The Justice juggernaut has begun to roll, but those hapless millions are still wondering what the excitement is all about when they're perfectly happy with Windows and MS-DOS (the latter written by Big Bill with his own little hands).

But the issue is not whether Microsoft makes popular products, but whether its trade practices are inducing abortions among the competition. The DOJ is defending the basic shibboleth of capitalism: the consumer's right to choose.The software industry has an unwritten law: basic programs should be either free or dirt cheap. Programmers get to makea living only from value-addition. This law came into force when the industry realised that unless it widened its user base, it would never have a market to fight over.

Command-line UNIX is free. So are basic connectivity tools like telnet and FTP. Carnegie-Mellon University even offers a free basic browser called Cello.

But years ago, Microsoft started making serious money from deals with PC manufacturers to ship their goods pre-loaded with MS-DOS and Windows. When these PC brands flooded outlets, Microsoft operating systems piggybacked to serious market share. No serious objections were raised at the time.

Trouble started brewing when Microsoft ventured out on the Internet. The first clash was with Sun Microsystems last year, which had just launched Java, its programming language for the Net. Java can run on any platform.

Microsoft saw it as a threat to its domination of the PC operating systems market and refused to recognise it as an industry standard.

Then it insisted on bundling its InternetExplorer browser with Windows. When users fired it up, they were hustled into the Microsoft Network, the company's Web portal. Microsoft offered just one answer to the question in its own ad copy: "Where do you want to go today?" It was Microsoft itself.This is why Microsoft is being demonised as a megalomaniacal monopolist. It wants to control every aspect of a consumer's use of his computer, from how he boots it through what what browser he runs to which sites on the Internet it first accesses. Many of the victims couldn't care less because seamless integration implies easy operation. A familiar platform and lots of handholding: it's literally Internet for dummies.

The point they miss is that once secure, monopolistic operations tend to go slow on product improvement (Windows 98, for instance, isn't exactly miles ahead of its predecessor) and stop passing down discounts to consumers. Sure, Microsoft is handing out dandy products, but that does not imply that the competition is incapable of supplyingbetter, cheaper alternatives.But the visceral nature of the US government's reaction to Microsoft clearly shows that fair competition is only one of the issues at stake. There is, for instance, a history of allegations against Bill Gates. Two books which hit the stands this season have done some dirt-digging.

In Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, former Microsoft developer Marlin Eller and journalist Jennifer Edstrom (whose mother does PR for Gates) claim that Windows was ripped off from the interfaces of VisiOn and Xerox Parc's Star System. And in Speeding the Net, Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla, technology columnists for Time and the New York Times respectively, say that Microsoft's market aggression prompted Netscape to send a Mayday to the DOJ in 1995, long before Explorer was launched. Reason enough for Gates-style Godzilla capitalism to be fitted with a bridle.