Gillmor on Microsoft

Really appreciate Dan Gillmor's stuff this week from Washington on the Microsoft anti-trust trial. The word "anti-trust" as a term takes on new meaning when he writes:

Someday, unless Microsoft changes its ways -- there's still time -- it will be brought down from a combination of its own arrogance, law enforcement and pure market forces. Then it will learn, too late, that it has no friends. Temporary allies, yes. But no friends. And that will be Microsoft's own fault.

No friends. And no one trusts them. Anyone who gets in bed with Microsoft should expect to catch a lethal sexually transmitted disease and not survive their evening of pleasure. Intuit is the lucky prom queen who staggered out with a dress in tatters, but with her life.

Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope in this new FREE-FALL environment where highly respected, long-established, extremely powerful institutions are suddenly imploding at record speed and dropping like flies — think Roman Catholic Church, Enron, Anderson.

It's a slippery slope when no one trusts you and your reputation is one of economic domestic violence. If someone (Apple, Linux, Palm/Handspring) can wake us from our WINDOWS WORKS hallucination and slip something into our hands that actually DOES WORK, something reliable, robust, simple, and elegant, maybe we can change the game.

Dave Winer is especially great on this subject and the death of Hailstorm here.