So you create a great snack in your kitchen. Friends like it so much that you work after hours, weekends, take a second mortgage to start a snack business.

You start to sell a few around the neighborhood and then in local stores. But then this international food company hears of your success. Its reps come by and want your recipe---- for free! Or they suggest that you can sell in just your neighborhood...... They'll have the rest of the city.

When you say no, they make a not-as-good snack. You're worried--- this is a big outfit--- but hey, maybe it will get people more interested in snacks. And yours is better.

But the big company's snack looks suspiciously like yours. And it starts including a free one with every new half-gallon of milk , which it also sells. And the stores start telling you they can't carry your snacks, or they'll get charged more for all the other of the big international company's foods. And the trucks wont' carry your snacks to stores anyway, because , well, they'd rather not say.

Ah, isn't that big food company innovative? Isn't it trying to make peoples lives easier? Isn't it trying to make peoples lives easier? So dedicated to consumers, you know.

Back in the late 1980s, a small software company I knew about had invented a utility program that was enormously popular. It ran on Microsoft's DOS, the operating system that came before Windows. On shoestring financing and its own hustle, this company built and distributed a truly innovative tool that saved many DOS users lots of time and trouble.

One day several Microsoft representatives showed up at the small company with an offer: "We want to include your utility as part of the next version of DOS. And we want it for free. We'll get to advertise this new feature of DOS, and we'll get to talk up "Microsoft Innovation."

The little company's operators were amazed: "Give up a program that we sweated blood over, a program that's our only serious moneymaker for free? why should we?"

"Because if you don't," said Microsoft's lawyers, "we'll just go to your competitor and get it for free. It won't be quite as good, because yours is the best, but people won't really notice because it will be part of this big bundle of programs that makes up DOS. And once people are getting the utility for free, your business will dry up and your company will die."

"Besides, if you give us your program for free," the Microsoft representatives continued, " we might even let you put a little ad in the Microsoft DOS package for some new 'plus deluxe' version of the program. Maybe your company can stay alive selling that. If you don't have a deluxe version, get busy and make one, because we are about to put you out of business."

I've heard similar stories again and again. Was that innovation? Only if grabbing other people's work is innovative.

It is particularly galling to see how much of DOS, Windows and Office have come from other innovative companies and then to hear Microsoft talk about its technology savvy and how it needs to be free to innovate. That the little companies were so often able to make better stuff than Microsoft is actually amazing. It's as if Ford kept getting upstaged by little companies making engine improvements that were better than Ford's own engineers could, even though Ford wouldn't let them see the blueprints to the engine.

But you didn't get to see most of those improvements. Microsoft worked hard to make sure they didn't show up on shelves everywhere.

Microsoft's Word, a word-processing program, used to stink. Now it's pretty good, one of the best. But a number of its snazzy features came from other companies' efforts. Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software also needed some years to become the best.

Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation program is still a little lame, but by including it for free with Word and Excel--- in the Microsoft Office suite--- all competing presentation programs were killed.

Because Microsoft was already making so much money from its operating system monopoly, the company was able to keep working on programs such as Excel and Word until those programs could compete. Any other company would have died selling such inferior stuff. Many did.

Microsoft's Outlook Express e-mail program is only now becoming one of the best. Yet it is probably the most popular because it is essentially free with Office or with Internet Explorer, the top web browser. So we end up with inferior wares such as PowerPoint because we need standardized Word and Excel, and Microsoft makes it hard to mix and match. And along the way, the price of Office stays at $500 to $1000. Do you know how much the competition is these days? from free to $100.

The latest Windows 2000 operating system is $200 on up. The competition costs as little as $0. And those are just the programs still here to compete. Yet it's almost impossible to buy a PC without Windows. I've even had a hard time getting without Microsoft's Office or its little sibling, Microsoft Works Suite.

That is the consumer harm that the media should have been detailing during the Microsoft antitrust case.

Microsoft ought to apologize and change its ways, though I get the impression that Microsoft has been getting its way for so long, has been told it's wonderful for so long, that the company literally doesn't understand what it's done wrong.

Newspapers and magazines ought to get off their behinds and start reporting on what's happening inside business, not just on the week's latest millionaire. And the rest of us ought to wonder why we feel so warmly toward a company that cheats its way to success.