UR TV CAST

But I do know that markets work better if there are two, three or more producers of goods or services than if there is only one. Our own history of nationalised industries and privatised monopolies bears this out.Nationalised industries were a lost cause, a form of commercial organisation which simply did not work; but we are still learning how to regulate privatised monopolies, and I suppose the US anti-trust action should be seen as a first step towards a form of regulation for information technology monopolies. Microsoft has a global monopoly rather than just a US one, but the rest of us have to rely on the US anti-trust action to act in the interest of consumers outside the US.Relying on the US courts to act in the best interest of global consumers is a pretty unsatisfactory state of affairs. The rest of the world has to cope not just with a Microsoft monopoly, but with a United States monopoly too.

I’m sure it is perfectly OK at what it does, and the principal alternative, the Apple system, is irritating too. But it is a strange irony that the personal computer, the great individualistic, liberating force of the 1990s, should be so conformist in the way it works. Switch the thing on and instead of getting, say, a picture of a loved one or the FT share prices or even the maker’s name, you get that Windows logo.And that, ultimately, is why the suit against Microsoft matters. But English is not owned by anyone, whereas Windows is, and the charge against Microsoft is that it uses its dominance of the computer language to force, or at least nudge, people to use its other products.The specific issue the US Justice Department is examining is whether Windows leads people towards using Microsoft’s Explorer browser for the Internet, instead of the main and earlier alternative, Netscape’s Navigator. Computers have to be able to talk to each other, so there is a great convenience in their having a common language. Just as the business world has standardised on English, the computer world has standardised, first, on MS-Dos and then on Windows.

More than 90 per cent use Microsoft’s Windows.To say that is not to rail against Windows, as such. Computers take ages to fire up, periodically crash, and use cute California-speak like “cookies” and “browsers” to describe things you don’t understand, or slither into spoof legalise as in “this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down”. So it was with a certain weariness that I read about the anti-trust suit filed this week by the US Justice Department against Microsoft. Who cares which browser to use on the Internet? Surely when someone comes along with a better browser (or whatever) we will go and buy it Boring, boring, boring.
But it isn’t. It suddenly dawned on me that one of the main reasons why computers are so infuriating is that there isn’t enough competition in the way they work. You can buy them from any number of manufacturers, all of whom try desperately to pretend that their products are different, but once you switch the things on they all behave in the same way. I earn my living sitting in front on one, pecking away at the keyboard as I am doing now, and we have the Internet at home.

But the actual technology seems to me to be at best boring, and at worst profoundly frustrating. We were told on many occasions by various Conservative ministers that the arms being sold to Indonesia would not be used for “internal security” and yet on the TV news over the past few days we have seen many shots of these tanks in action against rioters.
No wonder Michael Howard is making as much fuss as he can about possible sales of arms to Sierra Leone – he and the government of which he was a member have very dirty hands and presumably wish at this moment to direct attention from what they did.Colonel MICHAEL WRIGHTOxford. I SUPPOSE I should start with a confession I hate computers. We are all monsters now.
GABRIEL A DOVERProfessor of GeneticsUniversity of Leicester.