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DOJ Allegedly Reaches Consenus on Breaking up MS UPDATED
Quite a number of people have written to us with news that's been seen on CNN regarding the MSFT anti-trust trial. Apparently, government prosecutors are considering breaking the company into three parts - it's expected that MS will appeal the ruling. The parts would be (probably) a Windows OS division, a software division, and perhaps an Internet-business division.Update: 01/12 04:53 by H :We've heard now that the DOJ denies the report - or at least parts of it, saying that it's incorrect in several "aspects".
Is this a good thing , or just another way for the Borg to have three discreet cash cows?? I'm confused......
just what we need a trinity of tyranny? After Gates could just by enough stock in all of them to control them still (go network, disney, whatelse?)
I'm sorry, but Microsoft is right when they say that they need to be able to innovate their products. Perhaps they don't do it quickly enough, but the Internet is becomming so intertwined with all types of software that you can't just separate them out. I kind of like the idea to create multi-Microsofts, each with all the source code.
This is the best news I have heard all week long. Now with 3 seperate Microsofts we can have quality M$ software for Linux (I don't care what you say, a lot of the software they make is really good). But the OS half will still have to retain some of it's software right? What about solitare and such? What part will Bill Gates be in charge of? The OS part?
Does this mean that Ineternet Explorer can no longer be considered part of Windows? Will the three companies have different names? If they do, I wonder what they could come up with. How about crashsoft and bloatsoft. Well, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.
You see? It's like I've always said. You can get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than you can with just a kind word.
What I am wondering is if this M$ breakup would eventually help other OS'es. IMHO: No... Linux has stated his point the last 1.5 year to show the public that stable, quick and not expensive OSes can exist. Many companies are now turning over to Linux, and I'm quite confinced that this trend will continue. To be honest: I would like to see this battle till the end: Open-source vs. M$... Well, on the other hand: Maybe Netscape could get a hang on the public again after this break-up. We'll see... (sorry for my English, I'm at school and have no spellingchecker here)
This is a replacement signature.
The CNN article is rather short, and is just repeating something that's in USA Today.
I don't suppose anyone knows if the USA Today article is available online?
What about hardware? I'd say it would make sense (for the government anyway) if they split it between two companies: OS and consumer products & services (which would include browsers, office, internet access, and hardware).
_______
2B1ASK1
While the DOJ is of course correct in proposing a breakup (as a direct result of finding Microsoft guilty of monopolysing the market), I wonder whether this will help control MS' influence in any way.
While having seperate divisions for OS and application software will (hopefully) hamper their attempts to integrate the lot, 90% of the world's PC will still run on Windows. 99% of the world's managers will still choose to use Windows software and Microsoft applications because it is still the de facto standard. Breaking up the company doesn't help here at all.
Besides, look at what happened with the AT&T breakup. The seperate companies each went ahead to become market leaders in their own segment. It was hardly of any benefit to AT&T's direct competitors.
In short: I'm not getting up my hopes that this will seriously threaten MS's dominant position on the global market.
Reading the (short) document I notice that it doesn't actually say the the DoJ are going to force Microsoft to split, but merely where they would seperate the the behemoth into different companies.
Based on this article alone, it suggets that this is simply a plan that can be implemented if the DoJ decide to opt for the 'split the company up' option.
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The break-up remedy is already out of date, especially with the AOL-Time Warner merger. Microsoft is not the only "900 pound Gorilla" out there anymore!
Well, some people feel that their consumer OS offering, Windows '98 is probably close to a loss leader. At the very least it doesn't have the same margin as their application packages like Office. Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers.
The problem is, this still leaves one company with a monopoly on OSs, one with a monopoly on office software, and so on. What's the point of replacing one monopoly with three? (or two - the OS one and the Office one)
What's really needed is a breakup into three or four essentially identical companies that can actually sell and develop their stuff in competition - we need competition _within_ the windows market itself, both the OS and the major applications. If they go the breakup route (which might not be ideal - opening the APIs and standardising them, and maybe the windows source so that other companies can produce competing but compatible version, would probably be better in the long run) then they have to target the breakup at competition, not at some nice convenient points of demarkation(sp?) within the company.
To recap, the basic problem is one of replacing a broad software monopoly with several narrower ones - the monopoly isn't destroyed, it's just reconstituted.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
on m$'s site :) The page has some links to other pages also containing the news, so: let the slashdot effect try m$ servers *grin*
Sorry, there should be more out there right now
This is a replacement signature.
applications from the other applications in this day and age? Altogether too many applications need access to the internet.
And does this mean that no company can produce an Operating System, Applications, and Internet Software? Or are the reminants of MS to be forever cursed, and handicapped in competition against other companies in this arena?
Breaking up a cancerous growth is worse than simply removing the problem. What's worse than One Microsoft? Three of them competing for World Domination. If those who lost their jobs due to anticompete practices were compensated, I'm sure justice would be served.
The court might, for example, demand that no one shareholder could, directly or indirectly, hold more than 20% of more than one company. So Bill could keep the Windows company, but would be limited as to what he could own in Microsoft Applications.
There might also be 'collusion' conditions limiting the ability of the baby Bills to enter into secret contracts.
I suspect that if Microsoft was forcibly split up, it would be along the lines defined by the DOJ when they brought the case. So since part of the case was against illegal tying, then IE and Windows would be forcibly seperated. The applications market, which was not part of the case, would be a third company.
The Applications group would be the one most likely to keep the Microsoft name, since Windows is as well known a name as Microsoft, and for all its future importance, the Internet group is not the cash cow that Office is.
I also think that Hardware could do very well out of this. I get the impression that Microsoft hardware is largely used to launch new hardware initiatives that other companies take up (mice wheels, Windows keys, joystick improvements). It has the style, the imagination and the quality to go a lot further when it is freed from the politics.
It would make a very plausible fourth company, but that won't happen unless Microsoft wants it to.
