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Can you imagine if Lance Ito had been the judge?

By the time this column appears, the verdict itself (for the Microsoft trial, of course … have there been any others?) will be old news. The obligatory snap judgments will all have been printed, so you’ve read that (a) Judge Penfield Jackson was right and should throw the book at Microsoft; (b) he may have been right in theory, but technology has passed the whole issue by so the penalty should be light; (c) the whole trial should never have taken place because antitrust laws are bad for bidness.

The fact is that in the eyes of the law, Microsoft did harm and is guilty. The question now is finding a suitable punishment. What strikes me about this subject is the dreary sameness of the proposed solutions. Every one involves either breaking up the company, expropriating its intellectual property (read “Windows”), and/or supervising it closely while telling it to stop being so naughty.

Sadly, not one of these punishments stands up to the most basic of ethical tests: The punishment should fit the crime. The worst is breaking up the company, because in the wacky world of Wall Street a broken-up Microsoft would probably exceed a unified Microsoft in total market capitalization.

The goal of punishment is not to enrich the guilty.

Here’s one punishment that doesn’t enrich the guilty, and does fit Microsoft’s crime of abusing its Windows’ monopoly by bundling and dumping other, non-monopoly products, with it. What would be a suitable punishment? Prevent dumping, require the bundling of competing products, and break the monopoly.

Resolving the bundling and dumping issue is relatively easy: If Microsoft bundles a product, it must bundle the three leading competitors as well, and can only give away a product when at least one competitor already does so.

Breaking the monopoly is the more interesting challenge. Here’s one way: Require Microsoft to do what it should do anyway: Both publish and respect the operating system interface.

In other words, put the Windows API in the public domain. Not Windows itself, just its API. The court would enjoin Microsoft from either hiding any APIs or changing its specifications once published.

This would create near-instant competition in the form of Windows clones. Without hidden or changing APIs, clone-makers would be limited only by their ability to write code that works.

Enforcing this penalty is where the fun starts: The court should establish a bounty, paid by Microsoft’s own self to the first person or company uncovering a hidden or changed API. Make it $50 million or so per API, and I figure the average delay between infraction and detection would be measured in minutes.

Here’s the best part: Internet Explorer is part of the operating system, so its API, along with the API for the rest of Windows … all versions … will now be in the public domain. So will the APIs for any other applications Microsoft declares to be integral to the OS. Wham! Microsoft suddenly has a strong incentive to respect the distinction between OS and application.

That’s my solution. Even if you don’t like it, at least it’s different from the same old stuff.

If, on the other hand, you do like it and are pals with Judge Jackson, feel free to mention it to him. Or, mention it to a pal of a pal.

Six degrees of separation should get it there.

Last week’s column used MSNBC commentator Tucker Carlson’s Hillariphobia to introduce the subject of persistent sexism in the workplace(“Managers who have discriminating tastes,Keep the Joint Running, 5/12/2008).

Last week, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews provided more Hillariphobic drivel to help introduce this week’s column: “It’s almost as if Hillary Clinton is the Al Sharpton of white people.”

Clearly, the Fifth Amendment should override the First. As the t-shirt says, “You have the right to remain silent. Please exercise it.”

We need to continue last week’s discussion, to help out MSNBC if for no other reason.

Among the many e-mails I received were some that changed my view of the subject:

  • An African-American IT professional described his experiences. He did not describe overt racism. What he told me is that over a long career he never stopped being an outsider, and it hurt his career.
  • Another correspondent, Roy Schweiker, pointed out that some women, as well as the boss, like watching professional sports. Not all men do. “Of course,” he said, “if a man fails promotion for not talking sports he can’t file a discrimination suit.” Mr. Schweiker recommends calling the boss a “sportist.”
  • Then there was this: “In my workplace, to ‘be one of the boys’ apparently requires a sincere dedication to video games and movies. This is all my manager and ‘his boys’ talk about, sometimes for hours on end while the rest of us do the work.

Needless to say, the interesting or prestigious projects, and the promotions, go to those employees who are most like the manager, or play ‘World of Warcraft’ with the manager.”

  • And one more: “I’ve been working in corporate America for close to 25 years, in major corporations, including 5 years in Israel. I’m an Orthodox Chassidic Jew and have never been ‘one of the boys’ nor did I want to be.

Did it adversely affect my career? Of course it did. But I chose to be this way and I chose not to join the ‘boys club.’ Did I suffer financially? Of course I did.

Were all these corporations anti-Semitic? I don’t think so. But even if they were, does it really matter? I wish there weren’t anti-Semitism in the world. I also wish we lived in a perfect world. We don’t — we live in the world as it is, and have to deal with it.”

Until this week I considered “diversity training” to be a code phrase for “going through the motions to avoid legal liability.”

