Dear Ms. Reno; Dear Mr. Gates

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Did you catch the recent PBS Frontline show about the Mississippi Attorney General and his fellow Ole Miss grads who took on the tobacco industry? Wow, that must’ve been inspiring. And now you’re going to take on today’s favorite whipping boy, Microsoft!

I don’t know much about antitrust law, but what exactly do you or your staff know about operating systems that qualifies you to handle this case? If a chain of car dealers or barbershops in your state conspired to fix prices, I can understand why you’d go after the offenders. But Microsoft is a national and global player, and the issues in this case are highly complex. Is it really helpful to have you step in where the Feds are already litigating?

And have you really examined your motivations here? Is it Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive actions, or is it your own desire for fame that motivates you? I hope you aren’t looking to be on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer or to win treble damages for your states’ coffers. If it’s a big settlement you’re after, you ought to take a closer look at Microsoft’s revenues. Far better to sue automakers for alleged safety defects in SUVs; they make a lot more money than Microsoft does.

It must be frustrating. Your company was built on a premise of selling Web technology -- browser and server software. Truth is, you never made much money on the browser. With the competitive browser licensed at no charge, you’ve been forced to give away the Navigator and explore new business models. For instance, now you’re trying to leverage your most potent asset: your Web site. Yet to the extent Microsoft succeeds in supplanting the Navigator as the tool people use, the value of netscape.com declines correspondingly.

You played a very important role in the history of networking: Mr. Andreessen, you made an all-purpose, highly-functional browser, and you extended HTML in ways the inventors hadn’t yet dreamed of. Mr. Clark, you saw the commercial potential, and Mr. Barksdale, you worked hard to implement it.

Yet you sowed the seeds of your own destruction. You introduced frames and <blink> and <font> as your own fait accompli; in so doing, you abandoned the open standards process and you invited a small company in Redmond to compete on a strictly commercial footing.

Now, you protest that the Windows 98 operating system will have browsing functionality built in. But there’s no natural law that says a browser must exist as a separate app. A browser is something that fetches pages over HTTP, displays HTML, and launches external apps. The Windows file manager loads pages off disk and launches apps to display them. The only new thing Windows 98 does is to seamlessly integrate fetching of documents via HTTP and invoking an HTML viewer or the appropriate plugin.

Within five years, many devices will have browser functionality built into them -- every television, every telephone, and every cell phone. Isn’t it natural to expect that every computer operating system will, too? Would you be equally upset if Solaris or HP/UX or the Apple OS learned to do such natural things?