A Critical Review“The Microsoft Monopoly: The facts, the law and the remedy”
Microsoft has an extremely large market share in the personal operating system market. To some extent, Microsoft is a typical sample of monopoly. Jeffrey A. Eisenach and Thomas M. Lenard, in their article “The Microsoft Monopoly: The facts, the law and the remedy” (2000), assert that Microsoft has a monopoly, has engaged in anticompetitive behaviors, has harmed consumers and violated the law. They analysis the factual evidence and conclude two remedies which would solve this problem and best serve consumers. The objective of this article is to inform the reader that how harmful Microsoft monopoly is, and how necessary to change this situation as soon as possible. Although Jeffrey A. Eisenach and Thomas M. Lenard ‘s article is well organized, interesting and thought provoking, it seems that there is a bias against Microsoft, overuse other scholar’s opinions, some points of view lack evidences. This essay will present a summary of the article and discuss the positive and negative characteristics.
To begin with, authors introduce a Microsoft antitrust case and a debate between Judge Jackson and Microsoft’s defenders. In the following, they respectively analyze “the facts”, “the law” and “the remedy” of this case. In the part of “the facts”, authors quote Judge Jackson’s “three facts” to help audiences understand how Microsoft monopolies the software market and why it has harmed consumers. Next, in the part of “the law”, they introduce Judge Jackson’s conclusion of the law and damn to Microsoft’s conduct. After that, authors give two possible solutions respectively named conduct remedies and structural remedies. At the same time, they explain how do these two remedies work and rebut Microsoft defenders’ opposite arguments. Finally, authors conclude that they prefer the structural remedy, because it would end the Microsoft monopoly, end the threat of government regulation and obviate the need for further litigation.
There are both positive and negative characteristics in the article. The two positive characteristics are outlined below.
The first positive characteristic is that the article is interesting and thought provoking. In today’s society, almost every modern person has access to personal computers. People can not use computers without Windows, without Microsoft. So, readers should very familiar with this topic and interest in it. In addition, authors provide some classical cases that Microsoft uses their monopoly power threats other companies, such as Netscape, Intel, IBM, Compaq etc., which are all famous companies in the IT realm and act very important roles in our everyday life. Reader would be astonished if they heard about these giant companies all use to be threatened by Microsoft. Also these examples will make the audiences think more about Microsoft monopoly.
The other positive characteristic is that the article is well organized. In the article, authors offer a detailed explanation and examples for each sub topic, which is divided distinctively, and each section is finished with a short summary. As a consequence, readers can easily follow the article and understand the content.
On the other hand, it is obvious that the article has some negative characteristics. The [next page]