Once or twice a month, I get to sit in large airliners for anywhere from 10 to 15 hours, through two bad movies and two or more mediocre meals, until we land somewhere exotic or somewhere near home. I really enjoy these flights -- not just because of the high sound levels and poor air quality -- but because for just a few hours, they take me past the limits of communication and computation into what I have come to think of as the Dead Battery Zone. It's during these hours aloft that I actually think about things, rather than just writing about them. From these flights are constructed the frail underpinnings of my career. And I suppose, were I to get a computer with a longer battery life -- say a Psion Series 5 or an Apple eMate -- my so-called career would be over.

This week's flight was from Tokyo in an MD-11 loaded with expatriate Americans, all headed home for Christmas. They were a varied group -- sergeants and sailors and salesmen and engineers and teachers of English and mothers and finally, dozens of little kids who watched Space Jam with glee and then fell asleep before the second feature even started. I envied their ability to sleep in those seats, where the best I could do was think my thoughts and try to not notice the throbbing in my left knee that occurs at altitude and is growing worse as the years pass. Fortunately, I had a lot to think about. I was thinking about Microsoft.

For three weeks straight I've written nothing about the boys and girls in Redmond. A reader or two complained about how often I'd written about Microsoft, and I thought, "What the heck, I can go a week without Bill Gates." And then I went two, then three. But now it's back to reality, for in my absence -- first mental and then physical -- a lot has been happening. Federal prosecutors have been prosecuting, federal judges have been judging, and Microsoft has been adopting the most curious policy of saying in effect, "No, we're not in contempt, judge. We just don't think you know what the hell you are talking about."

This is not the way to talk to a judge, believe me. I made the mistake once of reading a newspaper in the back of a courtroom and almost did a night in the clink as a result. Don't mess with the judge.

So why is Microsoft behaving like this? After 20 years of Microsoft-watching and 9:42 of trans-Pacific thinking, I am willing to risk an explanation.

There are external and internal reasons for what is going on. Externally, Microsoft is pulling the same shenanigans any successful monopolist pulls. They delay, they obscure, they maybe tell a little fib or two, but mainly they act really, really stupid. This is by design. Here's an example from history. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic (and occasionally military) force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pa., literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, and their best lasted several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, the British turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother of searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island. Not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known to seep all the way to the surface. People have known about this seepage for more than 3,000 years. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They not only had to be NOT looking for oil, they had to be VERY ACTIVELY NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Fast-forward to a U.S. Federal Court, where Microsoft first claimed Internet Explorer could not be divided from Windows 95 without the loss of a spleen or a liver. With that argument apparently not working, they offered -- just as Anglo-Persian had offered -- to do the work of removing IE 4 for the consumer by substituting some crappy old code that didn't work two years ago and doesn't work now.

This is incredible arrogance on Microsoft's part, but completely in keeping with their self-image. This is where we get to the internal part. First, Microsoft sees itself with a single mind. This is not the Borg, but rather a very well-run American industrial company. Proctor & Gamble, Disney, Coca-Cola, all the great brands see themselves this way. Branding has that side effect of educating all the branders into the meaning of their brand. It used to be that way with IBM, too, until Big Blue almost died, and in doing so saw a bright light.

Microsoft sees itself in a certain way, and that way is as a technology leader. And why not, since most of the top computer scientists in the world now work at Microsoft, where they can work any 80 hours per week they want and get paid an average of $164,000 per year for doing so. And as a technology leader, if it was easy to separate Internet Explorer from Windows 95, wouldn't Microsoft have already done it? If the promise of object-oriented programming (and Microsoft keeps saying how object-oriented programming is at the heart of its software) says that objects can be swapped in and out at will, then wouldn't Microsoft have done such swapping to remove Internet Explorer if it was possible to do so? Sure, Netscape seems to have been able to replace IE 4 with Netscape Communicator, but that's a hack, a kludge. To do it right requires real technical expertise, and the real technical experts say it can't be done.

But they'll try to do it if that's what the court requires, even if doing so takes 22 years.

When he was a freshman at Harvard, Bill Gates spent much of his time playing poker for money. There is a lot to be learned about Microsoft from looking at Bill's behavior in those days. He was hyper-competitive, needing to play poker where he could win one hand at a time rather than to compete academically, where the results were posted months apart and didn't really mean anything until right at the end. Bill Gates is a tactical thinker because he likes the battle, not the war. Microsoft's strategy, such as it is, is composed of tactics that are employed over and over again. There is a master plan, but it changes twice a year when Bill goes off for reading weeks. And the new strategies that appear are just more bundles of tactics aimed at destroying yet another opponent.

There's the key: Microsoft is fixated on beating competitors, not serving customers. The "solution" they've offered the court does nothing for customers. In fact, Microsoft is counting on customers to apply pressure on its behalf and force both the court and the Department of Justice to back down. And it could happen.

Fifteen years ago a company called Esmark spent $250,000 trying to trademark the word "soup." They were unsuccessful, of course, and even attempting such an effort seems ludicrous, but what's $250,000 to a big company? And what if it HAD worked? What a grand and glorious day that would have been when Esmark and the U.S. Marshals arrived at Heinz and Campbell's to reclaim their trademark. Microsoft is thinking the same way. Bill Gates wants to get this anti-trust issue dealt with and finished so that he can go beat up on someone else. He saw this issue coming and feels Microsoft not only can handle it, but can gain the upper hand. But Microsoft's current tactic is a bluff. If the judge says okay, offer OEMs and customers your crappy old software, Gates won't be able to bring himself to do it. Bill's fear of competitors is too great. But the judge won't call his bluff, because Bill Gates is a better poker player than he is a programmer.

This skirmish has only just begun.

Fortunately for you and me, what's at the very heart of this mess is a fallacy. Both sides respect a kind of inside-out populism that smacks of Thorsten Veblen, the 1920s economic theorist. Veblen saw that the value of industry lay not in the bricks of factories, but in the minds of educated workers. Bill Gates and the U.S. Department of Justice think the same -- that those 25,000 USDA prime brains in Redmond constitute Microsoft's real asset, an asset that must be controlled (according to the government) and can't be controlled, stopped, or even slowed-down, according to Gates, who thinks what he's built is a natural intellectual monopoly.

But they are both wrong, because Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator and even the whole gosh-darned Internet are just snapshots of the progress of human thought. Microsoft is no more in control of this flow of ideas than I am of keeping Nina the cat off my bed at night. Ideas come from individuals, not groups, and there is an individual somewhere right now who has an idea that will pound to dust all this Microsoft/Netscape/Internet/Antitrust nonsense. I don't know what the idea is or who has it, but I know it's out there, growing, and I find that very comforting. And I hope you do, too.

Merry Christmas.