Microsoft today released Windows Principles: Twelve Tenets to Promote Competition (July 2006). Some are continuations and/or extensions of the terms of the Microsoft/Government consent order that ended the antitrust case; others are broadenings of the same basic ideas to meet the needs of the Internet age.

Basically, the tenets seem designed to draw a line between Windows as an operating system and the applications that ride on it, ensuring consumers access to aps that compete with Miicrosoft's own offerings, and assuring programmers that if they create such aps, Microsoft will not use its control of the OS to cut the ground out from under them.

At a more general level, it is an interesting development in industrial organization. The Internet age is increasingly organized as "platform companies" -- Microsoft; Google; eBay; Cisco; Telecoms -- and niche-player satellites. The MS tenets are designed to assure the niche players that the company will not use its platform power to extract all the juice from the partnership, will not engage in undue price discrimination, and will not lure the niche player in only to then appropriate the value of the investment. It will be interesting to see if other platforms sign off on the same promises.

C|Net's take is here. By tomorrow, the Web will be awash with interpretations.

posted by James DeLong @ 3:52 PM | Antitrust

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