It's inevitable that a successful company accused of monopolistic policies will throw up its hands and say "that's the whole point of business." Microsoft characterizes itself as a corporation which attained success through good products and shrewd tactics, whose future success is far from determined.

For Microsoft, these tactics include their relentless product shipping schedule, dogged if unspectacular technological improvement, brilliant marketing, and effective forging of corporate alliances. Microsoft has been a success for eighteen years in a fiercely competitive and fast-moving field. A field in which "products are conceived, marketed, and buried in the span of a senator's term," as Gates said during the recent hearings.[*]It is anti-capitalistic and a waste of taxpayer money to hound a company as successful as Microsoft.

Bob Dole, when still a senator, offered this defense of Microsoft: "Let us understand what is going on here. A company develops a new product, a product consumers want. But now the Government steps in and is in effect attempting to dictate the terms on which that product can be marketed and sold. Pinch me, but I thought we were still in America."[*]

Hand-in-hand with this is Microsoft's claim that they're really not the giant that they're made out to be. In this industry, their line goes, you're only one or two mistakes away from complete disaster. They point to IBM's fall from dominance. This position is outlined in Microsoft's white paper, in Section A : "The Vast Competitive Landscape."[*] In this they detail the fractured state of the software industry. They show how many software companies exist, and how small a portion of overall software revenues Microsoft pulled in. As far as gross revenues, Microsoft is far behind (hardware) giants like IBM and Hitachi, and not too far ahead of Sun and Oracle. Amazingly enough, they quote a statistic saying that Microsoft was responsible for only 13% of the operating system revenues in 1996. What this conveniently leaves out, of course, is that the majority of computer users sit down to an operating system made by Microsoft.

In his prepared opening remarks to the Senate, Gates claimed that Microsoft should not be subject to monopoly laws, since "a monopolist by definition is a company that has the ability to restrict entry by new firms and unilaterally control price. Microsoft can do neither."[*] Microsoft is big, they admit, but not so big as to be able to exert undue control.