-- James Wilkinson
-- James Wilkinson
Exeter, UK
And don't come out in the day. You're scaring all my kids.
IMHO MS Hardware is the only spinoff that I would buy stock in. They actually still produce reasonably good stuff that does not break the second you get it out of the box.
Other that that I think that the DOJ is going to have a nearly impossible time seperating IE from windows. I think we'll see a MSOS, MSAPP, and MSNET for sure, and I hope we see a MSHW or MSLABS (like the old bell labs)
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I wonder who is next. AOL perhaps? Who is the next MS? Any of you statist-supporting folks worried. Not likely, most facists are too incompetent to be successful to worry. Thus they level the playing field via Big brother. Here's to Joel Klien stepping in front of a bus... galtware@hotmail.com
Think its just a suggestion at the moment...defence lawyers, not the judge... they could have decided precisely how to send Billyboy to the moon, doesnt mean the decisions going to go that way. What i want to know is, if the judgement does go against MS, will they retaliate and, i dunno, build in PGP at a low level (the file system) for example? That`d be fun - no sniffing around the hd for unencrypted data - there wont be any!
In all likelyhood, this decision will only cause more trouble. Since Bill isnt just the CEO, but also the primary shareholder ( i think... )and owns more than 50% of the current comany he will have to own more than 50% of the other 3 companies as well. So this will just mean he has 3 companies to play around with. Although hopefully it will be harder to keep his legions co-ordinated if they are seperate entities...
In the end, it will never be the governemnt or nay law that defeats Microsoft, it will be linux.
Now, back to worrying about AOL Time-Warner....
Sorry, I wasn't real proud of it either, but I had to be quick, I knew the POSTMASTAH was in in the race!
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Trollmastah
M$ did a re-org last year. How does this news relate to the lines they had already drawn for themselves? Will it be along the lines that M$ has already set internally? This would make me believe that M$ felt this was a likely outcome and was preparing it as a contingency.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
.
Trollmastah
IIRC the majority of MS profits come from the Office division.
In the case of a break up would the operating systems division be able to generate sufficient cash to be able to maintain and develop the multiple OS base that MS has? Has anybody any clue as to the cost overun on W2K (2-3 years late, with how many people at what salary working on it)? I suspect that a pure OS division wouldn't be able to fund this.
Still, this isn't bad. Let's assume that the DOJ are not so dumb, that they allow BillG, Paul Allen or anyone else to hold any power in more than one of the new companies, then we are laughing.
The key is this: There is no way M$, in its current setup, will port MS-Office to Linux. It would MS's stamp of approval on Linux, and be the beginning of the end for Windows. It might sell more Office units, but it would more than offset this in lost Windows sales.
A separate MS-Apps division wouldn't care so much about the fate of Windows. Port to Linux, sell more copies, hedge bets in the OS wars, and who cares what happens to Windows sales -- it's not their bottom line!
Result, Linux loses the "..but it doesn't run Office argument", and can compete with Windows on a level playing field. On merit. Can you smell victory there? It will take a few years, but it can be done.
Lets hope they divide Bill into three pieces too.
I've seen a bunch of posts claiming that even if MS is broken up into these three separate companies, they will each still have a monopoly in their own market space.
That's not the point. Monopolies aren't illegal. MS broke the law by unfairly using its monopoly power, not by having one. If OS, apps, and internet are all separate companies, they can't join together and force new products down our throats while preventing the competition from entering the market.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
The one thing I've been wondering all through this trial is, how can it be possible for a free man in a free country to be disowned by the state (except for taxes) ?
...).
If MS is indeed split up, it will have either no consequences, as Bill Gates still holds the majority of shares (and rightfully so, since he owns the majority of MS currently), or the state will have to restrict Mr. Gates rights to his fortune, which is what happened during various communist revolutions, or the state will have to buy out Mr. Gates, which is propably the best thing that could ever happen to Mr. Gates, since all his wealth is currently paper money depending on the stock price of MSFT, but when he gets bought out, he will have "real" money (real as far as these green paper things can be
If you take a look back at other famous split ups, neither of them worked in the past. Neither the IG Farben split up in Germany (into Hoechst, BASF and Bayer) weakened the IG Farben (they all are now bigger players), nor the Seven Sisters split up of Oil worked.
IMO, the split up will not change the world of software in any way, since Bill Gates (and the other people who hold the stock in MSFT) will see that the BabyBills work together.
-max
Premier argument to install Linux at the workplace - I get paid while waiting for fsck to scan the partitions.
Doesn't seem to me that this will do much other than hurt the market, and punish a lot of Microsoft employees who have not necessarily done anything anticompetitive themselves. I can agree with the sentiment previously expressed that it would be great to see which wins in the long run: Closed or open source software. A better solution (originally proposed by RMS, to my knowledge) would be simply leaving the company as it is, keeping its source closed, but merely forcing it to open and publish all of its APIs and standards to the satisfaction of its competitors in markets where it can use its OS dominance to leverage them out. This isn't overly vindictive, and more importantly it gets to the source of the problem: the anticompetitive nature of their monopoly. The OS monopoly is fine for now, Linux, etc. will do what they will all in good time. All that needs to be done is to ensure that that admittedly legitimate monopoly (do you really want to answer Linux-related questions for most people who use Linux? I'd be perfectly happy with Linux just grabbing enough market share to get software and drivers developed for it in a timely manner. Forget world domination.) doesn't keep people out of the browser market, or the office software market. Most posts I've seen seem to be fairly sensible in that they express a certain distaste for this plan. Anyone know if there's a way for us to communicate with the DOJ and give them the benefit of our understanding of the technical issues, and why breaking up M$ isn't necessarily optimal? -RevRigel
In the midst of endless haggling over the inherent evil of Micro$oft business practices and low software quality, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the actual end result of breaking up the company.
