Elian Gonzalez and Microsoft

I thought for today's entry I'd weigh in on two of the major political issues in the nation right now.

First, the Elian Gonzalez matter. (If you've been living in a cave, Elian is the young boy who was rescued from a disastrous attempt by his mother to defect from Cuba to the United States last November. CNN has a good chronology of events through the April 22 seizure.

Simply put, Elian and his father Juan are pawns. Pawns of Fidel Castro, pawns of the Cuban-American community in Miami, and pawns of the Republicans against the Clinton administration. I actually feel some pity for them, and I'm sure that by and large they wish they could put all of this behind them, somehow. Other than these two, it's hard to find anyone in this whole situation worth supporting.

Fidel Castro, of course, is the ruler of what is sometimes called the last Communist country on Earth. He's ruled Cuba with an iron fist for forty years, and Cuba has been the subject of an economic blockade by the United States for that entire time. Castro is using Elian as a public relations tool with which to strike a blow at the United States. One wonders why he bothers, since it's clear there's not much Cuba can do to change its position in the world until Castro dies, although I guess as the leader of his country he does have the right and the responsibility to try.

Mysteriously, after Elian was rescued, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) turned him over to the custody of his great-uncle Lazaro and his family in Miami. One wonders what they were thinking, since even at the time it seemed clear that the Cuban-American community would mightily resist any attempt to return Elian to Cuba. Unfortunately, Lazaro and his family and supporters have shown themselves to be no better than Castro in this whole affair; indeed, their nauseating videotape in which Elian has clearly been manipulated into saying that he doesn't want to go back to Cuba is probably the most despicable event of the entire affair, and certainly disqualifies these relatives from having the right to have custody of him, in my mind.

Similar to Castro, they're using Elian to strike a blow (against Castro), an entirely ineffectual blow as they must know. I guess it has some value as a rallying point, but that's about it. While they might have some legitimate arguments for why Elian would be happier in the US than in Cuba, they've chosen just about the worst possible way to make those arguments, manipulating the boy and defying law enforcement directives. Moreover, the Cuban-American community has a long history of holding the rest of the country hostage to enforce the Cuban embargo (since it's widely believed that no Presidential candidate can win Florida without Miami, and giving up on Florida is a risky proposition in Presidential electoral politics). This also doesn't make me kindly disposed towards them.

The Justice Department and INS have been caught in the middle of this, standing up for the principle that Elian should be returned to his father. To their credit, they've stuck to their guns and their seizure of Elian from his cousins' home in Miami was well-executed (if less well handled in its public relations). They obviously have no investment in these events other than upholding the law. The Clinton Administration has remained distant from the whole affair, which is probably wise since it's a no-win scenario for them.

The Republicans in Congress, opportunistic spineless turds that they are, decided that the seizure provided a good excuse for them to start a new investigation of the Clinton Administration, although since it seems that the US public wildly supports Elian being reunited with his father, they've apparently backed off. The Republicans have a fanatic hatred of Clinton - presumably because as a spineless moderate himself he's managed to co-opt many of their platforms and strategies while not being a true conservative himself - and will grab any chance they can find, no matter how ridiculous, to smash Clinton again. They clearly have no interest whatsoever in Elian, and their involvement at all is at best mystifying.

The sad thing about all of this is that Elian's predicament is not likely to have any effect on US/Cuban relations, or on anything else beyond Elian's and his father's life. It's much ado about nothing. The US embargo of Cuba will continue until Castro dies (and he will die, someday), and in the meantime the embargo will probably do more harm than good to Cuba (it hasn't accomplished its goal in the last 30 years, after all). Elian and his father might defect to the US, or they might head back to Cuba. Who knows. Who, ultimately, really cares? Juan Miguel Gonzalez has the opportunity to defect now if he really wants to. If he decides to go back at this point, I don't think it's unreasonable to respect that and to let Elian return with him.

The only possible good I can see coming out of this would be if the US were to miraculously re-open diplomatic relations with Cuba, and consider whether the embargo is really useful, or if lifting it with careful supervision of Cuba might make life down there better.

But there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening.

