Bill Gates Versus Brussels- The European Union Action On The Microsoft Essay

Bill Gates Versus Brussels- The European Union Action On The Microsoft Monopoly - Essay Example The relentless movement to a global market is giving ever more scope to the English-speaking world to sell its computers, its information, its culture and its entertainment. It is making national government solutions irrelevant or unhelpful, as the pace of change outstrips the capacity of individual governments to keep up (McKenzie, 2000, Pg 2-3). This report is likely to lead to a trial of strength between two cultural and governing systems: the US democratic free trade one, and the Europe bureaucratic and regulated one. The 1950s and 1960s were dominated by a conflict between the communist and capitalist models, which was finally won without a shot being fired in anger between the two main protagonists, the US and the USSR, when the Western model proved so much more capable of delivering economic success. The next 20 years are likely to be dominated by a contest between the Europeans who think that governments can make societies better, and the North Americans who think free enterprise makes a bigger contribution to health and riches. The beginnings of the conflict are there for all to see, in the escalating trade disputes and the outlines of a row over independent European forces and foreign policy. US policy-makers will have to pull back from their enthusiasm for this emerging super-state and take stock of their position. They will find that what they may gain in a simpler command structure in Europe as one government displaces many; they will lose in terms of influence and friendship as that government sets out to rival the US. They come together when there is a problem or a purpose. The World Trade Organization makes good progress in spreading free trade ever more widely. It is organizations that try to become alternative governments that threaten the spirit of the age, and threaten to burden participating countries beyond their patience. Many very smart people, all of who were building on each other's good ideas and hard work, wrote the history of personal computing. However, that history was in no small way pressed forward at an ever-faster pace by developments at the Microsoft Corporation, which just happened to be founded at the start of the last quarter of the twentieth century and which is today the world's premier software company, dominating many of the markets it has entered and developed. What is remarkable today, at the start of the twenty-first century, is that the Microsoft Corporation finds itself under legal assault by the federal government, plus nineteen states. Microsoft Monopoly - An Introduction Is the fear of such a monopoly justified as we move into the new millennium, especially in software markets Microsoft likes to characterize itself as a software or Internet company whose main products are "digital" in nature, a claim not many industry observers, even those in the Justice Department and the trial judge, would dispute. If the characterization is tolerably accurate, it follows that Microsoft's main products can be represented as very