Instead of one monolithic company somewhat wary of government intervention, you now have three new companies. The new companies have 90% market share in their respective market segments. Remember, Micro$oft has its monopolies for a number of reasons and superior products aren't generally one of them. Shady business practices contribute but the biggest IMHO is that companies cannot afford to risk not being able to interoperate with customers and across their organizations. The solution for most is to adopt the most popular solution, Micro$ofts.
Now think about what happens next. Each company will have to work harder to grow their business since the traditional Microsoft tactic of buying competitors and spreading into new functional areas is probably off limits.
Don't fool yourself into thinking these three new companies will compete with each other. Does anyone dispute that, after AT&T spun off the company, Lucent still provides nearly all AT&T equipment and infrastructure? Microsoft will be no different.
Breaking up the company looks an awful lot like lots of stuff coming out of Washington. It seems like the right thing to do but under analysis, the end results may end up worst than the original problem. Clearly something needed to be done. I just think the government missed the mark.
Dave
I woudn't go calling MS Office a monopoly. Highly successful, yes. But you can just as easily choose Corel Suite. Or even LotusWorks, even though it sucks donkey turds. It's the LINK between Windows and Office that's the problem. Either forcing Windows source open OR forbidding whomever else owns Windows from doing anything else seems to me the best solution. And this breakup is designed to accomplish the latter.
No sig.
Any solution that fails to address pre-loads is doomed to fail, or to make things even worse.
And until hardware vendors start shipping drivers for alternative PC OS's with their products, and until software vendors start releasing alternative PC versions, no real change will take place.
The zero-choice pre-load is, I think, the causative factor of the other two--if computers start appearing in stores and on web sites pre-loaded with something besides MS-Windows, then vendors will start addressing those other choices.
I'll repeat my solution, which I've posted here before. Unfortunately, it involves doing very little to Microsoft; fortunately, it doesn't single anyone out for special punishment:
The trouble we're having with Microsoft is only a symptom of a larger problem. If not them, then somebody else would be doing it. If they are only broken up, the problem will continue.
What about the Microsoft Press? During the break-up attempt of '95 this was certainly going to be one of the Baby Bills. Now which division is going to get free access to the MS publications? And what about MSNBC?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
if anything, a meaningful breakup with real 'firewalls' between os and app developerss (such that non M$ app developers have as much access to os secrets as M$ developers when attempting to compete on the say os playing field, ala Netscape) would add admin costs, that plus the recent temp appeal and Caldera settlement etc means that either the per cpu license costs will go up, or stock dividends will go down; either way it'll be less attractive all around and people may stop being M$ robots and falling for their whitewashed crap, and maybe consider products that are more than a bunch of barely fulfilled & not-quite-working-right marketing bullets on the full page ads.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I agree. With the company for the OS being seperate to the other(s) incompatability between different software and different OS systems becomes inviable and the software groups will release versions of their programs for Linux while the OS system suddenly finds it has to stay competitive without the software tie-ins and will either improve in areas thus far neglected such as reliability, or founder.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
...in my opinion. Each new company would necessarily be focused on maximizing value to the stakeholders.
- The 'applications' company would have significant incentive to port it's stuff to alternate OS's. Suddenly, there's MS-Office available for Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS -- gosh, maybe even my old CP/M-80 box.
- An OS cannot stand for long in the marketplace without application software. With the applications company producing software for alternate OS's, investing in them becomes less risky for the consumer. With intense competition from cheap or free OS's, the new OS company would have to start providing real value to survive.
- Both companies would suddenly have *real* competition -- not the pretend competition they alleged during the anti-trust proceedings -- and they will suddenly be forced to be truly innovative, not immitative.
Consider MS' historical behavior: They seek to dominate any market they enter. They were able to do it with Windoze because they controlled the desktop and what appeared on it. After a breakup, I'd still expect the new companies to operate under the same premise. Only this time, it's a level playing field: the applications company doesn't own the playing field, and the OS company doesn't own the ball.
I think it's a win-win for everyone.
How could they possibly break MS into pieces while at the same time allowing the AOL/Time-Warner merger? This is just a sign that they only dare to what appears as politically correct - people _want_ them to break up MS because "everybody hates Micro$oft", but everyone watches CNN and Cartoon Network and loves it. So to hell with legal consistancy.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Three companies can be just as non-cooperative as one company. Unless the DoJ is hoping that this threat will scare Microsoft into cutting them a deal.
The threatening part of Microsoft is not their OS is on 95% of the computers, but that the monopoly gives them the power to to force their applications software onto those platforms as well, turning the OS monopoly into little monopolies over every other facit of the software market. Why would most people by an office suite, when a pretty good one came "free" on their computer when they bought it? The OS monopoly has given them others powers as well, such as total control over what hardware manufacturers can bundle with the computer. (In the past they required the hardware companies to not ship competing software, and there's no reason to believe as soon as the DOJ goes away they would continue that practice.)
There are many other illegal things MS can continue to do as a single company that would all be controlled simply by breaking them up. The advantages are many:
3 thoughts
It should be noted that when Bell was one company they broke them up into the baby bells they had 3 parts too: One that handled selling phones, one that handled long distance, and one that handled local calls. Wait, that's not what they did, because that wouldn't have helped.
To me this cure is worse than the disease. If this decision is ever implemented we may have to go through the same whole expencive deal again in a few years when they figure out that it didn't work as planned.
A horrible thought:
If AOL becomes as big as it wishes to with the Time Warner deal . . . what would happen if they bought one of the three companies?
The following gets mentioned allot but I'll toss it on anyway as well.
If I were M$ I'd just up and threaten move to Canada or somewhere that wants the piles of tax dollars and well paid workers they create.
Even if this is the action that the government takes, just how long will it take to be implemented? You can be sure Microsoft will fight this to the bitter end.
I'm not an expert on these things but I could easily see this taking 1-2 years to completely break up the company. With the last two years being tied up in the anti-trust case already we are looking at 4 years to get a result from actions taken be Microsoft even earlier. That is an eternity in the computer industry. So what good is this break-up so long after the fact?
