Letter to DOJ 08_19_06

U.S. Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001 August 19, 2006 Re: Microsoft Dear Attorney General Gonzales: Thank you for your letter dated August 9, 2004, in response to my letters dated April 2, 2004, and May 16, 2004. These were certified, and I have the return receipts if you need the numbers to find them. In the letters, I asked a question of Attorney General Ashcroft. If a group of citizens were to successfully bring Microsoft to trial for Monopoly behavior, would it represent an impure motive if we were to design our own solution? I postulated that I could design a solution more quickly than the office of the Attorney General could successfully sue Microsoft. Your office kindly advised me that the letters had been forwarded to the Antitrust Division's New Case Unit. These many days later, I believe that Real Player has brought suit against Microsoft for that particular reason, although I am not a lawyer, and cannot tell you details of the case. This letter is to follow up, and share with you that I have designed such a solution. I have written the Whitehouse about it, but lacked the foresight to copy you about it, until now. In the early days of the PC, IBM made their personal computer parts interchangeable, just as Ely Whitney made the parts of the cotton gin interchangeable, glad tidings to the slaves of that day. The organization that held the specifications to each part was the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, more commonly known as the IEEE (I triple E.) Microsoft benefited greatly from this standardization, and the leadership of IBM was repaid unkindly by the industry. IBM has persisted, and at this time, is involved in efforts with the Open Source Community to improve standardization of software. Properly used, this effort can be used to repudiate any monopolistic tendencies and practices of Microsoft, without hurting competition. I know I am not being very brief, but I will try to put the salient points in boldface. Microsoft currently exhibits innovation in the data encapsulation of it applications. For example, a file with the .doc extension is written in a particular format on the hard disk drive. When Microsoft brings out an upgraded version of Word, the .doc format is commonly changed. This renders obsolete all competitors' offerings that read the old format. Microsoft is ahead of all competitors by default. Examples of proprietary formats used by Microsoft include .doc, NTFS and .xls. If Linux developed the ability to read and write to NTFS hard disk drives, one could easily envision that the next Microsoft Operating System would use a different file system. This has the added benefit of making everyone have to buy a new copy of Windows too. Contrast this with some openly held data encapsulation standards, like mp3, HTML, and TCP/IP. These have flourished disproportionately well, by comparison, with the added advantage that they work on other Operating Systems as well. An mp3 will play on a Macintosh as well as any "IBM compatible." Microsoft attended to the mp3 standard, by introducing its own .wma for sound storage. That's fine, but defeats the benefit of standardization that we have otherwise enjoyed by the ubiquitous nature of Microsoft's Windows Operating System. Likewise, Microsoft has introduced its own "flavor" of a great many things, the C++ language not the least of them. I intend to make the argument that there exists a better way to deal punitively with Microsoft than a simple fine. I envision a regulatory body for Software data encapsulation standards external to Microsoft which would govern and regulate data encapsulation. An example of an instance of this has been employed by the State government of Massachusetts. The State moved the data standard for Government correspondence from the .doc standard to the "open data format," or .odf standard, developed by the open source community. Microsoft refused to modify the Word word processor to read this format, although other word processors customarily read its .doc format. This "problem" has been dealt with by a third party writing a "plug-in" for Word that reads .odf. Rather than stifle innovation, the regulatory body would allow competitors to write to an accepted standard that Microsoft could not change without notice. These competitors would be able to protect their intellectual property rather than publish "open source." They could sell their products for a profit, rather than distributing for free. Beyond that, Microsoft could actually be improved by breaking into six or seven divisions. One division for the basic Operating System, one division for each application (Word processor, Browser, Media player, Spreadsheet, Language Compiler division,) and one division for Research and Development. They would be as free as anyone to innovate in the area of data encapsulation, but would have to have improvements certified by the aforementioned regulating body, a sort of Software IEEE. Microsoft should find itself a leaner company and competitors would be more able to enter the marketplace with novel approaches to each of these applications. False innovation would be evident to all. If Microsoft found itself treated unkindly by the free market system, it would be a poetic retribution for what they did to IBM, a company that has not ceased to lead at every available opportunity, even working with the Open Source community at this present time. Not only has the State Government of Massachusetts moved in this direction, but the Government of Norway is looking to be a leader in this area, a leadership that the US should retain. At this time a foreign agent can deliberately compromise a large number of computers by the simple expedient of taking employ at Microsoft with the intention of introducing an Easter egg or backdoor code. A country that uses a variety of applications that all read and write the same standard data would be less vulnerable to this attack. I hope that I have persuaded you that Microsoft doesn't need another fine, accompanied by a wink and a nod to continue doing business as usual. I have attempted to show a disciplinary solution that Microsoft would fight tooth and nail, but would render a justice that is good for the free market system in the end. Yours Sincerely, Robert B Johnson