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Gives the background to, and describes, the suit filed against Microsoft by the US Department of Justice in October 1997. For those such as librarians, dealing with the requirements of information technology, argues that this case is important because it demonstrates the high stakes inherent in the software industry not only for the players, but also for users and purchasers of that software and the operating systems which will be used to display them.

A former Microsoft insider believes that Microsoft prevails not because of its ability to innovate but because of its capacity for covering all the bases.

This paper focuses on two related questions at the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property law. First, under what circumstances must the holder of a patent or a copyright or the owner of a trade secret allow others to use that intellectual property? Second, under what circumstances can the holder of an intellectual property right use that right to make it difficult for another party to succeed in a related market? These questions have vexed antitrust and intellectual property scholars alike ever since the Federal Circuit ruled in 2000 that patent holders “may enforce the statutory right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention free from liability under the antitrust laws,” a ruling that directly contradicted the Ninth Circuit ruling that antitrust liability could be imposed for almost identical conduct, depending on the motivations of the patent holder. The various proceedings in United States v. Microsoft only added fuel to the firestorm of controversy.After briefly retracing the jurisprudential path to see how this situation arose, we propose a solution that primarily involves a variation on the real property concept of adverse possession for the intellectual property space along with a slight extension of the Essential Facilities Doctrine for industries that exhibit network effects. We examine, both for firms with and without market power, how our proposal would resolve the situations presented by large fixed asset purchases, the introduction of entirely new products, and operating systems with network effects. We also demonstrate how our proposal could be applied in the European antitrust enforcement context.

There are two leading paradigms about the power balance between multinational corporations (MNCs) and states. The MNCs in Command approach takes the perspective that MNCs dominate states. The States in Command perspective assumes that states lord over MNCs. Each perspective suffers from noteworthy flaws. I advocate a modified bargaining power (MBP) approach to understanding the relative power of MNCs and states. I test the value of this approach by examining Microsoft's experience in China between 1987 and 2004. My study shows that that a MBP approach sheds considerable light on the aforementioned case, whereas the two leading paradigms do not.

Prior research on technology standardization has focused on two common patterns: processes in which product developers and other stakeholders cooperate to achieve a consensus outcome, and “standards wars” in which competing technologies vie for dominance in the market. This study examines Microsoft's responses to 12 software technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005. Despite the company's reputed tendency to pursue a strategy dubbed “embrace, extend, and extinguish,” a content analysis of news articles from the same period reveals surprising diversity in Microsoft's responses at the product level.

We classify these responses using a typology that treats “embrace” and “extend” as orthogonal decisions faced by product development organizations. This typology allows four kinds of outcomes to be distinguished, including two kinds of partial compatibility in addition to the familiar cases of full compatibility and incompatibility. To complement this cross-sectional perspective, we examine more closely the evolution of Microsoft's strategy with respect to Sun's Java technology. This longitudinal view highlights another underappreciated aspect of standardization, namely the extent to which a firm's strategic posture toward a standard can change over time, even within the same product family.

Based on this evidence, we suggest that firms tend to publicly embrace a standard with the aim of gaining legitimacy with a community of adopters, whereas efforts to extend a standard tend to be motivated by the intent to leverage the underlying technology to achieve or strengthen architectural control. We argue that legitimacy and leverage are strategic complements, making the “embrace and extend” strategy attractive to firms like Microsoft, but that the resulting outcome is unstable. Firms that pursue this strategy ultimately face a choice between contributing their extensions back to the standard and losing proprietary leverage, or giving up the legitimacy associated with standards compliance in exchange for freedom from the constraints of compatibility.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

In the ‘old days’, throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the adage in the IT industry used to be ‘Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM’. IBM would sell complete solutions, hardware and software (operating systems and applications) to meet all needs. These days it is more likely to be ‘Nobody ever gets fired for buying Microsoft’. Microsoft do not sell complete solutions. The only hardware they currently sell are ergonomic keyboards, mice and game accessories. Their dominance comes solely from their software.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the history of the standardisation of two largely overlapping electronic document formats between 2005 and 2008, and its implications for future IT standards development.

The document format controversy is researched as an exemplary case study of the institutional rivalries, perspectives and strategic interests at play in standardisation processes. The study adopts a methodological lens of discursive institutionalism in order to explain how actors assume and perform a variety of roles during the controversy. It consults a range of documentary sources, including media commentary, corporate press releases and blog posts, financial reports and technical specifications.

The study shows that: first, intentions to increase competition in the office software market through the standardisation of document formats led to a standards “arms race”; second, this further entrenched the position of a single market actor; and third, the resulting public debate nevertheless has reinvigorated the push for genuinely open standards.

Information technology standards are often touted as mechanisms for increasing the competitiveness of a market, thereby benefitting consumers and the greater public. In the presence of dominant institutional actors, efforts to standardise can, perversely, undermine this benefit. Increased public scrutiny through online media offers a potential remedy.

This research presents a novel account of the controversy over the document format standardisation process, understood through the lens of discursive institutionalism. It also shows the increasing and potentially putative role of online media in the development of IT standards generally.

Microsoft employs 90,000 people and its products affect millions of users around the world every day. Developing the next version of Windows or Office is easy for Microsoft, but the company has struggled when it comes to more radical innovation. Intense competition from Google, Apple, and others threatens a business model that has delivered tremendous success over 25 years. This case highlights the strategic challenges facing Microsoft and provides insights into the organizational, leadership, and operational issues that must be addressed in order to define a successful innovation strategy at one of the world's most well-known companies.

The purpose of this paper is to describe innovation planning methods used at Microsoft.

The paper examines the cultural environment and changes that needed to occur to implement these methods and looks at a selection of product development efforts at Microsoft that used these methods and were successful.

This paper shares the steps taken to enable innovation planning methods to be successful organizationally and describes the specific approaches that were most successful from a product development perspective.

The findings demonstrate that innovation in the large enterprise is a repeatable and reproducible process when the right environment and methods are utilized.

Because enterprises are increasingly being called on to provide breakthrough and disruptive innovations innovation planning methods are increasingly becoming a necessary core discipline that is required in the enterprise.

This paper is valuable to all readers and organizations that want to enable innovation planning methods in large enterprises.