EDITORIAL - The trouble with courting trouble

Resellers slept soundly last week after the move that Windows 98 would be able to ship. The US Court of Appeals judged it right to grant Microsoft's 5 May petition to have Windows 98 excluded from a preliminary injunction, first issued last year, which prevented it bundling Windows 95 and its Internet Explorer Web browser. Not that Bill Gates was as worried as the average UK reseller before the judgment - if you believe what you read in the press.

One of the Saturday glossies had a story on Bill and his habit of buying art incognito. This seems a strange thing to do for a man who, like Larry Ellison, has all but graced the pages of Hello!

magazine. Rather than worry about any legal battle, recent PR coverage of Bill in the national press dwelt more on his ability to spend time worrying about how his offspring will deal with their wealth.

Only in the US could that be a problem. The UK Lottery has created hundreds of millionaires but, as far as I know, only one of them has given their winnings away or worried about new found wealth. Bill found time to shoot into the office and order a few legal minions to confuse the US judiciary. It seems to have worked.

As I have pointed out before, once you decide to take your opponents on in the courts, as Sun has done, you move the battlefield from one over which you have nominal control to one that is out of your control.

So UK resellers can stop fretting and be safe in the knowledge that those little boxes will be shrink-wrapped at top knots in anticipation of the biggest sales this side of Windows 95. The fact that US judges made the move not to 'put judges and juries in the unwelcome position of designing computers' will have been ascending to Heaven on the prayers of resellers and Vars. But they may be praying too soon.

The legal battles are not over and there are signs that other US IT companies may start to counter-attack MS in the courts.

If so, they should consider the realities of using the courts that Sun has faced.

First - timescale. It was in August 1996 that Netscape filed its original complaint with the DoJ against MS. That was because MS was allegedly in contravention of the 1995 consent decree regarding Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. A battle between corporates is never a fast one.

Second, it is only the anti-MS alliance and MS' competitors that are worried about the company's almost monopoly position. The majority of US users polled in newspapers saw nothing worrying about MS's domination of the desktop and neither do the majority of corporates that buy Windows.

The fact that MS has domination should concern us. But the place to beat that is the market and MS's detractors should learn to quit while ahead and spend the money on research and development of software rather than court battles.

That would be a service to the industry.