By David Schneider-Joseph, AMSA02/15/99

Bill Gates said once in 1983, "imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art."
What few people saw was that this practice of stealing intellectual property was exactly what Bill Gates had in store for Microsoft. Why would a company spend tremendous effort developing a product only to have another firm come along and steal the idea, claiming the work as its own? The use of this activity would stunt innovation in the industry, because no person could afford to develop products if he/she is not to reap the rewards from the market. The truth is, this has been Microsoft's business strategy from the beginning.
Bill Gates and his supporters would have you believe that he wrote MS-DOS himself. As we've seen, this is not true. It originally started life as CP/M at Digital Research, was cloned by the Seattle Computer Company as QDOS, and then sold to Microsoft. This claim mirrors Microsoft's claims for all of its products. The idea behind the interface of the Mac OS was stolen from Apple and renamed Windows. Excel was not a product of Microsoft's own creative thinking, but was a take-off on VisiCalc, the killer application in the late-80's. Internet Explorer is a copy of Netscape Navigator. The Network PC tries to mimic the functions of the Network Computer. The Palm PC is a clone of the PalmPilot. In fact, if you look closely enough, you can take virtually any Microsoft product and find the true originator of it lying outside of Microsoft's corporate walls.
It is understandable that one may "borrow" an idea or two from someone else and improve upon it. This practice can even increase competition and innovation in the industry. But when one man gains a stranglehold on our economy while consistently producing bad products and stealing intellectual property from others, this is in no way, shape, or form a benefit to anyone but the man himself.
So people will call Bill Gates a genius for taking advantage of loopholes in the law. And I'll concede that he is pretty smart. But why are we praising a man for finding ways to act immorally that he can get away with? Instead, we should be exercising our power as consumers to protest against Microsoft by boycotting its products, while at the same time endeavoring to improve our laws so that they prevent people like Bill Gates from doing as much damage to the economy as he has.