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By the summer of 1998 Microsoft had made so many enemies that Gates was no longer welcome in Silicon Valley. The word "microsoften" (meaning: To weaken before the kill) had begun to creep into conversations taking place in Silicon Valley coffee shops. The media had turned Bill Gates into the poster boy for the computer industry but people were beginning to hate him & his crooked ways. The seeds of a powerful anti-microsoft movement were being sowed.
Gates had used a combination of luck, persistence, ruthlessness and underhanded schemes to make Microsoft the most successful company in the world. But history has shown that no force, no matter how powerful, can sustain a dominant position forever. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, the Roman empire was destroyed by the barbarian hordes and the British empire fell victim to its own indulgence. Microsoft intended to beat these odds by gaining such a stranglehold on the world's computer needs that it would be quite impossible for anything to stand up to them. What they had not counted on, however, was the tendency for people to rebel against any form of totalitarian rule.
Created by a Finnish college student in the early 90s, an operating system called Linux grew in popularity untill the media could no longer ignore it as a viable alternative to Windows. Recently, it has been stealing market share from Windows for systems which cannot afford to keep crashing, as Windows is famous for doing. The biggest reason for Linux's success is that it is not owned by anyone, so people are free to use it without having to break the bank.
Meanwhile, Netscape has been purchased by AOL, which is one of the very few companies to have taken on Microsoft & won. This pretty much guarantees them a continued existence, despite what Microsoft tries to do to them. Netscape's latest move was to release the source code to their browser so that hundreds of volunteer developers can contribute to it, in the hope that this will lead to a better development cycle than Microsoft can manage to achieve.
To top it all off, the US federal gov't and 18 state gov'ts are in the process of taking legal action action against this 800 Lb. gorilla of the computer industry for its illegal business practices. The trial has not been going well for Microsoft and there has been talk of breaking it up.
The movement to free the world from the tyranny of Microsoft has gone from pieing Bill Gates in the face last year to an organised attack on his company on all sides. If all Microsoft's enemies keep up the fight for a while longer, the company that once had the entire economy wrapped around its finger will be cut down to size. With any luck, Windows 2000 will never see the light of day.