Word: antitrusters
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Government and antitrust lawyers are not the only ones testing Bill Gates' empire these days: union organizers are circling. Microsoft's 260-acre campus is a cool place--you work in jeans, play volleyball on breaks and get good pay, benefits, stock options and job security--if you wear a blue ID badge. Those who wear orange badges (known as "A-dashes" for "Agency" because of their e-mail address prefix) get no benefits, no stock options and no talk about getting on permanent staff...
...Theodore Roosevelt and his trustbusters had another word for it--monopoly--and the Lord proved no help to Rockefeller against T.R. Rockefeller's tough tactics forced America to define the limits of corporate behavior. Since Rockefeller managed to figure out every conceivable anticompetitive practice, the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 simply had to study his career to draw up a reform agenda...
Rozelle's next big move was to weld the owners of the new, expanded league into a cartel. This too required an exemption from the antitrust laws, which Congress granted in 1966. One morning the three major television networks woke up and found not a collection of individual teams competing with one another to sell their broadcast rights, but a single entity with a growing sense of its value...
...displaying the same attitude that doomed certain robber barons. As writer Ambrose Bierce once gibed of Hearst, "Nobody but God loves him, and he knows it." Likewise, Gates' Xanadu has helped transform the boyishly charming geek into the Microsoft Monster, who is being chased by torch-bearing mobs brandishing antitrust suits. Nowhere in Gates' overwired palace is there a program to inform him how to act in the nation he lives in: the U.S. of A., in which throngs cheered the heavy-metal band Motorhead when it performed Eat the Rich and where Garth Brooks became a megastar for crooning...
Theoretically, a conglomerate made sense because it could balance out the business cycle by trading in a wide array of goods and services. Somewhat perversely, both the tax code and the antitrust policy at that time encouraged the strategy. ITT bought the maker of Wonder bread...