COLLOQUY

Dominance in the past by IBM was largely restricted to the business sector, and then often to equipment and delivery of business process capabilities. This dominance was judged counter-productive such that IBM suffered mightily at the hands of governmental agencies. Fortunately, any damage caused by such dominance was largely limited to the business process sector.

However, dominance by Microsoft is occurring at the juncture where computers shift from being largely "office automation" and "business process" devices to where they play a central role in the access of the public to vital information sources. Dominance at this point can literally determine the direction that society takes as we step into the information age.

As individuals become ever more dependent on e-mail and web sites for delivery of information, we need to ensure that such access is untarnished by the wishes of others. As academics, we should also be worried that such dominance is stifling the development of new and better methods of retrieving information (and IR methodology is still very poor).

Take the Microsoft Index Server that indexes information for later retrieval. Why would any student of Information Science attempt to develop a better model of Information Retrieval? Earnest students, graduating with pride, would quickly discover the harsh reality that even if their idea is transformed into a product, if won't sell because Microsoft "already has a product in place." And if the professor of the student does publish the better model, one can be assured that Microsoft will quickly transform their product using the new model.

We saw this happen at the University of Illinois, the birthplace of the Mosaic Web Browser. The campus licensed Mosaic to Spyglass, who subsequently licensed it to Microsoft as the basis of Internet Explorer (IE is Microsoft's web browser). Unfortunately, Microsoft claimed, after working with the Mosaic code for a while, that their code was "brand new," thus not falling under any licensing agreement. The result was predictable, while Microsoft went off to make IE a central component of their software strategy, arguably worth billions, Spyglass and the U of I were "left holding the bag."

The $13-billion in profit that Microsoft made last year raises other concerns. This amount of money can be equated to roughly 130,000 "jobs" (assuming $100,000 per position). These jobs don't exist, at least in the computer software sector, because Microsoft has the money. Instead of thousands of new and better ideas, we find a single idea being replicated over and over. Have there been any new software introductions for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, or web browsers in the last few years? Not really, at least not successfully. Indeed, it would literally be suicide for a company to try and produce anew a "better" product as they would be crushed by the dominance exerted by Microsoft.

The result of dominance can be seen in a decided shift in computer related jobs. It used to be that Computer Science meant programming, now it means network and PC support. Instead of training programmers that can meaningfully improve computers, we see colleges being tasked to supply IT managers to implement networks running software from Microsoft. The 5,000 folks programming for Microsoft in Redmond can be argued to be at the expense of literally hundreds of thousands of bright individuals who, instead of developing new software ideas, are focused on the minutia of trying to get Access to function without crashing every 10 minutes.

Computers and software are still at a very germinal and primitive stage of development. Allowing a single company to drive and determine the direction of where Information Technology goes in the next century is very short-sighted. The market dominance exerted by Microsoft ensures that new companies, touting better ideas, are not viable. Unless some restraints are applied to Microsoft, I am afraid that developments in the Computer and Information Technology industry will be stifled.

-- Eric Larson, Graduate Student Information Science (posted 4/23, 12:20 p.m., E.D.T.)

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