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
I think the spin off of the Baby Bells is a better analogy than the formation of Lucent. IIRC, Lucent is what used to be Bell Labs, spun off as a separate company (not under court order) to do research _for a profit_. The Baby Bells were spun off under court order, and for better or worse, they are definitely not beholden unto AT&T.
It said right in the article, "Windows in one company, software in another," which endorses what so many have said before. Just like a biological virus does not have enough parts to be considered "alive", Microsoft Windows does not have enough of what it would need to be considered "software" :)
You realize that, if MS is split for example into a "customer" and a "professional" section (with Win98 being in the "customer" and NT being in the "professional" section), MS would benefit from that solution very well ?
Linux and many other OSes suffer very hard from neither drivers nor support nor documentation being readily available (that is, in printed form when you buy your computer), since there simply is no "central" place for drivers, support or documentation. This burden of "availability" would lie with the single, preinstalled distribution, which would have to offer (solid) drivers, support and (solid, printed, native-language) documentation - three things which are not easily obtained in the Linux world and which drive up the "free" cost of preinstalled Linux (or we get the phenomenon of illegal copies of Linux (support)).
Your requirements are an interesting proposal, since it would open up the interoperability between every software, but I guess that this wouldn't work very well, since the Microsoft Office file formats are more or less documented (they are OLE streams of objects streamed to disk), but this dosen't make loading something from such a file easier, since you don't have the code to the OLE object stored. So a solution like this would also mean that all code must be opened, something which I don't think would be beneficial to commercial programming.
-max
Premier argument to install Linux at the workplace - I get paid while waiting for fsck to scan the partitions.
Thanks
While in theory I like the idea of wanting to do *something* to stop Microsoft's behavior, the actual way to do it is a difficult thing to think about. The breakup idea has been floating around for a while, and the most common comparison is to the breakup of the Bell System.
Now, my dad was an AT&T employee for 30 or so years until his recent retirement. I was young when it happened, but I remember him explaining to me how it was cool because each share of stock he had got him one share in EACH of the Baby Bells. Perhaps someone could find an online reference to this to verify this, since I'm only going from memory?
If the same thing happens with Microsoft, then all those shareholders will suddenly triple the shares they own. Is that such a good idea?
Asshole
Wouldn't it make sense that the Office Products division will STILL work closely with the OS division?
I mean, come on. You know that the principals of all the companies will be the same people who worked together previously.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Okay, a breakup might hamper Microsoft's attempts to use Windows as leverage to dominate new markets (like the Web)...but only if there's a mechanism put in place to prevent collusion between the newly created companies. Without some kind of preventation measures in place, the split would be ineffectual at best.
-- WhiskeyJack
just read it man! that was by far the best song yet. freaking hilarious man :) keep 'em going.
MICK, THE FIRST POST MASTAH
I hate to say this, but the governmet really shouldn't be breaking up microsoft. Any monopoly microsoft does have is a monopoly given to them by the US government, via patent laws. And as much as I don't like the law, it is still the law, and a court has too follow it. If government can break up microsoft, then they invalidate all patent laws by showing that having a patent is a monopoly.
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
Eventually. Soon is, of course, a relative term. I cannot wait for my local telco to have competition. I can't stand that company - they charge too much, their product offerings are crap, and their customer service is the pits.
Local number portability - my ass. SHOW me another telco to which my number is portable! There's no competition - and it SUCKS!
First of all, as stated above, Dividing M$ is like attacking various oozes and slimes in the D&D world, Physically attacking them only divides them further in which each part then becomes another formidible entity which you then have to fight.
Secondly,
As I see constantly in my line of work (ISP) The masses still think that Microsoft is the only answer.. yeah there are quite a few mac-heads, and the occasional Linux user around, but given the "choice" more people are heading towards Microsoft.. Reason? PLACEMENT, I live in a rural area where most people do their "technological" shopping at Wal-mart/Ames/K-mart what have you, and are easily swayed by cheap costs and what the salespeople are pushing at them.. including computers that have shoddy parts (i.e. Rockwell HCF 56K modems with drivers in them from 8 months ago) and even less technical support.. But they don't look for that, they see the ads on TV showing sharks swimming from the screen and how it's going to raise your kids IQ from cro-magnon level to rival Stephan Hawking, then give my staff and I shit about how pages aren't loading quick enough at a 26.4 connection.
3. What about updating their shoddy code??? Does that mean that people are now going to have to even search THAT much harder to find updates to their MS products (see #2)
Don't get me wrong, I'm doing the dance of joy for the breakup of M$, I'm just a little leery (no not Denis) of what the future holds for us.....
C'mon B.G. is so used to falling face first in feces and come up smiling and fresh as a daisy he makes the other Bill (Clinton) pale in comparison.
ok ok moderate me down now, Im through venting... Thanks all
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
I don't think it's a loss leader. If it is bundled with 80-90% (a guess) of the PCs sold, they're raking in quite a lot of money. Add to that the cost of upgrades, and they get more moola.
Gotta agree on this one. I've bought a lot of MS hardware, and it's always been on merit, not because of their monopoly power. They make nice joysticks, nice keyboards, and nice mouses. Anyone who can't see that is just blinded by their random MS-hating fury.
How are they going to define an OS in such a way that the OS mini-Bill can't start writing applications and thereby recreate the problem of an application house with an insiders knowledge?
Excuse my innocence but:
How the hell do you keep these companies from collaborrating secretly? As we all know, the internet as a communications medium routes around roadblocks like censorship, so how can we be sure that these new companies don't still operate under one M$ board of control?
And how the hell do you strip the internet access out of the applications?
Methinks this solution is not feasible
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
With the new merger of AOL and Time Warner, Microsoft is no threat at all! It makes no sense to break it up, when the new AOL-Time Warner company would have the power to rule the world!
