Microsoft has been a punching bag for money-hungry lawyers and politicians in the previous years. The recent
anti-trust suit against them seemed to come out of nowhere under the Clinton Administration and is disappearing
just as quickly under Mr. Bush. This kind of thing can be expected in our society, I guess. Those who breed
success are doomed to suffer the onslaught of jealous under-achievers, although some would argue they brought
it upon themselves. There is a case for that, too.

But, we have a new President in the United States. Not that he has anything directly to do with this case, but
the new administration, regardless of politics, does bring a new attitude to Washington. The Justice
Deptartment, under Bush, is not going to stress this case as much as they did under Clinton. It seems as though
Microsoft is expecting this to effectively end the anti-trust lawsuit, and it may very well. They sure are
acting like it, as they are now pursueing their intergration plans in full force with the upcoming Windows XP.
They are making deals with AOL and are looking to integrate a new Windows Messenger.

I have no problem with that. I think that Microsoft should be able to integrate its products however it wants
to. I say let economic competition drive the market, because when that is the case, consumers always win.

But, I do have qualms with a trend by Microsoft to move toward subscription-based software. In releasing their
.NET platform, they are looking to place more emphasis on remote software, renewable by subscription, than the
stand-alone products they have sold in the past. In fact, it is rather agreed that the XP versions of both
Windows and Office will likely be the last of their kind as Microsoft changes its business strategy almost
fully to the subscription model.

I can see it from Microsoft’s viewpoint. They release a product, say Windows 95. The market eats it up because
its a huge improvement over Win3.x. But, then they make incremental improvements, call it Win98, still more,
call it WinME. Windows 95 users watch it and conclude that they have no purpose in spending money for the
upgrade. Their OS works just fine, thank you. The same goes for Office software. Many people and businesses are
still using Office 97 simply because they were not convinced of the benefit to the upgrade to 2000. 2000 users
are, of course, hesitant to spend a lot of money on XP because, quite frankly, its the same thing with a
slightly different looking interface (when you get right down to it). For Microsoft, this poses a problem. They
want to make money. They can’t have their customers not buying new products. What are they to do?