A horizontal split would entail selling the code base for a particular product multiple times.
This could be done with any of the Microsoft products. However, only those products that now hold or could hold a monopoly power would be relevant. NT, 95/98 and Office come to mind.
Let's take just one of these and see how it could work. Lets take 95/98.
Assume for the moment that the code base for 95/98 will not go away as promised by Microsoft. (If you want it to go away, just assume we are talking about NT in this example.)
Take the code base for 95/98 and conduct a court supervised sale to at least 5 and as many as 20 companies. Any major OEM in the PC market would be interested at the right price. Some of these OEMs do little software development now. But, given the opportunity, that could easily change. Some such as IBM, HP, Compaq, etc., would naturally want to bid for one of the copies. My guess is that about half of the major OEMs would certainly be interested. The court could set a maximum price for the entire sale and simply allocate the price based upon current market shares in the PC industry. Microsoft Corporation gets its money. But, they no longer have a monopoly much less a product (unless some employees want to submit their own bid and start a company with a copy of the code base).
But, what would this do? Seriously fragment the OS? I doubt it. Microsoft now is suggesting that Java be thrown into a standards committee (pretty brave since they do not own it). A standards committee would most likely be formed by all of the buyers. And, it would be in their interest to contribute to and maintain a standard compatible OS. The government does not need to even show up at those meetings. What result? The result is that the core functionality of an operating system will be agreed to. The fluff (add-ons and browsers and other applications) will never reach consensus and therefor not be in the standard.
Any company (buying one of the pie pieces or not) would be free to offer
applications that the core standard OS ould run. The owners
of the code base could be free to develop options, applications and add-ons
but are not likely to
force their inclusion in a bundled version. If you can just go
to HP for a vanilla version of the OS, IBM would not be able to force a
nasty bundled of unwanted options. (Nor could the employee group
buying one of the pieces. That trick just does not work with real
and active competition.)
There will always be at least one company that would offer a core OS at a much lower price than a complex bundle of applications that only a small group of customers would really want.
The real question is do we really need 6 or 12 new little Microsofts selling 98?
In this case, HP and IBM and others would be maintaining and selling
the consumer OS. I would not call those companies "little Microsofts".
They have better business practices and compete fairly almost all of the
time. And, they are used to dealing with standards bodies.
The result would be both similar and different as that found today with Unix. It would be similar in that more than one vendor can supply essentially the same OS. But, different in that all participants would be interested in "toeing the line" as far as compatibility is concerned. In the Unix market, any one company can exist quite well without being totally compatible with other versions. In a consumer market, that approach would kill off their business. My guess is that almost all buyers of the consumer OS would stick very close to the standards as adopted by the common committee.
What they do not have is the "unfair advantage" of being a monopoly.
And, other operating systems such as BeOS and Linux would also be able to compete. They would need a good selection of applications in the market in order to be viable. But, remember, if Microsoft is split both vertically and horizontally, many of those companies would want to support more than just ?/98/NT". Right now, most companies only want to help further the monopoly power that Microsoft has. And that is not likely to change without a rather drastic remedy.
Lewis A. Mettler, Esq.