The comments that this proposal would create two or three "Baby Bills" with instant monopolies is one extreme, and may be true for a time. However, breaking the financial/managerial/intellectual-property relationship between the OS and applications groups should stimulate the development or porting of MS applications to non-MS platforms. Why wouldn't the president of the MS Applications Company want to make their products available for as many environments as they could support?
---- Politics: Kissing ass and pointing blames.
The only thing that can help the industry is open
standards - Microsoft must be forced to publish
all Network Protocols, file formats, and API's;
and must be prohibited from making any agreements
along the lines of per-processor licensing.
If this is done, Microsoft will still be free to
innovate as much as they would like; and the only
way to continue to dominate would be to create
the best software.
Breaking one horizontal monopoly into 3 horizontal
monopolies will change nothing... Windows, IE,
and MS Office will still be the only game in town.
From reading through most of the discussion so far, quite a few people have said that if this breakup were to occur, then MS would magically start porting stuff to linux.
My initial reactions to this were:
1) Why would they want to port products to another operating system when:
a) they wouldn't release them for free
b) they wouldn't release the source code
In my opinion, Microsoft was setup as a commercial entity, so they could make money (putting it very bluntly) - by doing what quite a few people here think would happen (open sourcing code, free for all MS products) would ruin what they have built up over the years.
I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm not pro-MS or anti-MS, I choose to use MS products on a daily basis, in the same manner that I choose to use FreeBSD, NetBSD and some forms of Linux day to day.
If they are _forced_ to release code, then they snip bits out, make it look the same, to the rest of the world it looks the same, and has nfi about it at all.
---
acb ON slashnet
--- acb!irc.slashnet.org
I find it interesting following the recent vitriol surround privacy, freedom and the rights of people needing to be maintained under the state that people actually advocate the forcing of a private (well, shareholder owned anyway) company to be fragmented by the government. So freedom is only the right of certain circumstances. Anyway on another note entirely, this isn't really going to change anything. Short of appointing government senctioned overseers and managers the company will still be able to continue to develope integrated products to a centralised strategy with monopoly control over tehir areas. In fact it may even strenghten MS's control over those markets, as although there will be a splitting of capital they will still dominate and will be able to focus more clearly on their individual tasks. Creating 3 seperate pseudo-monopolies will still elave them with market share. The only real answer is promotion of alternatives and looking at why the previous competitors failed whilst MS was slowly gaining it's dominance and trying to not make the same mistakes. + monopoly regulation is a bit of a non starter in gereral, it's only real power is stopping mergers, although in the UK the MMC is one of the most useless organisations of it's kind...
Working for the (other) man
What about NT server and all of its licensing... I would say that is where a great deal of the micro$oft revenue comes from.
I noticed that a lot of you people have said that the browser and os could not be integrated with each other. Well, did you all forget about software licensing? They could still license the browser and still integrate it into the OS. After all, they did it with scandisk and defrag (both written by Symantec) Who says that the 3 companies can not work together and share code, etc. I think the breakup will have little or no effect on Microsoft (and the others). It will just make 3 very powerful companies instead of 1.
Lot of it. MCI's Metro, BAN's service in NY state, Frontier in the Northeast, Qwest in the US west 14 states, Cavalier and GTE in the south.
The LD stand is that even though in spirit the little bell bast*rds have "on paper" opened up the market to local, there is still a lot of stonewalling.
Things like a local customer wanting to change and the BOCs "accidentally" mis routing the order etc. In most cases it takes over 3 mos to get a number switched, even if the local number portability is there.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Let's all face it the damage is already done. Breaking M$ up into 3 companies isn't going to undo anything. Here's what I'd like to see. The villians do real hard time. What true geek wouldn't get wood seeing M$'s corporate heads being lead off in prison overalls? Oh on the 6o'clock news even, yeah. The DOJ should get to the bottom of who the ringleaders are, and make them pay with jail time! While real penalties are being levied how about serious fines? Stuff these fat cats won't shrug off. Total liquidation of the company's assets, and the assets of all the guilty parties. The sum total to be used to pay off the shareholders and product customers at a percentage on the dollar. Of course after accounting overhead, taxpayers should not be burdened, there will be losage. The victims should be recompensated, to whatever extent possible. Just like with other computer criminals as a condition of their eventual parole (sometime after all of hell freezes over :) make these convicted felons stay away from computers for a prescribed period of time. Maybe their natural life and 99 years, that sounds about right to me. Make these bastards wish they'd never been born. Then nationalize what's left of the company. That's right have the government step in and take total total control of the company's assets. There being no cash left this would mean the software base. They did it with NYC subways, and whorehouses, why not M$? I mean how far is M$ from a cross between a whorehouse and a subway? I say adopt a scorch and burn policy, destroy the evil empire entirely. The courts are used to ruling harsh verdicts as an example, because they know they can not afford to capture and convict every felon. A powerful message needs to be sent to anyone that believes they can make a mockery of the court system. I want to see some action that speaks tough on crime! Muwahaha
Hey I can dream can't I?
I have 2 other accounts but I like my AC account the best!
If you steal $10 you're a thief, if you extort 100 billion dollars you're an "innovator"
While I would LOVE Windows source to be open..as a rational person, I think that if the gov forces the openness of Windows, that basically is stealing...the government can't take your product from you..and basically forcing Windows to be open..isn't that stealing? Correct me if I'm wrong..I'm sometimes known to be wrong..but not often
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I stand corrected. Although I still can't see how a monopoly could be for the better of people. :)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Once upon a time there was a company named United Aircraft. They owned Pratt&Whitney, who made the engines for the planes, they owned United Aircraft, who put the people on the planes and flew them around, and they owned a large stake in Boeing. They were broken up in the very same manner as is being proposed for MS. They were considered to be a 'Vertical' monopoly. MS comes very close to this idea, especially now with the rise in MS content production. Why would you want to split up MS? I would want to split it up simply because for far too long MS software has had inside access to MS OSes. Borland complained about this for a long time. How about all those data transfers back to Redmond; remember when Win95 came out? What attempt their attempt to coopt java? This isn't product innovation, this is divide and conquer. Face it, above and beyond the monopoly question, the have clearly and consistently engaged in unfair business practices.
