[Newspoetry] How to Deal With Microsoft - Gorilla Bloat

[Nick Montfort]

> Sometimes the military can have quite a sense of humor. And 800 pound gorillas
> ain't nothing on these boys.....

I've often wondered about how massive of a gorilla, exactly, Microsoft is.
Commentators seem confused on the matter, although the weight is often
pegged at 800 pounds. PC World suggested more modestly that the company
was a 500-pound gorilla back in November 1998 - and of course it has grown
a bit since then.  In December of 1998 Steve Wadsworth's claim that
Microsoft was a 1,000-pound gorilla came out during the anti-trust trial.  
The Engineering Times further confused the matter in their May 1999 issue,
referring to Microsoft as a 1,200-pound gorilla. But that sort of figure
had a even more hyperbolic precedent - Computer Design weighed Microsoft
in at 2,000 gorilla-pounds back in 1996.

Obesity is a particular American affliction, one which seems to be
reflected in Microsoft's gorilla-portliness. The average adult male
gorilla weighs less than 400 pounds.

No one on the Web - as yet - has made the more physically reasonable yet
sinister claim that Microsoft is a 666-pound gorilla, although
numerological manipulations of the ASCII values in Bill Gates's name hint
that this may be the case.

Those who side with the justice department may be picking an even heavier
gorilla to bet on. The government's regulatory apparatus was characterized
as even more massive than that of Microsoft, gorilla-wise, in a Nevada
Policy Research Institute article entitled "Reforming the 4,000 Pound
Gorilla." Even then, Microsoft may tip the scales of justice. In an August
1997 article for the HAL-PC User Group's magazine, Microsoft was dubbed a
"five-thousand pound gorilla."
 
-Nick Montfort   nickm at media.mit.edu    http://www.media.mit.edu/~nickm