Nowadays, Microsoft is proclaiming it brought innovations to the software market and played a big role in the greatest peacetime economic expansion in history.

   And it's hard to find a better case of the difference between accurate and true.

   The general public, often bored or tuned-out in matters of news and politics, doesn't seem to buy the idea that Microsoft ever did anything wrong -- bidness is bidness, you know.

   I suggest this apathy comes in large part because Microsoft has used a classic PR technique: don't refute a charge, reframe the argument.

   Think about it: nobody is talking about the specifics of the Microsoft case, and understandably so -- you need to be a geek or a lawyer to understand the allegations. Microsoft has plenty of geeks and lawyers, but chooses not to argue specifics. It chooses to turn around the argument -- we are the company that innovates.

   Turns out, both spins -- did nothing wrong, great innovators -- have that pesky problem of getting crushed by the facts. It also turns out that most of the people spouting these facts are Mac users or Open Source geeks, so even truth can sound biased and whiney.

   A great nugget of pure truth -- not accuracy, not spin, just plain truth -- can be found in a footnote to a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the Microsoft breakup plan. It looks at 18 Microsoft "innovations" and notes they were all technologies purchased from other companies. The list starts with acquiring MS-DOS from Seattle Computer Systems and runs through technologies now known by familiar names -- Internet Explorer, PowerPoint, FrontPage, Access. Apparently in Redmond, innovation is defined as being able to spot somebody else's good idea.

   What Microsoft has not bought up, it has ruthlessly crushed. People have this notion that a big company will always devour a little company, but consider this -- among the companies that lost an operating system war to Microsoft was a quaint little company called IBM.

   To see Microsoft's illegal exploitation of its monopoly doesn't require a law degree -- all it takes is paying attention. The Justice Department nailed it in 1995 for strong-arming computer makers to use their system, but the consent decree forced no changes, and there's a long list of questionable practices from there. Truthfully, though, the important thing isn't the length of the list -- it's the fact that these predatory practices continue to this day.

    Microsoft loves to add little tweaks to open international standards to make sure things will only work on their systems. There's a huge outcry nowadays in the tech world over Microsoft's tinkering with an encryption standard (the Kerberos kernel). It is squeezing Real Networks to the benefit of its MediaPlayer using the same bundling tricks it used to crush Netscape. And think about this; within days of getting hammered by a judge for monopolistic practices, it was running ads on TV for six months free MSN Internet access. Once again the big dog was forcing rivals to compete with free.

   These practices are important to consider because PCs running the Microsoft OS became the defacto business standard by being cheaper than their competitors. The classic argument about a monopoly is that a monopoly will raise prices, something Microsoft has not done on the scale of John Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust. Microsoft made its money not by jacking prices, but in rolling up market share.

   Which brings me to my final point.

   In the PBS classic "Revenge of the Nerds," Apple founder Steve Jobs didn't complain about Apple losing the operating system war -- what bothered him most was that Microsoft churned out "third-rate products."

   Because there are millions of Americans who have never worked on anything but a PC, they have never experienced something which can be quite eye-opening. Computers don't have to be hard to learn and intimidating to use.

   There's plenty of software out there that's a lot easier to use than the stuff Microsoft puts out, which brings up the saddest point of all. The real loser in Microsoft's abuse is not the rivals it crushed. It's Microsoft's own customers.

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