Your IP address has been logged. The Committee has taken custody of your children. Appear this afternoon for your hearing and urine tests.
-The Mgt.
..and as far as I know, they can't be negative ;-)
Now, instead of one large company to oversee, we have three, slightly smaller companies. Each with a dominance in certain market. The government will have to work three times as hard simply to prevent collusion between the three companies, if such prevention is possible.
Failing in this, you've just given the Microsoft Companies (the baby bills) another weapon/smoke screen to fight lawsuits and anti-trust hearings. Basically each of the three baby bills can sit there and say, we have an exclusive licensing agreement to do such and such with this other baby bill. The only thing that'll change are some accounting practices. Departmental budgeting will simply be replaced by contracts, agreements, licensing, etc.
Microsoft OS corporation will simply produce the OS (and possibly the browser, as the product now seems pretty irrevocably tied into file management for the system). Now they'll have a good reason to charge more for their OS (we don't get subsidies from the other departments we used to have). Plus they'll be getting subsidies from the other baby bills for licensing agreements relevant to the OS API hooks, etc.
Microsoft Applications corporation will continue to produce the dominant apps for the Windows platform, as they have had access to the Windows API from Day 1. And can continue to have access to the API through licensing. Apps will become more expensive due to the "we're not subsidized by the other divisions" excuse as well.
Microsoft Online Business corporation will, possibly, be hurt by the breakup, though the lucrative contracts from MSN, MSNBC, and their various other online initiatives will probably keep them easily in the black, since a meatspace presence isn't required for them to stay profitable. Their main competition would be Time-Warner-AOL. Even still, with their close ties to the other baby bills, they can easily leverage themselves in the market.
Simply splitting the markets up doesn't necessarily change public perception. Microsoft will still be Microsoft.
Take a look at phone service. Many people still look at it as "from THE phone company", even though their bills are separate and itemized.
Personally, I'm in favor of them opening up their API's to review, even if it comes with a license barring duplication. Companies would be able to build better products, and Microsoft would benefit from people reviewing their code and possibly improving it. The customers would benefit from better products and a wider range of highly optimized products.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's simple really. Competition is good, right? Sure! So what any solution needs is to either increase the number of competitors, or decrease the ability of the competitors to utilize non-competitive practices.
The second solution is difficult, and not likely to have a good outcome, since it requires someone to take a proactive role in regulating things. None of want that, I'm sure.
The first solution is great. We need more competitors, so we simply create them by fiat. How? By breaking Microsoft into pieces. "Baby Bills", I think someone called them. But the key here is they must compete!
Microsoft should be broken into 4-6 competing companies (plus 1 or 2 small ones for the Hardware and Publishing devisions), all with a license to the source code for the core stuff--the programs and OS. The API's would also be published, of course.
All of a sudden you've got lots of companies, all of which are competing. They HAVE to differentiate themselves or die, and price is the easiest. (Boom, prices come down). But all of the Baby Bills can do THAT, so next up is features. And since there won't be a monopoly any more, it's even likely one of the Baby Bills will have the bright idea of heading open source to some degree as a means of upstaging it's rivals.
And THAT is the optimum outcome. Whether you think it likely or not, it's gotta be better than splitting the Microsoft monopoly into lots of little ones. That tactic has been tried before...
I am surprised that Microsoft didn't think of this earlier. The best way to buy AT&T is to have a separate Internet division - as a separate company - so no conflict of interest.
Three different companies coordinating their best efforts (actually it would become two if Office could be hosted as a web application). Once iMS (i call it iMicrosoft) has AT&T it has the pipes to majority of the homes in the US. Not to mention all the Cable investments across the Globe Next eMicrosoft (office. oMicrosoft is for OS) would have an alliance with iMS to host office thereby two companies have the monopoly now. Of course office would be best selling application for Linux !! And as always oMS provides the shitty OS on which iMS runs. eMS would run on Mozilla but 800 of its features (795 rarely used) wouldnt work. So IE would be standardized on all desktops for those 5 extra features.
So at the end of three years (Just in the US)
Symbol MarketCap StockValue
iMSF 330 Bill 155
eMSF 190 Bill 335
oMSF 400 Bill 95
Thanks to DOJ, Scott and Larry, Gates would be twice as rich as he was earlier.
I sure wish DOJ had attempted to force M$ to publish it's Windoz source code! Such a Left-Liberal seizure of property! Gosh I can only imagine the "FireWorks" such a proposal would have set off!
oh....my!
Um.... am I the only person who wondered where the MS hardware division comes into the separation, which acts as if MS only sell software?