We turn now from a small boy whose existence has caused an awful lot of squabbling, to a giant company whose predatory behavior has been holding back the computer industry for years.

I doubt it comes as much surprise that I'm strongly in favor of seeing Microsoft broken up. Microsoft's success is almost entirely due to having made a single good (great!) deal with IBM (at its most clueless) back in the early 1980s. Its continued success is due to having not dropped the ball too often or too badly in the ensuing two decades, while playing off its success at usurping IBM's previous dominant role in the industry due to that deal.

Microsoft has always made substandard operating systems, until they were big enough that they could define what was standard. MS-DOS was buggier and harder to use than all other character-based operating systems of its day, and it took nearly a decade for Microsoft to come up with a graphical-based system to compete with Macintosh, Amiga, and the other GUI systems which emerged in the mid-to-late 1980s. Windows was clearly buggier and harder to use than those other systems, and in the 90s Microsoft has also added increasing bulk and slowness into their system (although its one remaining competitor - Apple - has also bulked up its OS in recent years, so it's no longer nearly as nimble as it once was).

Many people have suggested that having a "standard" operating system has helped the industry move forward without having to deal with cross-platform issues. I believe that quite the opposite is true: Apple - among other companies - has solved many of the cross-platform issues so that the Mac interacts with Windows fairly well. If the whole industry had spent the last ten years working on these issues, I believe we'd have all sorts of straightforward cross-platform tools making it easy to develop (and maybe even use!) programs on multiple platforms. That drawback would not exist today, but we'd have the advantage of three or five (or more!) competing operating systems from which consumers would choose. Now that would be capitalism in action.

Microsoft has been better at developing applications: Microsoft Word was once a terrific word processing program, although increasing complexity and decreasing performance rendered it more bloated than useful about eight years ago. Microsoft Excel is in my opinion the company's best product, as it is relatively easy to use (to the extent that spreadsheets are ever easy to use) and very powerful and flexible. (Its user interface is far superior to Word's, as well.) Internet Explorer is - now that version 5 has been released - an acceptable Web browser, although it is pretty lousy as far as performance goes. In its defense, no other browser I've seen has nearly as many features without being even less reliable. (Netscape certainly is no better.)

Microsoft's big problem, though, is that it's a predatory company, buying other companies which might pose even a small threat to it, and driving companies which won't sell out of business (or worse, into the hands of AOL). Microsoft has the resources to wait until some other company comes up with a good idea, and then can quickly slap together an application which does about 50% of what the competitor does, make it look like it does 75% of what the competitor does, and they can release it for free or simply overmarket it so that everyone will buy it because it has the brand name "Microsoft". This is not a level playing field, and without such a playing field, the capitalist system simply does not work. If Microsoft hadn't put the fear of, well, of Microsoft into the industry, imagine where we'd be today?

So breaking up Microsoft seems like a good idea exactly because it divorces the cash cow - Windows - from all the other elements of the company with which Microsoft has been clubbing the industry. The government has been saying that they want to create operating systems competition, but it's too late for that; as Steve Jobs said, the desktop OS war has already been fought and won (by Microsoft). But there are many other wars to be fought, and Microsoft should not have an unfair advantage in that fight.

I was hoping that Microsoft would be broken up into three or more companies, instead of the proposed two. But I'm heartened that the government wants to place further regulations on Microsoft to enforce the competition the industry so badly needs. It's not the ideal solution, but it's not too bad. I'm a little surprised that the government's proposal is even this good.

Finally, I often have heard comments on the radio or read articles in the newspaper complaining about the government's actions because "Microsoft is good because they give us free software", or "Now if a company is too successful it can expect to be punished." All of these comments miss the point: A company should be able to dominate and crush its competition if it's producing the best software that can be produced at reasonable market prices, from a consumer's point of view. But this is not why Microsoft dominates: It doesn't produce the best software, and it doesn't price its software reasonably ("free because we can afford to make it free" is not reasonable when you're the only company that can afford to make it free).

Someday it would be nice if we could all pay $50 for a good Web browser, rather than what we're stuck with right now, and I look forward to the degree of innovation this lively industry can produce when it's not running in fear of Microsoft.

With any luck, that day will not be far off.