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I don't have to get "hyper-technical" to suggest Microsoft has competitors, and that Microsoft cannot raise prices forever without their customers going elsewhere. While Microsoft currently enjoys a position of market dominance, they are not guaranteed to keep it. Microsoft is not a Standard Oil or an Alcoa Aluminium.

However, you will find that I am highly critical of some of Microsoft's business practices. They have in the past, and apparently they continue to steal software belonging to their competitors; this past month Microsoft was levied a multi-million franc fine for packaging some small French software company's software as their own. This isn't the only time they have resorted to outright theft. Mircosoft stole Stac Electronic's Stacker software that automatically compressed your hard drive in DOS 6.0. A few years before that Microsoft released Video for Windows which was nothing more than a plagerized Apple Quicktime that ran on Windows version 3.0.

When you take these incidents with their sometimes deceptive advertising, then yes I have a problem with Microsoft management. I do not think that Microsoft Corporation is a monopoly. Rather I believe that some of their upper executives are guilty of some very shady behavior. I do not believe that Microsoft could accidentially package three different competitors' software packages by mistake. This is not monopolistic behavior, it is criminal behavior, and should have been dealt with at the time.

As I said, I don't care if they are a monopoly. The software industry by nature will correct itself, but the government will not allow that because it will allow Microsoft and companies like it to use patent law to crush incipient competitors. As always, the government as at least a part of the problem.