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
This would be a rather unfortunate occurance. Microsoft is definitely a problem, but I don't think this is the way to handle them. They are a member of the Dow Industrial Index, their OS still is THE mainstream OS, Microsoft Word still sets the standard among word processors, and don't forget, they consolidated most of the PC world with a standard, albeit not a perfect one, but a standard nonetheless. That said, I am not, nor will ever be a M$ loyalist, in case anyone is wondering:o). I grant you, breaking up the company into 3 parts will force the parts to compete more vigorously. Consider an alternative scenario, hypothetically. Penalize M$, severely, make them pay heavy calculated damages to Caldera, Sun, IBM (I don't know if they also sued, but where is OS/2?), Netscape/AOL (I know..Aol doesn't need the money), and who ever else they have harmed. I mean heavy fines, ongoing. They listed 'Linux' as a competing OS in legal documents. Fine, let them then support the competition, as IBM (a legal trust), already does. They should either heavily and monetarily support, (although not have any control whatsoever over) a few of the free, non-commercially funded Linux projects, like Slackware (my personal preference;o) or Debian (albeit VA Linux and Corel are throwing their weight behind it, its still a free project I believe), or, they can become distributors of their own distribution, and support it with resources similar to the support they give Windows (I know ppl. groan at M$ Linux, but why not? If you can't beat us, join us;o) Why Linux and not another OS, like a bsd, or Solaris? First of all, Linux is best positioned at this time and place, bsd's and solaris outstrip linux server side, while Linux rips them on the desktop. (Please, this is my subjective opinion, no lame flames, stay on topic) Secondly, M$ did list them as a competitor in some anti-trust document, I remember reading that on The Register. BeOS is also another 'competitor' that merits financial support from M$, being as the nature of an anti-trust suit stipulates that the offender has suppressed new technology through unfair market manipulation, BeOS and Linux qualify as new innovations worth M$ penalty funding. If they don't want to compete with anyone else, make them divide their resources and compete with themselves. I think that if they are allowed to remain one company, but are SEVERELY penalized, it would be a faster resolution, a fairer resolution (for this to work they would need to be monetarily penalized in the range of the billions of $$'s, because it is ill-begotten gain), and it would be better for our economy, as well as the worlds economy. I may not personally like them, but how will it help anything if they are penalized in such manner that would degrade their service to their other customers? Most of whom couldn't care less about software wars, but would be hurt anyway. I must admit, a breakup would be gratifying though. They need to be reborn, as AT&T, and IBM were, because there is alot of ideas and innovations on their side, even if they have been hiding it behind millions of lines of buggy code. Their office software is standard setting, their OS is still the most widely used. Even their 'contributions' to java, were eventually included into an open-source implementation of java whose name escapes me now. M$'s actions have harmed us all, we know that, DoJ knows that. But lets not do more damage to ourselves or others in penalizing them. A breakup will be fought by Microsoft in court, vigorously for years, providing much hoopla, instead of amicably settling this, by allowing them to remain whole, but cutting in on Uncle Bill's paycheck. I think both sides could begin to work on the basis of keeping them together, but seriously downsizing them, in what is already a historical case. I don't know if this idea will be popular, but I hope it'd be well received, and if I err, I hope it is to the side of mercy, not for their sake, but for the greater cosmopolitan good. P.S.: What OS ran your first PC? Mine was a TandyRL1000, but I didn't begin to learn anything really until I got a wintel machine at 9. Just a thought. P.P.S: Sorry about the long sentences, remember, the preamble to the constitution is one sentence as well ;oP
Pariah on #Desperado@irc.wiretapped.net
I really needed to hear a response from a sentient being whose neural network doesn't just stop at the spinal cord... After the whole Y2K fiasco with (l)users getting paranoid and frantic over FUD I appreciate knowing that there are some of us who aren't just living by reflex alone..... :)
Thanks again
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Is it indeed poss that they will see the light and embrace open standards (if not open source).
LDAP and XML are good starts, who knows.
In the coming era post AOL/TW m$ could the be a pyrric victory if it was indeed broken up, as some of the newer megacorps might just borg the pieces, and the situation could be possibly worse.
Ignore them, keep coding, and they just might go away!
If you get Windoze Inc and Office/IE/Visual Inc, then there's no incentive for OEM's like Compaq to push Office since it won't count for their volume-discount on Windoze licensing, and Corel and Staroffice have a chance to get(back) into the market. If Windoze Inc no longer owns IE, they can't threaten to pull an OEM's O/S preload license if they load Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, etc. on the desktop. If the O/S developers and the Office developers aren't sitting 10 ft apart anymore, there won't be any use of undocumented APIs that Corel/StarOffice/SmartSuite etc. don't know about. If there's no tie between Visual Whatever and Windoze, or Office and Windoze, there's a better chance of them finally making the tools cross-platform. And if there isn't a Redmond gorilla to subsidize Expedia/Carpoint/MSNBC, can they honestly compete on their own against Travelocity, autobytel, Drudge :-)
Well, if you look at the names of two recent spin-offs, Lucent (AT&T) and Agilent (HP) the names will probably end in 'ent'. My vote for names for the two MS spinoffs would have to be "arrog-ent" and "incompet-ent"...
OK. lets think of this in this matter, Currently we have one company that has monopoly power but is watched over by the government. Now, If this breakup occurs, you have three companies which have monopoly power in their respected catigories. I dont think it takes a genius to figure out what's going to happen here.
I know David Beat Goliath, but I don't remember the dead body of Goliath spilitting into three Goliath's and systematicially killing anybody named David.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Yes, splitting up Microsoft won't diminish their market share, nor will it diminish the power they have through that marketshare. However, what it will do is prevent products from being developed, advertised, given away and bundled into other key products with 100% funding provided from their OS.
I don't know what lines to split them along, but as long as their application developers can bundle products together, they will always have an unfair edge.
They beat Lotus through manipulating their OS and bundling in a wordprocessor. Likewise, they beat Wordperfect by bundling in a spreadsheet. They beat Stac by bundling in Doublespace, they beat Netscape by bundling IE into their OS... there are countless others, but the trend is continuing...
Why else do you think they bought Visio?
3 seperate companies completely dominating their seperate fields by crushing their competition. ;-) "OK Office team, instead of us having to worry about you, we'll spin you off and you can go monopolize the Windows Application market seperately! Isn't that a keen idea of the DOJ?"
Windows 'R' Us (OS division) (or 'We Do Windows inc.')
Office Schmoffice (Application division)
Net'n Special (Internet division)
It's not going to change the fact that the DOJ doesn't think Linux is a real operating system! L)L
http://www.msnbc.com/news/356529.asp
I'm still working on a clever footer.
I do agree with you that there should be preventative legislation that creates an environment which discourages the formation of monopolies, but like everything in life, need will find a way. No matter what legislative systems are in place there will be unintended and undesirable consequence which will have to be addressed by emergency fire-stomping measures. That requires that government intervene at the behest of the people. I know that that happens relatively rarely, that most of the time it is intervening on behalf of big business, but that is just because "We the People" are not taking our democratic duties as citizens very seriously. How many people vote? The system of democracy and freedom in this country is, on paper, one of the best in the world. It provides for representation of our opinions and protection from the special interest power groups. All it requires to make it work is an educated, active citizenry - something that is sadly lacking.
