Oakland, CA—The book that The Economist magazine calls “by a long way…the best single thing to read” on high-tech markets and network economics has just been reissued by its publisher, The Independent Institute, to include a stinging, new critique of the Microsoft antitrust trial judge’s findings and the proposal to break-up the software giant.

“The government has chosen and the judge has approved a defective remedy. Its key defect is its logical inconsistency with the claims made in the case,” write economists Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis in the new appendix to their book, Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology.

“Its difficult to avoid concluding that the purpose of the so-called remedy is not correction, but punishment,” conclude Liebowitz and Margolis.

First published in 1999, and based on peer-reviewed research going back more than a decade, Winners, Losers & Microsoft argues that high-tech markets are not immune to vigorous competition and that the “path dependence” theory which claims such markets are prone to “locking in” inferior products lacks empirical support and merits no place in antitrust cases.

Even with the presence of so-called network effects—the phenomenon of a product becoming more useful to a consumer, the greater the number of other users of the product—markets do not “lock in” a market leader and thereby do not preclude the possibility that a better product will come along and dethrone it.

As Liebowitz and Margolis show, contrary to popular myth, the market success of the QWERTY keyboard format, the VHS videotape format, and various Microsoft software programs is due not to “lock-in” but to the fact that these products are as good or better than the competition.

In the case of Microsoft, Liebowitz and Margolis found that when its software products have dominated a market, that success can be explained by the superior reviews those products received in independent magazines. Further, Microsoft has not acted as a monopolist but has pursued a low price, high volume strategy that has led to prices falling more dramatically in markets where Microsoft competes than in markets where it does not compete.

Among Liebowitz and Margolis’s criticisms of Judge Jackson’s findings and “remedy”:

• Jackson relies upon the “lock-in” theory refuted in Winners, Losers & Microsoft. But if “lock-in” theory is true, how could Microsoft Windows have beaten out Macintosh or IBM’s OS/2, which started out with plenty of applications developers?
  
  
• Jackson contends that Microsoft sought to protect an effective monopoly in desktop operating systems by reducing Netscape’s considerable market share. Jackson assumed that Java applications might someday operate off of Netscape, thereby making the underlying operating system irrelevant. But this premise requires a leap of faith, say Liebowitz and Margolis. “No middleware program has ever become a platform for mainstream programs or a serious alternative to an operating system” (p. 280).
  
  
• Jackson’s “remedy” of separating Microsoft into an Operating System company and an Applications company—and preventing them from conducting business with each other for ten years—is inconsistent with his findings of fact “and will weaken, not strengthen, the world of computing that surrounds the Windows operating system” (p. 282).
  
  
• Jackson says that a separate Microsoft Applications company would strengthen alternative operating systems such as Linux. But even if the company found it profitable to port its applications to Linux, by the court’s previous reasoning, Linux would still pose no threat to Windows. (p. 283)
  
  
• The biggest problem concerning pricing is that it is not at all certain that the new Microsoft Applications company would pursue the same low price, high volume strategy that has benefited consumers throughout Microsoft’s existence. (p. 287)
  

Conclude Liebowitz and Margolis: “When the theory of an antitrust case is based on a defective view of markets, it is not surprising that the findings are flawed or that the proposed remedy will do more harm than good. The Microsoft case is based largely on a theory of lock-in through network effects, an insecure foundation at best. Network theories, we have argued, ought not be enshrined in our antitrust laws. They can be so enshrined only if conjecture is elevated above evidence.”

Winners, Losers and Microsoft has been favorably reviewed in Upside, Wired News, Reason, Newsweek, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, Choice, Industry Standard, Journal of Product Innovation and Management, Washington Times, American Way, and other publications.

Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis are research fellows at The Independent Institute and professors of economics at, respectively, the University of Texas, Dallas, and North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Their articles on network economics have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Law and Economics, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, Investor’s Business Daily, Christian Science Monitor, Upside, Reason, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.