MS-Stink Never Ends
Microsoft executives "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing." – Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge, United States vs Microsoft
I had a nostalgic feeling reading yesterday's LAT headline, “NBA drops the hammer on The Cheatin’ Clippers and they can’t shed the stink.” The stink is Steve Ballmer, whose cheating and stench goes back decades. Ballmer was one of Chairman Bill Gates chief minions in building the Microsoft monopoly.
Tech is known for moving fast and "disrupting," yet here in 2026, fifty year old Microsoft remains one of the biggest players in Tech and a favorite to profit from the latest generation of compute marketed as AI.
Forty-five years ago, Microsoft gained their position by being bestowed control of the new IBM PC operating system. They ruthlessly and crookedly used control of the operating system to take possession of the entire PC landscape. Having not invented the PC spreadsheet, data base, word processor, or email, after 15 years MS dominated all. Microsoft as innovator was laughable, but they were nauseously clever and criminally unscrupulous.
When the internet entered the PC picture, Microsoft developed plans to use their browser to dominate. At their anti-monopoly trial at the end of the 90s, a released company email stated Microsoft’s goal was to get a “vig” for every transaction that occurred over the internet. Vig, short for vigorish, was an organized crime term for getting a piece of every transaction.
By the mid-90s, the control Microsoft had over the industry made such a conspiracy likely to succeed. However, some of the notoriously libertarian, plushly military funded Valley, led by none other than dough boy Andreesen's Netscape, paid a law firm to come up with an antitrust case, which they presented to the DOJ. In 2000, Ballmer, Gates, and Microsoft were convicted of being monopolists.
Unfortunately, the company was left intact and their monopoly fortunes undisturbed. One change that did come out of the case was it stopped Microsoft from controlling the internet. If that hadn’t happened, there would have been no Google, Facebook, Twitter, go down the list. What value you can say that was, well, let's just say the case had little impact on Tech's greed and narcissism.
Ballmer used his share of monopoly loot to buy the Clippers and continue his cheating ways. Gates used his to befriend Jeffry Epstein and continually and publicly espouse any and every stupid thing he wants. This current generation of greedy Tech Lords' ludicrous and fantastical statements just carry on an unfortunate tradition.
Microsoft teaches us a number of things. First and foremost, simply growing and profiting are not sufficient measures to value any technology. Secondly, technological control is easily monopolized, and in this regard, there is absolutely no economic argument against breaking up monopolies. Stopping Microsoft internet domination in the 2000s, breaking-up AT&T in the 1980s, freeing the ideas of Bell Labs in the 1950s, and of course Standard Oil in the 1910s, all proved overwhelmingly economically beneficial. However, politically, anti-trust has never proved adequate to stopping corporations, in the words of Jefferson, from allowing the few, booted and spurred, to legitimately ride roughshod on the back of mankind.