rap Microsoft all along. For Microsoft, any market share significantly less than 100 percent is cause for concern. You can’t be a good monopolist unless you have a good monopoly. The single most important job of the CEO is increasing per-share earnings. Admittedly, this is done for the most part by solving customer problems, delivering new products, and competitors, but those are just tools for accomplishing the true goal. The people who really count to the CEO aren’t customers or employees, but shareholders. There are only a few ways to really increase per-share earnings and Microsoft does them all. The simplest method is to buy back your own shares, reducing the size of the pool of shares against which profits are accounted. The other techniques are related to customers: You can get new customers or find ways to extract more money from existing customers.One possible motivation for Microsoft to reach a settlement is the danger of private lawsuits filed by class-action lawyers. A U.S. District Court judgment against the company could add significant momentum to those cases (110 lawsuits in 28 states) under federal antitrust law, which permits that judgment to be used in the follow-on cases (3).Antitrust is not there to protect competitors but to protect consumers. If you can’t show that consumers were hurt, the you can’t prove antitrust. Sure, Microsoft is a bully, but that’s not illegal. Sure, Microsoft wanted to kill Netscape and to corrupt Sun Microsystems’ Java language, but does either act hurt consumers?The government’s insistence that Microsoft tied its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system is a crucial aspect of their case. An earlier decision by a federal appeals court “tentatively” said that Microsoft was allowed to tie the products together, unless there was other compelling evidence to show that such an action harmed consumers in some way. Mic...
