"Here's the worst part of what is happening: Because of the still unstable aspect of [Windows], the only people who can use computers and be sure they won't crash are those who buy factory-installed systems running something like Microsoft Works and never upgrade or add third-party software. For all practical purposes, this open system of ours has become proprietary. Proprietary to Microsoft."

-JOHN DVORAK, PC Magazine

"We are going to cut off [Netscape's] air supply. Everything they're selling, we're going to give away for free."

-BILL GATES, June 1996

"I do not feel we are going to win on our current path. We are not leveraging Windows from a marketing perspective ... We do not use our strength -- which is that we have an installed base of Windows and we have a strong OEM shipment channel for Windows."

-JAMES ALCHIN, Senior VP, Microsoft

"It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator."

-CHRISTIAN WILDFEUER, Microsoft

"Nothing we are doing here will or should prevent Microsoft from innovating or competing on merits. What cannot be tolerated -- and what anti-trust laws forbid -- is the barrage of illegal, anti-competitive practices that Microsoft uses to destroy its rivals and to avoid competition."

-JOEL KLEIN, U.S. Department of Justice

"Netscape pollution must be eradicated."

-JEFF RAIKES, VP, Microsoft

"I don't know what anti-competitive means."

-STEVE BALLMER, VP, Microsoft

"The real threat to entrepreneurial innovation is Microsoft's anticompetitive arrogance. Great discoveries in computing often come from small start-up companies. Yet with Microsoft's dominance, vast areas of the product market -- including but hardly limited to basic applications like word processors and spreadsheets -- are barren zones where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs fear to tread because Microsoft has staked a claim or is seen as likely to do so. It is a sad but telling fact that in the high-tech field, virtually no business plan will be financed today without a convincing answer to the question of what is to be done about competition from Microsoft."

-MITCHELL KAPOR, Founder, Lotus

"Microsoft allowed us to [change our startup screen], but we don't think we should have to ask permission every time we want to make some minor software modification. Windows is an operating system, not a religion."

-TED WAITT, Chairman, Gateway

"Not very long ago, free market enthusiasts were predicting that technology would stimulate so much innovation and competition that antitrust would be passe. But it turns out that technology also allows innovative forms of monopoly. How like the free market."

-ROBERT KUTTNER, MS Monopoly [Click here for the full text.]

"Over the years, Apple, Amiga, IBM and others have been giving away minor operating system upgrades. But Microsoft is using its dominance of the operating system market to gouge consumers."

-RICHARD SHAFFER, Technologic Partners

"... about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

-BILL GATES [Click here for the full text.]

"Copy the product that others innovate, put them into Windows so they can't be unplugged, and then give it away for free."

-LARRY ELLISON, CEO, Oracle, on Microsoft's business strategy

"There's very little protection against Microsoft doing exactly what we do and destroying us."

-BAROTTI, Inex

"Microsoft will suck you dry, in time and knowledge."

-JONATHAN CARSON, CEO, FamilyEducation Network

"If they want to kill you, they'll kill you. All we can do is meet with them and try to see what they're going to do to us and when they feel like doing it."

-MAX METRAL, Co-Founder, Firefly Network

"There has been some concern in the industry about Microsoft continuing with its very aggressive business practices, and under Steve Ballmer, not known to be a shrinking violet, the people hoping for moderation in Microsoft's practices are probably not expecting that now."

-DWIGHT DAVIS, Summit Strategies

"With every day, we are coming to live and to work in an increasingly networked, technology-driven world. There is little question that Microsoft, which now controls the PC software market, is seeking to extend its desktop monopoly in effect to control these other technologies and, to a large extent, the network itself."

-ORRIN HATCH, US Senator

"The ruthless people we know as robber barons were actually giving away much more money at a much earlier point in their careers than the high-tech and biotech and Wall Street billionaires who are so revered today and are seldom described as ruthless. ... It's a paradox."

-RON CHERNOW, "Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr."

"The Browser Wars of the 1990's are over. It's impossible to imagine any judicial action that will remove Microsoft's browser from the desktops of virtually all the world's PC users. It's worth pondering a mystery that the Court of Appeals has not yet felt obliged to worry about. Why has Microsoft spent so much money and muscle on a mission of giving away software?

"The answer is that Microsoft is a forward-looking company with a sharp eye for the power points, the lever arms, the control valves in the emerging digital economy."

-JAMES GLEICK

"The essence of a competitive market is its impersonal character. No one participant can determine the terms on which other participants shall have access to goods or jobs. All take prices as given by the market and no individual can by himself have more than a negligible influence on price though all participants together determine price by the combined effect of their separate actions."

-MILTON FRIEDMAN, Capitalism and Freedom

"Stop being paranoid. Gates is always whining about how any minute he can be out of business because things change so fast in the software business. The only companies put out of business in the software industry have been put out either by their own incompetence or by Microsoft. Give it a rest. I'm personally sick of listening to this one. In the early 1980s before Microsoft was public, Gates would go on and on about how he could always fall back on being a programmer if Microsoft went broke. Let's see, he's up to $50 billion in net worth. When does this thinking end? At this point it's pathological and unhealthy."

-JOHN DVORAK, PC Magazine

"If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all that worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile with Novell when we pull the trigger."

-JIM ALLCHIN, Senior VP, Microsoft, in an internal memo

"Microsoft has knowingly and willfully concealed information regarding security flaws in computer hardware from the [National Security Agency] out of fear that revealing such flaws would reduce the number of copies of its products that would be purchased by the government... I have raised this issue internally with Microsoft, and in return have been the subject of both bribes and threats."

-ED CURRY, Computer Security Specialist, in a letter to Defense Secretary William Coen

"Whether you think their witnesses are credible or non-credible ... they've admitted monopoly power, they've admitted the absence of competitive constraints, they've admitted raising prices to hurt consumers, they've admitted depriving consumers of choice and they've admitted that the reason that they did that was because they were afraid that consumers would in their view make the wrong choice, which is the non-Microsoft choice."

-DAVID BOIES, US Department of Justice

"Microsoft has sold just about every IT manager out there on Windows NT. Like a drug dealer who has a large and profitable clientele, Microsoft is hooked on making big money and hooked on their own poison called the Windows OS."

-JOHN MARTELLARO, Macopinion.com

"Microsoft has made it clear that it wants to control every lucrative or strategic software category on Windows. And Microsoft has demonstrated time and again that it is willing to (in order of preference) copy, buy, or license any competing technology it needs in order to gain that control. It would seem unwise, therefore, to support Microsoft or Windows, especially if you have a product that competes with a Microsoft product, or is likely to compete with a future Microsoft product."

-NICHOLAS PETRELEY, Sr. Editor, InfoWorld

"I have a nice perspective on what it means to be in charge of the most important project in the history of mankind."

-BRIAN VALENTINE, Windows 2000 Project Manager

"High-tech industries are the key to America's future competitiveness, and we simply cannot afford to look the other way when serious questions are raised about allegedly inappropriate business practices."

-TOM DASCHLE, U.S. Senator