Microsoft appears in The Bob Zadek Show not as a topic in its own right but as a recurring example in arguments about corporations, taxation, antitrust and the transitory nature of market power. The excerpts span 2010 to 2020 and treat the company chiefly as a case study.
Corporations, taxes and pass-through
In a 2010 episode, Bob Zadek used Microsoft to illustrate his argument about hidden taxes and the corporate pass-through. Corporations, he said, are a legal artifice, neither good nor bad, and cannot properly be described as greedy: greed is a personal quality, and a corporation is inanimate. He asked rhetorically whether Microsoft could be depressed, insecure, or in need of therapy, noting that greed seems to be the only quality attributed to corporations. From this he drew the conclusion that a corporation is only a dispersing agent: a corporate tax is a pure pass-through borne by stockholders, workers, suppliers, landlords or bondholders, because only humans can pay taxes. Taxing corporations, on his account, lets legislators raise revenue without being voted out of office Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Business versus free markets
A 2011 episode with Luigi Zingales drew a distinction between business and free markets. Bob Zadek argued that many American businesses would prefer there not be a free market, and that the home of laissez-faire resides for the most part in small business. He cited Microsoft alongside Xerox and IBM as examples of businesses that were big and powerful when they controlled their industries, and used them to make the point that a business’s power in a marketplace tends to be transitory: the railroads were all-powerful until there were planes and trucks. Private business has temporary power, he said, while the power of government seems far more permanent Obama Nationalizes General Electric (2011).
Rent-seeking and fiduciary duty
In a 2015 episode, Mike Munger placed Microsoft at the center of an argument about rent-seeking. A CEO, he said, has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and is therefore obliged to spend money on government programs and to approach members of Congress because doing so increases profits. He said Microsoft did this, and that one cannot blame the corporation for it — any more than one blames a dog for eating out of the garbage. The remedy, in his framing, is to change the playing field so that the incentives for campaign contributions are lower, because government needs to stop selling policy. He characterized the problem not as a market failure but as a government failure Who Wants to Buy a Politician? With Mike Munger (2015).
The 1998 antitrust case
The 1998 antitrust litigation against Microsoft is the most developed thread across the excerpts. In a 2019 episode, Frank Buckley recalled that there was antitrust litigation in the 90s to split up Microsoft, that Bill Gates came to town as the face of high-tech, and that he came across as a supercilious punk who teed off the judge in question, Thomas Penfield Jackson, who ordered that Microsoft be split up. Buckley quoted Maureen Dowd writing in the New York Times in 1998 that Microsoft was a dangerous giant that had cut off the air supply of competitors in a bid to control cyberspace. Twenty years later, Buckley said, Gates had been more or less expelled from running Microsoft and made into a philanthropy figure, and Microsoft had not had too many brilliant ideas since. His conclusion was that behemoths tend to disappear in time, and that breaking up the media giants is nuts Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019).
In the same episode, Buckley returned to the case in a discussion of the FTC. He said the reason Gates seemed arrogant is that he really was arrogant, that his attitude was that he had made Microsoft and was a master of the universe, and that this teed off the judge and gave rise to the breakup order, which was reversed by the Court of Appeals. He contrasted Microsoft’s lobbying presence at the time of the case — a lone lobbyist in a second-floor walk-up of a strip mall in the suburbs — with its later position as just about the biggest player in town in terms of lobbyists. He used this to argue that a company facing periodic regulatory death sentences will invest heavily in political parties, and that the FTC, a five-member commission of which no more than three members may belong to one party, would become politicized as a result Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019).
The keystroke argument
A 2020 episode with Ryan Young made the Microsoft case the basis of an argument against trustbusting big tech. Young described the Microsoft case as over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which Microsoft tied into its Windows operating system, made the default, and made impossible to uninstall. Even though Microsoft then had a dominating market share of the internet browser market, within a couple of years of the lawsuit — which ended essentially in a draw with very few actions taken — Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari took over. Internet Explorer and its successor Microsoft Edge, he said, remain the default option for Windows computers but have a combined market share of maybe 15%. His conclusion was that Microsoft never actually had power; consumers did, and they changed as soon as something better came along. He called this the dozen keystrokes argument: typing bing.com into a browser is not difficult, so Google does not have the power either Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
Bob Zadek’s framing in that episode was that power per se is benign unless misused, and that no founding document contains a mission to attack power simply because it exists. He compared corporate power to the power of wealthy people and of NFL team owners, and to the power of the Wall Street Journal, which has power by dint of having a good product Why Trustbusting Big Tech is a Bad Idea (2020).
Across episodes
The Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 is treated in two episodes, both from 2019 and 2020, and the later treatment builds on the earlier: Frank Buckley in 2019 supplies the account of the breakup order, the judge and the reversal on appeal, while Ryan Young in 2020 uses the browser market outcome as evidence that the case demonstrated consumer power rather than corporate power. The two accounts do not conflict; the later one adds the market-share outcome that the earlier one does not state. Microsoft’s appearances in 2010, 2011 and 2015 are incidental examples in arguments about taxation, free markets and rent-seeking rather than a developing treatment of the company.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Microsoft’s founding date, its founders’ full history, or the outcome of the 1998 case beyond the reversal of the breakup order. They do not name the statutes under which the case was brought, the court that reversed the order, or the terms of any settlement. No excerpt describes Microsoft’s current business, products or financial results, and none addresses the company’s role in any later antitrust proceeding.