It seems everybody has got Microsoft in their sights. Urged on by Netscape, the US Justice Department is increasing pressure on the software giant to ease up its strict licensing provisions in order to give Netscape's browser some room to survive.

Next week in Washington D.C., Microsoft will face probably its most savvy antagonist yet - Mr Ralph Nader. Mr Nader is a household name in the US, known for his crusades against automobile companies, airlines, insurance policies and for a quixotic presidential attempt in 1996.

He has now turned his sights on Microsoft, convening a conference which brings together industry figures and consumer activists who have a less than favourable opinion of the world's largest software company.

In a letter to Mr Bill Gates, Mr Nader said conference participants seek "an information highway that is ungated where they see such a highway becoming increasingly gated".

This conference is interesting because most of the bluster against Microsoft so far has come from its competitors, which obviously have an interest in hobbling what they see as monopolistic practices. The one constituency that has remained silent in all this is the consumer. There has never been a significant grassroots-level revolt against Microsoft, and the arrival of Mr Nader on the scene could signal the start of such an action, or at least bring the concerns into the mainstream.

Although Mr Nader's abundance of causes has made Washington's pundits somewhat tired of his antics, his name resonates among the millions of Americans who have grown up associating it with David and Goliath struggles.

Much of the opposition to Microsoft comes from here in Silicon Valley. Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Netscape all have a lot to lose if Microsoft extends its domination of the technology business. Sun's current spat with Microsoft is really just a sideshow - they are arguing over the status of the Java programming language, but Microsoft's ambitions for its industrial-strength operating system NT could cripple Sun's bread-and-butter workstation business.

Outside Silicon Valley, according to Mr Ralph Nader's letter to Mr Bill Gates, "seasoned executives are quaking before the relentless Microsoft wave in such lines of commerce as banking, real estate, insurance, car dealers, travels services, cable television, newspaper media and entertainment".

It's quite a list, but it reflects areas that Microsoft has already begun to enter, buying its way in with huge mountains of cash.

There's no question that Microsoft's strategies overhang pretty much everything that goes on in the technology business. One of the areas Microsoft is entering, for example, is the local online city-guide business. Microsoft's offering, known as Sidewalk, is generally thought to be cold and unwelcoming, but when has Microsoft ever got it right the first time?

The company's entry into this market has galvanised competitors, many of whom are traditional newspapers going online by extending their existing editorial content and advertising base. One chain of newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area, Metro Newspapers, saw financial support for its online offering melt away with the arrival of Microsoft.

Quoted in the San Francisco Examiner, Metro chief executive officer, Mr Dan Pulcrano, said: "At that point [when Microsoft announced Sidewalk] the venture capitalists I was talking with said `Microsoft's in, the game's over'. Microsoft's entry into the marketplace has a chilling effect on the competition." However, not everybody in Silicon Valley wakes up in the morning in fear and loathing of Microsoft.

The Microsoft/Intel domination of the desktop has opened new markets, relentlessly driven down the price of personal computers and thereby created almost limitless opportunities for software developers. The ubiquity of Windows takes away one of the uncertainties for these developers what platform should they develop for? If 90-something per cent of desktop PCs run Windows, that decision doesn't take long to make.

One such developer, Mr Peter Winer, chief executive officer of start-up Infomediate Inc, calls Microsoft "the standard-bearer of system software". Arguing that Microsoft's dominance attracts the most innovative ideas and products to its platform, so advancing technology for users, Mr Winer also sees the increasing market share of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, as offering the possibility of enhanced user benefit online also.

"Current websites are interesting but largely difficult to get information from in a meaningful way," says Mr Winer. "Microsoft is working with developers to create applications that can allow users to `grab' useful information such as spreadsheet data from a website and view it on their desktop. Only a company with investment dollars and an ability to take the long-term view could make that happen."

Similiar views are taking root in the cable industry, generally accepted to be one that has failed dismally in many areas, including technology innovation. Microsoft's June purchase of a $1 billion (£684 million) stake in the US's fourth largest cable company, Comcast, shook the industry, which is struggling to add highspeed Internet capability to its cable network.

Microsoft's technology expertise, deep pockets and most notably, its subsidiary WebTV, will force the cable industry to focus more heavily on developing the Internet component of its business. Several cable companies have invested in @Home, a Silicon Valley company that is putting high-speed cablemodems into homes.

Microsoft is no gentle giant. It recognises its own power and uses it for its own benefit. What Microsoft is increasingly moving towards the integration of all sorts of technology, transactional and "content" businesses is probably going to force some companies under and strangle others at birth.

However, consumers have other things to do with their lives besides struggling with incompatible systems from different manufacturers, and one consequence of Microsoft's actions could be that consumers find it easier to make use of all the new technologies that are lining up at their front door waiting to come in.

Frank O'Mahony lives and works in Palo Alto, California. He can be contacted at frank@liffey.com