rosoft has held to that appeals court decision at every step of the trial, insisting that the decision was the right one, claiming that a court has no business trying to second-guess the technological decisions of a high-tech company (3).No decisions have been made, but two dramatic proposals are being considered: Breaking the software giant into two or three separate companies, and forcing it to license its Windows code. Or, the Justice Department may propose some less drastic remedies. Another potential fix could be to order Microsoft to end predatory business practices defined by the government--such as its Internet service provider contracts, which many view as exclusionary. However, that was the intent of the 1995 consent decree Microsoft signed with the Justice Department and is viewed as largely ineffective.A recent survey found 63 percent opposed a Microsoft breakup; 67 percent opposed forcing Microsoft to open up Windows to licensing; and 72 percent opposed the forced inclusion of competing companies' software in Windows. The survey was done by the Washington, D.C., firm Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research. "People like standards, and we've chosen Windows to be our standard," said Ted Johnson, executive vice president of Visio. "It's a stable platform on which we all rely. It is not really a surprise to me that UNIX never really took off" (2).Negative publicity hurts, and could erode sales or make it harder for the company to do business deals with partners. Some industry analysts also fear that Microsoft management could get so distracted by the lawsuit that they might make poor business decisions.When applying the Utilitarianism theory (the greatest good for the greatest number of people), breaking up Microsoft into separate companies is not good for the consumer. As Robert Cringely states, “the popular notion of breaking Microsoft into pieces would be a bad idea, turning a great white shark into a school of piranhas. ...