That does happen. There’s no excuse for it.

Diversity training has a vital role to play in every company big enough to have a diverse workforce. That role is to help managers especially, and also every employee, recognize how easily employees can divide into insiders and outsiders.

It doesn’t really matter whether the cause is a shared appreciation for sports, video games, soap operas or romance novels. Shared interests help build the trust needed for effective teams to function. When they cross the invisible line where building trust stops and making the workplace exclusionary starts, everyone has work to do.

Leadership has to (of course) take the lead. If a manager loves baseball, and enjoys talking about it with those employees who share her interest, that’s fine … so long as the manager shows just as much interest in talking with other employees about what interests them.

Employees also have a role to play, on their own initiative regardless of how their manager behaves. That role is to recognize outsiders and help them feel included. Not everyone is comfortable barging into a conversation among people who are talking about a subject that’s of intense interest to the group but not to themselves. The group can help by inviting them in.

The group can also help by expressing interest in the outsider: “You don’t talk much about yourself, Howard — what do you do when you aren’t busy writing code?” is a decent, if obvious icebreaker.

This isn’t the tyranny of the minority, and outsiders can help themselves by expressing interest in whatever it is that the insiders find so fascinating. Who knows — even if knitting is your hobby, you might find World of Warcraft has some possibilities, too.

Diversity means we understand that our differences make life more interesting, that we all have common ground if we look for it, and that we turn our understanding into action.

Appreciating differences while finding common ground isn’t political correctness.

It’s simple good manners — no small thing in a team environment.

If you blow enough smoke, you’ll convince a lot of people there’s a fire somewhere.

Last year, Bob Metcalfe and other pundits predicted the imminent collapse of the Internet. I, on the other hand, courageously predicted its non-collapse, and even more courageously endorsed the free-market economic model on which it is based.

The collapse contingent cites big outages last year, especially at Netcom and AOL, as evidence of the coming collapse. Their recommendation: throw a big party for the Internet’s inventors, thank them, shake their hands, and send them home so professionals can take over the job, replacing the current “anarchy” with modern central administration.

Here’s where I get lost. Netcom and AOL are private corporations operating centrally planned and administered networks. Both suffered big, noisy, noticeable outages. So to save the Internet from collapse, we want to centrally plan and administer it?

What am I missing? Most Americans think communism collapsed because big, centrally planned and managed economies don’t work. Most Americans are right. The Internet’s stability comes from its decentralized model. Rules are established centrally and kept simple – hence “Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and “Simple Mail Transport Protocol” (SMTP) – while implementation of the rules is decentralized.

(One other problem with the proposed solution: there are no other professionals to call in. Only the Internet’s designers and implementers have experience in designing, building and running a successful, global network that links millions of independent computers. Who else are you gonna call?)

Despite all this enjoyable gloating, I give Dr. Metcalfe a lot of credit for sticking his neck way out, and for making a self-preventing prophesy. When disaster fails to strike, very few people give credit to those who sounded the alarm. I wonder how much of last year’s investment in Internet capacity resulted from the publicity attending Bob’s predictions.

Any lessons for you in all this? Ya, you betcha, as we say in Minnesota. The Internet’s successful use of centralized rule-making and decentralized implementation, far from being anarchic, gives you a wonderful model for organizational design.

Awhile back one of my readers sent me Sahakian’s Rules (Corporate Partnering Institute, Skokie, IL, 1995). It’s worth buying. One entry: “In ancient times, in order to manage large masses of people in the battlefield, Commanders used gongs, banners and horns. If a plan of battle was not simple enough to communicate with gongs, banners, or horns, it was a bad battle plan.”

Manage your organization like the Internet, or like a Commander on an ancient battlefield: with simple, easily communicated rules, not close, central supervision.

One other useful lesson: when you manage, ignore currently fashionable theories, especially those that demonize some group that Isn’t You. The idea that current Internet management doesn’t hack it anymore comes from one such notion that I call the BIG/GAS theory (for “Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid”).

Yes, you can certainly find waste in government. Some comes from its sheer size, more comes from having lawyers (most of Congress) designing work processes, and much of the rest is unavoidable. (The military, for example, is staffed to conduct wars. When there’s no war, it’s over-staffed. Big deal.)

While government isn’t as good as it could be, the Internet’s history proves that BIG/GAS is just … vapor. In the 1960s visionaries in the academic and defense community created it. It’s been an international reality for decades.

In the 1980s the Graphic Communications Association (where, coincidentally, I worked for a few years) began creating the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Commercial publishers ignored it; the defense community embraced it as part of its Computer Aided Logistics System (CALS). Early in this decade, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (the international particle physics laboratory) adapted SGML to invented the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

And business finally caught on three years ago. BIG/GAS indeed.