How is it Microsoft could benefit from whatever decisions the DOJ or EU decide? I, Cringely explains.
Last week, Microsoft was slapped by the European Union with sanctions and a $600+ million fine for anti-trust violations. Readers have been asking me what this really means. But Microsoft"s troubles extend beyond Europe. There are signs of strain in last year"s DoJ v. Microsoft anti-trust settlement. And while Redmond has settled many private and class action anti-trust lawsuits, several more are continuing. This would seem like not a good time to be Bill Gates. On the contrary, this is a VERY good time to be Bill Gates, because Microsoft is winning every case. Not only are they winning, in fact they"ve already won. Sure, the verdicts aren"t all in, and in some cases, the jury hasn"t even been chosen, and there is even the very real prospect that some verdicts will appear to go against Microsoft, but that doesn"t matter: Microsoft has already won, by which I mean that Microsoft literally can"t lose. It"s just that until now they are the only ones to have figured this out.
There was a time, years ago, when I actually worked for a living. I did a little software, did a little hardware, and while I wasn"t the best at any of it, I got by primarily on, of all things, my skills in geometry. Something of an idiot savant, I was so bad at math and so good at geometry that, of course, I reduced everything I could to a geometry problem. And it turns out that geometry, at least as I practiced it back when I did practice it, was particularly useful for understanding the timing of digital circuits and the biorhythms of software. I believe that in today"s world circuit libraries and object-oriented code such timing is something of a lost art, but the results back then were that my efforts, crude as they were, often got to the finish line first just because in computers, as in comedy, timing is everything.