Orren Boyle, Meet Bill Gates

"Google's algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft's well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms."

-Lead whiner for Microsoft, counsel Dave Heiner, pleading for help from the DOJ and EC

This is just disgusting. Back when the looters and rotters were attacking Microsoft for being too good, I was angry and defended the company against the injustice. Now they are doing the same damn thing, pleading to the State to knock their competition down a few pegs. "But it's too hard beat them! It's not fair! Bing needs to gain volume too! Who the hell are they to think they're so great?!"

Screw you, Microsoft. You deserve every bad thing that comes to you from now on.

Today, Yaron Brook and Don Watkins have a column in the Christian Science Monitor provocatively titled, "Apple vs. GM: Ayn Rand knew the difference. Do you?," with a subhead of "Apple acts like a producer. GM acts like a looter. It’s a key distinction that Ayn Rand laid out in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’"

Microsoft, though it admittedly has a very mixed history, has generally acted like a producer in the past. Now, it's playing the political pull game, and shows its new pragmatic, unprincipled colors: cowardly, yellow, Orren Boyle type colors. Sickening.

Brook and Watkins could just as easily be talking about Microsoft as they are GM:

The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.

It is the producers who make life possible: who keep grocery shelves stocked; who discover new lifesaving drugs; who make computers faster, buildings taller, and airplanes safer.

The looters, on the other hand, leech off the wealth created by producers.

The novel rejects the widespread notion that both the producer Reardens and the looter Boyles are fundamentally united by a desire for profit. Only the Reardens, she argues, deserve to be called profit-seekers, because they earn rewards through productive effort; the Boyles are antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot.

But it’s not only unearned wealth the looters want. In “Atlas Shrugged,” Boyle uses his influence to throttle Rearden with progressively harsher government controls and regulations, because he can’t survive except by hindering the competition.

Witness the birth of Microsoft's new tagline: "antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot."