The nation’s best-known consumer advocate sought Thursday to focus public attention on what he said is Microsoft Corp.’s plan to dictate the course of the information age at just about everyone else’s expense.
Meanwhile, Microsoft attacked the two-day conference convened by Ralph Nader as a “kangaroo court.” Indeed, the Redmond, Wash.-based company officially boycotted the event, although Microsoft spokesmen were present and provided rebuttals.
“This country is not going to tolerate one corporation dominating a closed architecture, on its own terms, for the information highway,” Nader said.
The conference, entitled “Appraising Microsoft and Its Global Strategy,” brought together a range of Microsoft’s critics.
Besides direct software competitors and lawyers who have battled Microsoft in the courts, there were also representatives of banking and travel agencies who have seen Microsoft enter their fields.
They charged that Microsoft tends to try to destroy its competition or hurt any company that does not do business with Microsoft on its terms.
With the vast market share of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, found on more than 90 percent of existing computers, they charged, Microsoft has tried to dominate access to the Internet and content on the global computer network.
“There’s one company everybody’s afraid of. This is a reasonable question to ask: Is this company a problem?” asked Scott McNealy, chief executive officer of the Sun Microsystems Co., a Mountain View, Calif. computer and software firm that competes fiercely with Microsoft.
Such concentrated power and the resulting loss of consumer choice, said McNealy, could stifle the diversity of ideas that led to the Internet and its World Wide Web.
The presence of McNeely and other adversaries made Microsoft dismiss the meeting as unbalanced and chide Nader, who became famous a generation ago for taking on General Motors Corp. on auto safety.
A five-page letter to Nader signed by Robert Herbold, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, said it was “regrettable that you appear to have aligned yourself with a small band of Microsoft’s detractors whose apparent goal is to enlist the government’s assistance in their efforts to compete with Microsoft.”
Herbold alluded to the Justice Department’s current lawsuit against the company, accusing Microsoft of using its marketplace dominance to hurt competitors.
“You and your colleagues have already taken an aggressively hostile stance toward Microsoft in your public statements,” the letter continued. Herbold said the conference “has all the hallmarks of a kangaroo court.”
“I think Microsoft, being the big gorilla on the block, doesn’t want a dialogue, it wants a monologue,” Nader said.
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MORE ON THE INTERNET: Read the text of the court filings and join an on-line discussion about the Microsoft antitrust case at chicago.tribune.com/go/microsoft
