Editor’s note: Joe Johnson is editor-in-chief of Business Reform Magazine, the leading Christian business magazine with over 100,000 readers. Each issue features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
Many years ago, a father, while sitting in his lazy boy and reading his paper, looked up for a moment and said to his son, “Remember son, if at first you don’t succeed, make it look like someone else’s fault. Then sue them.” And with that, the new American dream is born: whoever sues the most, wins.
This attitude has reached epidemic levels.
Last Friday, Microsoft found itself being bullied as usual after saying that it would pay $1.1 billion to settle a class action lawsuit. The settlement comes in response to initial charges brought by California residents claiming that Microsoft bullied them by abusing its position and overcharging for its software.
Sad, but true – in our society, you ultimately win if you find someone with big pockets to sue. And here, as if the suit itself isn’t bad enough, what’s worse is the reason for why a lawsuit was filed in the first place: in this case, Microsoft is being sued because the prevailing attitude among most Americans is that it’s wrong to become successful to the point that no one else can compete with you.
Ingenuity, under our current governmental system, is punished. Apparently, the government thinks that Microsoft’s ingenuity and productivity are unethical to the point that laws need to exist in order to prevent them. The government, on the other hand, is allowed to create monopolies in order – and this is their exclusive claim – to benefit the consumer.
Take the U.S. Postal Service, for example. Companies like FedEx and UPS face certain restrictions that do not allow them to compete properly with the USPS. These restrictions give the federal government a legal monopoly (anti-trust) in this sector of the market. Other shipping companies have restrictions against them because competing with our government would cause the post office to lose money, and if they lost money, they would then need to increase rates because cutting cost and becoming competitive seem – at least historically – to be out of the question. The problem, however, is that even with all the benefits and powers enjoyed by a monopoly, the USPS still increases rates like no one else and continues to lose money that the taxpayer must then subsidize. Having a monopoly in which you struggle year after year to stay in the black and must depend upon the country’s population to subsidize your failure – that’s legal, if you are the government. Being smart, producing quality products, and doing it at a rate no one else can touch – being, in essence, Microsoft – that, my friends, is illegal.
Microsoft has one bully down and a multitude more to face (similar lawsuits are pending in 35 other states). They had little choice but to settle in the class-action suit in California and perhaps, with the way things are set up in this country, the only hope they may have for the other suits is to start being vastly unproductive. Once they’re out of money, and perhaps not until that point, they will finally be left alone. Their best bet, then, is to punt, to quit trying, to disassemble the empire they’ve built one window at a time. And what’s the best way to go about doing this? My advice: take a little trip down to the post office, pull up a recliner, and start taking notes.
To read Joe’s look at Microsoft’s seedier side, in the current issue of Business Reform Magazine, click here .
