Bill in a china shop

Ralph Nader has joined the anti-Microsoft bandwagon. He hosted a 'Microsoft the baddie' conference which could turn out to be quite a thorn in Gates' side.

So many things are just a matter of course. Sun believes thatd a 'Microsoft the baddie' conference which could turn out to be quite a thorn in Gates' side. Microsoft has overstepped the mark in adding bits to Java and ended up in breach of contract. Sun has consequently taken Microsoft to court and has asked that it be restrained from using the Java logo. Microsoft is counter-suing, of course. Meanwhile the US Department of Justice is fining Microsoft $1 million a day for unfair competitive practices, while the State of Texas is suing the company for much the same reason.

It is not, then, the best time in the world to be Bill Gates. Product delay stories are emerging surrounding NT 5, which won't be released now until the middle of next year. Gates has also had bad press for urging people to buy into Windows 95, then pushing them towards NT next time around.

These are all fair comments. Neither Gates nor Microsoft staff or shareholders would disagree that if there appears to be an insoluble breach of contract then the courts are the place to resolve it. If, after verdicts and appeals, Microsoft comes out looking bad, then so be it. Likewise with anti-competitive practice, a statutory body is the one to look into this sort of issue.

Then something odd happened. Enter Ralph Nader, hosting an anti-Microsoft meeting on the grounds that the company is unduly dominant in the Web. The official title of the conference was Appraising Microsoft, although as Microsoft's senior vice president and chief officer of operations Bob Herbold pointed out in a letter to Nader, most of the speakers were 'either litigation opponents, leading competitors or well-known Microsoft critics'.

Microsoft turned down the opportunity to speak at the conference on the grounds that it was unlikely to get a fair say in such rarefied company.

This was no insignificant meeting. Luminaries included Scott McNealy from Sun, Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Varney and special assistant to the attorney general for the State of Texas, Samuel Goodhope. Bryan Sparks, chief executive of DR-Dos buyer Caldera, spoke against the Redmond giant, as did Audrie Krause of consumer rights group NetAction, who has been vociferous in her condemnation of the company for some time.

Not many people have been forthcoming about their motivations for attending the conference. A Sun representative suggested that McNealy, for example, knew it would be an important industry gathering and 'just thought he ought to be there'. Besides, McNealy will take any opportunity to speak on behalf of the Java user community and its interests.

The basis of the meeting was that Microsoft has been competing unfairly, more so than anyone had been prepared to admit to the US Department of Justice.

Bryan Sparks of Caldera said: 'We are not beholden to Microsoft. That gives us the freedom to speak out. We are very different from a lot of companies that can't do this.'

Those companies that can't speak out, of course, were not present at the meeting, but some of the users were. Krause complained that she had been limited in her choice of software by the company's tactics, although an NT user group held a town meeting elsewhere in Washington DC at the same time as the Nader meeting.

For all its bluster though, the conference didn't call for the de-centralisation of Microsoft. The main issues raised were for another look at the alleged anti-competitive nature of the company's business practices and what they described as 'coercive licensing practices', the basis on which the Department of Justice case rests. These were accusations of deliberate product changes to make Microsoft incompatible with other companies' products, selective disclosure of technical information and general intimidation. The strongest comments of all came from the organiser and instigator of the event, Nader.

Nader is an important household name in the United States. In California, he championed the cause of motorists in the 1980s by challenging the insurance companies to cut their prices, which they did. He also stood as a presidential candidate, and has now switched his attentions to Microsoft. Speaking at the press conference held on the first day of the event, he was reported to have described Micro-soft as being 'uniquely ruthless'. He said: 'It's the brow-beating... that is a symptom of something much more aggressive in terms of structural retaliation.'

It is not the takeovers that bother Nader, it's the very nature of them.

He explained: 'It's not that Microsoft is controlling the nightly news, but it will have so many tight oligopolistic alliances that what they say becomes more influential with those that deliver the news.'

It is not only the media that appears to have become more reliant on Microsoft. An increasing number of banks in the US have a Microsoft logo lurking somewhere on their premises. This is exactly the sort of thing that bothers Nader - not the logo itself, but its growing presence.

And yet this is the company that took a two-year-old product called Internet Explorer that nobody appeared to want, and turned it into a success. This is the company whose target for world domination - the internet - is only seen by about 10 per cent of Britons, meaning that a vast 90 per cent of people remain blissfully untouched. This is the company that kept plugging the Windows standard - it took three goes to get it right, remember - and put an enormous amount of resources into marketing it. As a result, it increased the entire IT business faster than anyone could have imagined.

Never mind Nader, the IT trade might consider it has things to thank Microsoft for in terms of volume of sales, regardless of the niceties of its business practices.

In fact, Nader was noted for the fact that he appeared to be more or less the only speaker without any vested interests in seeing Microsoft's public image getting another hammering. For all Sun's assurances that McNealy's presence being purely to support the Java community, the fact remains that his company is in litigation with Microsoft and nothing would suit Sun better than to see them routed a few more times.

Caldera owns the only rival to MS-Dos - not a particularly serious rival, but a rival nonetheless - and the entire state of Texas is suing Microsoft for insisting its OEMs don't disclose information, not even to the government.

The terms 'witch hunt' and 'kangaroo court' were emanating from Microsoft in response to this meeting.

Nader's own intentions for the meeting were unclear, but what is evident is that certain chief executives could not believe their luck when a celebrity consumer advocate started making noises and stating their point of view. Was he naive to play into their hands?

In giving a platform to Varney and Goodhope, who actively asked the assembled throng to come forward with evidence of Microsoft misdeeds, he allowed the event to become slanted in such a way that the target company could not have come forward with a reasonable reply without looking defensive.

There is a great whispering campaign across the country of all the bad things that Microsoft has done. 'We don't bring cases based on rumour and innuendo. If you believe Microsoft is violating the law, then come forward with the evidence,' says Varney, who incidentally was head of the Federal Trade Commission when it launched three failed investigations into Microsoft. A co-incidence, surely.

It appears rather similar to another story that is gripping the US at the moment - the sexual harassment charges brought against President Bill Clinton by Paula Jones. In a parallel with Microsoft, there seems to be no shortage of people willing to take the slanging match and turn it into their own personal sideshow.

Listening to what was said at the conference - if you could hear anything above the sound of grinding axes - you could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into a playground in which some little kids were complaining about what the big kids were doing to them. The fact of the matter is, Micro-soft is under very close scrutiny from the US Department of Justice, so there is hardly a need to draw further attention to the company.

But that's how stars like Nader tend to work. The meeting was organised to examine Microsoft's sales tactics. But it appears unlikely that Gates will be bullied into retreat by a mere meeting of 'litigation opponents ... competitors ... or critics'.

So if the intention wasn't to stop Gates, then you can't help but wonder what was.

The long-term impact won't be felt by Microsoft, it will really only affect corporate America - if only for the purpose of setting a precedent in which a thinly-disguised moaning convention is now an accepted way for executives to occupy their time.

It now seems that if you can't beat the opposition in your market, the accepted practice is to run up to their corporate headquarters and lob stones at it.

You can't help but wonder whether US corporate culture is any richer because of it.