Tom Lehrer said that “satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”. The news that Microsoft boss Bill Gates is to be awarded an honorary knighthood for his “outstanding contribution to enterprise in the UK” will raise similar hollow laughs from those familiar with Microsoft’s baleful effect on the software industry worldwide. And it will puzzle those who wonder what his precise contribution has been to UK enterprise. After all, Microsoft employs only 2,000 people in the UK. To date, the prime effect Microsoft has had is to suck billions of pounds in exorbitant licensing fees out of British companies, schools, universities, hospitals and government bodies.

There is, let it be said, a case for honouring Mr Gates’s contribution to “education and the voluntary sector”. He has endowed a major scholarship programme at Cambridge which rivals Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarships. He has also given Cambridge a magnificent new building in which to house the university’s world-famous computer laboratory. And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done wonderful work in combating disease in Africa and other parts of the world.

But these are not the prime reasons cited for giving Bill a gong. He is to be a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire because “his company”, in the opinion of Jack Straw, “has had a profound effect on the British economy”.

You can say that again. Walk around the business district of any British city at night and peer into the windows of office blocks. What you will see are thousands upon thousands of PCs, each one of them running Microsoft software and each representing an outward flow of up to £440 in licence fees to Mr Gates’s Seattle empire. Most people who buy PCs have no idea of the size of the Microsoft tax they are paying, but the numbers are very instructive. For example, when buying some PCs recently for a small organisation with which I am involved, I requested a detailed itemisation of the cost per machine, which was £739 plus VAT. The breakdown revealed that the cost of the hardware was £299. The remaining £440 was made up of licence fees for Windows XP-Pro and Microsoft Office. In other words, 60 per cent of the cost of a PC system was accounted for by Microsoft licence fees. Multiply these numbers by the millions of PCs bought annually by British companies and organisations and you will get the measure of Mr Gates’s “contribution to enterprise in the UK”.

The official rationalisation for his knighthood also provides an illuminating glimpse of the cluelessness of new Labour in these matters. The Microsoft boss has been a fêted guest in Downing Street on several occasions, fawned upon by Tony Blair and co as if he were a combination of Einstein, Spinoza and John D. Rockefeller. His views on education have been respectfully sought. Ditto, no doubt, his views on enterprise, technology, medicine and space exploration. For the Prime Minister and his circle, Microsoft equals Modernity and the brave new world of the networked society. For Tony, Bill is cool.

What seems to have been overlooked during these love-ins is that in 2001 Microsoft was found guilty by the US courts of abusing its monopoly power (90 per cent of the world’s PCs run Windows) to exterminate competitors, and that the company is still under investigation by the European Commission for similarly ruthless behaviour in Europe. The US Department of Justice eventually climbed down in its fight to break up Microsoft after the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House. Mr Bush did not get where he did today by annoying America’s most profitable company. But the Commission seems to be made of sterner stuff, and the word from Brussels is that Microsoft’s lawyers are worried that the judgment may go against them.

If that does happen, Tony’s newly-cemented friendship with Bill may come in useful. In the meantime, Sir Bill could show his commitment to the UK economy by returning some of the billions he has looted from it.

The author is Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University

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