High-Tech's Starr Report.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: Microsoft antitrust case

The consequences of a software culture war

On November 5, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson released the high-tech version of the Starr report: the finding of facts in the antitrust case against Microsoft. It is as angry and, in its own way, as lurid a document as Kenneth Starr's account. And it is also the product of a culture war.

Grassroots techies--the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don't make the headlines--hate, loathe, and despise Microsoft. At technology conferences, it is the devil, or the guaranteed laugh line. Its products are mocked, its business practices booed.

"The quality of their software is terrible in itself, and it's contagiously terrible," says a former Microsoft programmer, now with a Bay Area Internet start-up. "If you write for a Microsoft platform, it becomes the Tar Baby of bad code. It's really demoralizing to work with it." This developer doesn't want the government meddling in the software business. But, he says, "Microsoft is the Skokie Nazis of free markets."

Microsoft has its defenders, of course. They argue that the craftsman's view of quality is too narrow. Programmers do not value the same things consumers do. "It drives the Valley nuts that the market may want something--a standard platform for applications, backward compatibility, low cost, ease of installation, bundled products--that conflicts with their notion of what is technologically superior," says another programmer, who frequently gets into arguments with colleagues by defending Microsoft's success.

This broader view of quality notes, for instance, that Microsoft got its operating system dominance largely because Windows came bundled with relatively inexpensive computers, thanks to the fierce competition among companies using Intel microprocessors. (See "Creative Insecurity," January 1998, available with other Microsoft-related material at www.reason.com/microsoft99.html.) Compared to the Macintosh package, priced to maintain 50 percent gross profit margins, consumers found the less technologically elegant Wintel combination a bargain. And by providing a standard, Microsoft made it possible for personal computing, and all sorts of auxiliary devices, to flourish.

This culture war is a civil war--the most vicious kind--among people who care about technological creativity and progress. Both sides say they're out to protect "innovation."

For Microsoft's opponents, that means blocking the company's...