EU W2K case puts cart before horse
2000-02-09
There is always something to be said for planning ahead, but if the early reports from ZDNet UK are anything to go by, it could be that the European Union is take this a little too far. According to the reports, EU competition chief Mario Monti said that Windows 2000, the latest release of Microsoft’s flagship operating system, may be breaking EU antitrust law. A probe into the issue is planned, following “allegations that Microsoft could extend its dominance to server operating systems and electronic commerce”. Interesting allegation, but for two points. The first is that W2K is not a new product. Secondly, it is extremely difficult to work out how such a hypothesis could be tested in advance.
Windows 2000 is due to be launched in just over a week, undoubtedly with as much aplomb as the marketing muscle of the mighty Microsoft can muster. The OS, touted as “the business operating system for the next generation of computing,” is being presented as something new. However this perception is out of step with the facts. W2K is an upgrade of Windows NT. It may be much-enhanced for scalability and availability, transaction management and interoperability, but it remains an upgrade. Windows 2000 it may be to you and I, but to the developers and internal staff at Redmond the product is referred to as NT5.0. It is not, therefore, true that Microsoft are moving into areas which the company previously had nothing to do with. Indeed, had the operating system been able to support “enterprise-scale” applications five years ago it might well have won the Unix wars and the rest would be history.
The antitrust case that is underway in the US does not question the fact that Windows grew to be the dominant operating system. What it deals with is how Microsoft used their dominant position to stifle competition in other areas, such as Web browsers, by including them with the operating system itself. It is here that the EU may have a point: by including Microsoft Transaction Server as part of the operating system, it could be said that the company is exhibiting anti-competitive behaviour relative to other application server vendors (such as BEA, IBM and SUN). However, there are many application server vendors that support a number of platforms other than NT, and have already created a sizeable market. This is not the gorilla company stifling the activities of a bright young start-up; rather it is one company presenting its offering to an already-crowded market, of which both the evolution and the outcome are far from certain.
It is always worth keeping a watching brief on major companies to protect the markets against anti-competitive behaviour. However, in the IT sphere in which fashion plays as big a part as technology, it is impossible to determine in advance who the winners and losers will be. Windows 2000 is unlikely to sweep the world in the same way as its desktop sibling, for many reasons of which the most important is that Microsoft is no longer perceived as the only platform in the eyes of the board. Mainframes have survived the onslaught of client-server, Unix (with a little help from a softly spoken Scandinavian) is as popular as ever and new types of device are coming onstream every day. The context which helped Microsoft to world dominance no longer exists, and as illustrated by Palm, Linux and AOL, the company does not have a guarantee of success in every market it targets. The EU’s crystal ball is as opaque as everyone else’s: in IT, no company has a monopoly on predicting the future.
(First published 9 February 2000)