June 12, 2000 New Thinking:
The fiercest competitor of all
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June 12, 2000
The fiercest competitor of all
By Gerry McGovern
"It may not be the most visible thing I'll do this week, but it's the most exciting thing of all," Bill Gates said as he handed out the first of over 4,100 scholarships of a Millennium Scholars Grants fund set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates is a titan of the modern age, a figure so powerful and brilliant that most of his peers exist in his shadow. He epitomizes that ultra competitor and absolute entrepreneur. He is a visionary. He is one the most financially generous givers to charitable causes. His company, Microsoft, is more than a company. It has a power and influence that many countries do not have.
“Microsoft will find that there are limits to how large and powerful it is allowed to get,” I wrote in January 1998. It seemed inevitable to me then that Microsoft was on a collision course with the US Government and legal system. As powerful a business entity as Microsoft is it cannot hope to openly challenge the authority of the US Government and legal system, and get away with it.
Microsoft failed to recognize that the Government was not tackling it simply with regard to what software should be linked to what, or who had the right to innovate and compete. By Microsoft being contemptuous and arrogant towards the Government and legal system, what in fact it ended up doing was challenging the Government’s right to govern and the legal system’s right to establish the law. Such challenges can never be allowed to succeed by any country that wishes to remain a cohesive entity.
What the US Government ultimately feared was that Microsoft was becoming an independent State beyond its control. It could order Microsoft to do things but Microsoft was simply going to ignore it, brush its wishes aside as a parent brushes aside the wishes of a child.
In private, Governments can and do bend to the wishes of powerful companies. However, it is lethal for a government to be bullied and humiliated in public. Microsoft has repeatedly done that.
Maybe Microsoft believed the hype and tripe by so many libertarian techno journalists and commentators, that speed and technology and the Internet had essentially made government irrelevant? These deeply naïve people chattered on about how the Internet was borderless and how it would route around any attempt to control or legislate for it.
Where are these libertarian voices now? Why aren’t they rushing to support Microsoft’s cause against the big, bad Government? They are strangely quiet. Perhaps they are quiet because if there’s one thing they hate more than the Government, it is Microsoft.
As a young man, Bill Gates was reputed to say that he would find it hard to work anywhere where he was not in charge. But there are politicians and civil servants in charge of the country and judges in charge of the law. Companies like Cisco and Intel have learned to work with the Government, to, where appropriate, give them their day in the sun.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has rubbed too many noses in the dirt. In so doing it elevated things beyond mere right and wrong to a point where it seemed to be challenging the very institutions of the State. The State is wily operator and the ultimate survivor of the modern age. Those who challenge it have found that it is the fiercest competitor of all.
Gerry McGovern
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