Microsoft, the giant computer software company, was under intense scrutiny last Tuesday as its co-creator, Bill Gates, was called to testify in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington D.C.

The investigation is the latest in a series of high-profile inquiries into Microsoft’s business practices and, more specifically, its monopolization of the personal computer industry.

Anti-trust laws discourage monopolies and other restrictive capitalist practices, while encouraging greater competition.

The Justice Department, as well as 11 state attorney generals, the European Commission and other international consumer advocates, are investigating the software giant in various cases where Microsoft has monopolized the personal computer market.

Last year, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit concerning Microsoft’s marketing tactics in the Internet browser market. It currently is working to collect evidence that could lead to a broader case.

The Justice Department case is focusing only on the issue of whether Microsoft has violated terms of a 1994 anti-trust consent decree. The department contends that the company agreed to sell Windows to computer makers only if they installed Microsoft Internet Explorer browser for viewing content from the World Wide Web, a violation of the anti-trust agreement.

The Senate committee avoided the issue of merging Microsoft’s browser functions with Windows 98, an issue that could potentially be the focus of the further anti-trust investigations.

Gates vowed in his testimony at the Senate hearings to continue enhancing Windows.

“If I can’t put Internet support in Windows, then Windows will fail. If I can’t put speech recognition in Windows, then Windows will fail. Our goal is to make Windows better,” Gates said in a press release.

The committee did not show any interest in more sophisticated proposals to curb Microsoft’s power.

McNealy, owner of Sun’s Microsystems Inc., acknowledged that his company is looking into possible legal action against Microsoft, presumably in the high-end workstation market where Microsoft’s Windows NT is dramatically cutting into Sun’s Unix-based product line. However, according to an article in USA Today, McNealy made it clear he preferred government enforcement.

Gates suggested the department brought about the lawsuit to justify its long-running, pointless investigation of Microsoft.

“If a policeman follows you for a thousand miles, you might decide he needs to write you a ticket at some point. Or, in other words he kind of looks a little stupid,” Gates said in an interview with the Washington Post.

The investigation then raises the question of whether a company like Microsoft can be subjected to conventional regulation and a reactive legal process in such a fast-changing industry.

“If we can’t innovate our products, then you know we will be replaced,” Gates said at the Senate hearing.

Rivals cite that the problem with Microsoft is that when the company sees a technology it likes — memory management, printer communication tools and Internet browsing — it adds it into Windows. In doing so, Microsoft does not raise the price of Windows, making it difficult for firms that develop stand-alone products to sell them separately.

The hearing proceedings suggest that any anti-competitive action against Microsoft is, in the long run, going to be long-coming.

Ultimately the law may stand as less a factor in altering Microsoft’s behavior than its image with partners, customers, software developers and the all-important consuming public.

Microsoft and its leader, Bill Gates, are quickly becoming the not-so-well-regarded “big brothers” of the computer industry.

Historically, Gates founded Microsoft with high school buddy Paul Allen in 1975. They quickly built it into the world’s largest software company.

“I started Microsoft with nothing. Nobody gave me anything,” he said. “IBM at the time had more share and position that any company ever had, or will have, in the computer industry. And I built a product, a product I believed in; a great product.”

Microsoft introduced Windows in 1985. At a cost of $99, the program supported only a few basic programs. As an operating system it was very weak.

Because computers of the day could barely handle the program, and because most screens were not yet color, the graphics were hard to see. As a result, Windows sold poorly in its first few years.

The combination of the operating system and the computer makes the foundation of computing. The introduction of Windows marked the start of a new platform of Intel-based PCs.

In 1985, there were a lot of successful platforms such as Mac, Unix and minicomputers. But Intel PCs started to get cheaper, better and faster than rival computers.

With these improvements, Microsoft improved Windows, while other competitors made major mistakes. Taking advantage of the situation, Microsoft consumed a major portion of the computer market.

Presently, it is hard to find a PC anywhere in the world that doesn’t run Windows.

In the fiscal year that ends in June, Microsoft is expected to post more than $4 billion in profit on $14 billion in sales, a jump of 23 percent from a year ago.

However, Microsoft will have trouble surviving the fact that computing technologies quickly run out of steam.

“There’s so much change in technology that one kind of machine can’t make it in the marketplace for- ever,” Gates said. “No patches or revisions can make it last longer.”