During that Department of Justice antitrust trial against Microsoft, poor, beleaguered Bill Gates claimed that the company he co-founded only wanted the freedom to “innovate.” Now this innovate mantra has been part and parcel of Microsoft’s pitch to customers, competitors and government agencies for years, as most of you know.

The question that comes to the fore, though, is just what does Microsoft mean by that word. Now if we simply go by the conventional definition, we get: “make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.”

All right, that’s simple enough, and I’m sure that most of you will agree with the standard meaning. That is except for Microsoft, which seems to be unable to deliver “new methods, ideas, or products.”

Take Windows, which was nothing but a knock-off of the Mac OS, based in part on technology they actually licensed from Apple in a foolish deal crafted between Gates and then Apple CEO John Scully. In retrospect, Scully created a monster, one that came to dominate the PC industry in ways that were not always beneficial.

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I’ve been extremely hard on Microsoft in recent years. First, I’ve criticized them for their bait and switch and other shady marketing schemes, and then I’ve even gone so far as to suggest they are doomed to fail big time in a few years.

I don’t think many of you agree with me about Microsoft’s potential for future irrelevance. After all they still have billions in the bank, and they make huge profits on their software. All right, they are laying off 5,000 people, but maybe they were simply overstaffed and used the state of the economy as an excuse to dump unproductive workers.

But I’m quite serious about what I say, and I think Microsoft’s sordid history is sufficient to warrant some close scrutiny by the authorities. We in the states shouldn’t depend on the European Union to do the heavy lifting when it comes to fining Microsoft for various and sundry offenses.

Sure, the Department of Justice also clamped down on the company more or less, but the regulation-free environment of the Bush administration probably lessened the penalties. For example, efforts to break up the company were quickly abandoned.

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It appears that Microsoft’s worst nightmare may not be Apple, but the European Union. Their most recent action, involving a Statement of Objection is, as others have observed, a throwback to the browser wars of the 1990s, where Internet Explorer decimated Netscape. Sure, Microsoft exploited its huge share of the PC market to trounce the competition in an unfair way. That was a major part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s own antitrust action.

More to the point, I think Microsoft deserved what they got, and I don’t disagree that the penalties should have been more severe. No, I don’t necessarily feel that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should have gone to jail for their offenses. That’s going a little too far, as far as I’m concerned.

In Europe, the latest complaint of unfair behavior comes from Opera Software, which is an extremely minor player in the desktop browser market. Sure, Opera has pioneered some of the powerful features we take for granted today, such as tabs and so forth, but the company has never been able to achieve a market share of more than one or two percent. Even Apple’s Safari is way ahead.

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It’s not easy for a company that’s number one in its market to admit that its efforts to spread its dominance to other product segments have not succeeded.

Whenever Microsoft is mentioned, the fact that they own over 90% of the personal computer desktops on the planet often accompanies the reference. That and consistent high profits surely auger well for their continued success, but it has been hard for them to come to terms with the fact that they don’t do so well when they stray beyond their core competency.

Take digital media players, where Apple long ago rose to the number one spot and remains there. Microsoft first tried to parlay their PC operating system market share advantage and set up a standard for other digital players to follow. It went through an identity crises, but was last known as PlaysForSure. Except Microsoft realized they couldn’t succeed with this strategy, so they double-crossed their partners and created the Zune, which hasn’t done so well either.

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