Is It What Gates Deserves, or Merely Government Idiocy?

One has to laugh at Bill Gates’ lame admonitions regarding antitrust action stifling “innovation” [“U.S., 20 States File Antitrust Lawsuits Against Microsoft,” May 19].

This from the consummate high-tech knockoff artist. As one who has served as a DOS/Wintel/Novell and Unix systems administrator and has also worked extensively in a Mac network environment, I can say without fear of contradiction that the innovations all emanate from the latter platform. Gates’ “genius” is that of supreme derivator and scorched earth re-marketer.

Moreover, for Microsoft, “win-win” is a sophomoric joke. “Win-lose” will not suffice, either; “win-annihilate” is the ethos of Redmond, [Wash.].

I’m surprised he didn’t play the national-security card, after trotting out the chorus line of hand-wringing CEOs lamenting the impending end-of-the-information-economy-as-we-know-it.

Time to take him down a peg or two in the interest of innovation and healthy commerce.

BOBBY GLADD

Hollywood

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State attorneys general and federal Justice Department lawyers’ ignorance of the marketplace is palpable. If they should succeed in forcing Microsoft to help sell its competitor’s browser, it would be a paradigm shift in the way products are marketed.

For one thing, Microsoft itself could then force Netscape to help sell BOB (a Microsoft program that bombed a few years ago).

Every marketer with a poorly selling product could force a competitor to help him sell it.

Chevrolet could force sales of Impalas through Ford dealers. Ford could force sales of its Thunderbird through Chevy dealers. Why, the Edsel might still be with us if all Ford’s competitors had been forced to help sell it.

Imagine where this philosophy goes. Every product introduced into the marketplace would be sold by every marketer in the industry, whether it wanted to or not.

Think of the marketplace flooded with all those losers that nobody wanted to buy. Who would then buy them? The government? Voila! That’s socialism. And shows why socialism doesn’t work. It rewards everyone equally, the winners and losers both, until soon there is nothing but losers, because there is no reward for the winners.

Ever get the feeling we are governed by buffoons and bozos?

DON HULL

Costa Mesa