Brer Bill
& the Briarpatch
by Doc Cuddy

Remember when Brer Fox finally caught Brer Rabbit, and Brer Rabbit pleaded so long and loud to Brer Fox--"Whatever you do, please don't throw me in the briar patch!"--that Brer Fox forgot all about eating Brer Rabbit and wound up throwing him into the briar patch? Which, of course, was exactly what Brer Rabbit had wanted all along.

Take that little story as a template, and place it carefully over the players and the dialog emanating from a certain federal courtroom in Washington, D.C. Hmmm. Here we have Judge Jackson / Justice Department / Brer Fox finally catching you-know-who. And here we have you-know-who / Brer Rabbit yelling at the top of its $500-billion lungs, "Whatever you do, don't break us up!"

My friends, how stupid does Microsoft think we are? Are we to believe that detailed plans have not already been drawn up in Redmond for Microsoft I and Microsoft II, with Brer Bill taking one and Brer Ballmer the other? And are we to believe that the two Brer's will never talk to each other cell-phone-wise, never e-mail each other?

If the two Brer's working together in one office were able to bring Microsoft to a pinnacle of money and power enjoyed by no other company in the history of the world, are we to believe that they do not positively slaver at the thought of what they can do with "separate" companies working in parallel?

Windows won the PC war. Now, nobody's quite sure about the parameters of the next war. Distributed computing, smart objects, the net everywhere? We've long known about Microsoft's proven ability to wage ruthless, merciless, agglutinative war, and the court has now confirmed our knowledge. Microsoft, the giant amoeba that ate the world's desktops, as everybody knows, does NOT innovate. It acquires, absorbs, digests, burps, and says, "What a good boy am I!"

By creating two Microsofts, each still larger than any other corporate entity in the world, all we've done is give Brers Bill and Ballmer double the chance to rape, pillage, and plunder in the next briarpatch of the computer wars. Too bad about Brer Fox. Not to mention us.

END