Since the application group will have the same documentation as everybody else regarding the OS API, no more secret hooks into the OS that make it impossible for a would-be competitor to write a decent office suite.
Similarly, it is now possible to develop a competing OS, since the only requirement is providing a fully functional API. This will be possible because the API would be fully documented.
Also, no more squashing a competing application by extending the OS to include the equivalent of their application.
Whether one thinks this is the best solution is largely a matter of taste, it seems. After reading about, discussing, and considering all of the options that were available, I'm inclined to believe that this is the best (as in, least among the list of evils) that could be hoped for.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
I mean, isn't that part of the point?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The real question in my mind is how do they plan to address the personality of Microsoft. Wouldn't any offspring companies resulting from a break up have the same mentality (win at any cost)? I'd like to know who would run these companies. Gates? Ballmer? Kempin? Aren't these the same guys who made those decisions that got them in trouble in the first place? I realize that most corporations are not much better, but they at least tend to think before breaking the law. If they do continue to break the law, we just go through another one of these long litigations.
The reason that this behavior worries me is that the OS company would still have too much power. They would still be the "only game in town". Part of this is the fault of the OEMs for not having any backbone, but some of it is a fiscal reality. Why should an OEM ship Linux or BeOS when they have to pay MS for every machine out the door? And why do they have to pay for every machine out the door? Because there are many OEMs but only one company who can provide the OS. Stripping the other assets from the OS company takes away some of their influence, but it still leaves them in a very powerful position. I suspect that they're trying right now to tie as much of their apps as they can into Windows, so they don't have to give up too much control.
-Jennifer
I'm afraid that I must disagree that such publication is sufficient. The reason for this lies in the control that MS has over the marketplace.
Consider protocol AAAA. In January, MS publishes it. In February, a competitor releases a compatible product. In March, MS releases a new product using AAAA version 2, and publishes the version 2 protocol.
If MS manages to convince enough people to upgrade - or automates that upgrade - then the competitive product has just be rendered useless.
This scenario is one that MS can play forever, and applies whether AAAA is an API, a protocol, or a file format. This leaves competitive products always playing catch-up. Knowing this, will many really invest - either develop or buy - competitive products?
Of course, I know that there are some competitive products today, and so the logic above is not perfect. On the other hand, I don't see Star Office (for example) making significant inroads in the MS desktop market.
Perhaps the answer is "prepublication", with some guaranteed delay between publication and release of the product. I've never heard of such a legal requirement before, and there may be good reasons why it wouldn't work. But I don't see those reasons just now.
The National Archives could state that they will only accept electronic documents in documented formats, preferrably formats published by national/international standards bodies. Since most Government documents above a certain level, including e-mail and memos, have to end up in the Archives, this would force Microsoft to publish their data formats or lose the Government as a market.
The Government Accounting Office could declare that Microsoft is a single-source vendor, and as such their products require special dispensation to purchase. Along with a decision to require unbundling of software and hardware (they did it for IBM, remember?), this would give Linux an edge as a multi-vendor OS.
By and large, the military already requires documentation of formats for software written for them, up to and including escrowed source code. They have "relaxed" this requirement for off-the-shelf office automation software, and they need to tighten up again.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
- compiled code
doesn't apply to your machine? Hmmm? Why not give the hackers that you are endlessly trying to fight a chance to outdo you, huh, Billy?"Oh, I went mad for a while. Did me no end of good." -Ford Prefect
If the DOJ had been investigating IBM for its mainframe monopoly in the early 80's we wouldn't have a million different pc makers. IBM could have protected it's design, like apple has done. In the 80's MS had a near monopoly on x86, where was the DOJ then. x86 clones are cheap that's why they're are some many. The DOJ should bring the hundreds of hardware manufacturers to court and demand they raise their prices to make non-x86 platforms more attractive to the buying public. This isn't going to happen nor should it. Let the market run it's course. In a few years MS won't have the same monopoly it currently has on x86 pc's
Come on, you can't create three identical companies based around the same product, expecting them to compete. A company's competitiveness is also a function of the people developing the product. Would you expect the court to divide Cutler among the three competing subcompanies? Or to split his team? A court has no right to split teams apart. Those people chose to work together. They could just quit and regroup at one company anyway. And the subcompany with Cutler and his team will become the authorative OS company. The other companies would have to play catch-up learning about the internals of the code, and figuring out where to develop further. It would not work.
Some people really don't think, IMHO. Do you really believe the average manager suddenly would swap officesuite? Because the chance is there? of course not! Will the majority of computersellers swap office suite? no. Because the majority of the buyers wants MS Office. It's not about the reasons, it's about the FACT they want it.
;) The DOJ wants to achieve it's cut away from the OS, so it's moved in software or Internet. But... which? it's something with internet, but it's also software. Better example: IIS. It's a webserver, but tightly intergrated in NT. You can't cut it out and run it on windows 9x. But it's an internetapplication, should it be placed with the OS, as it is now, or should it be moved to 'software' because it's an application or to the internet company because it's an internet related object.
:)
Lots of companies are using windows on the client computers where the officepeople work with. Will they all of a sudden change ship, use another OS? why? Windows is good enough for the task they want it to perform. Plus, swapping to an alternative is possible today too. But not a lot of companies do that.
Microsoft is a software company but owns a lot stock in other companies which do other things, cabling companies, computer companies (apple) etc. Splitting it up in 'OS', 'Software' and 'Internet' is too vague. where would you place IE for example? it's a trick question
Which pops up the real question: what is an OS? what is necessary software for the OS, so that a buyer of the OS can install it and use it out of the box, and not has to buy 20 packages (or download) to get something started?
From the anti-MS point of view, it's obvious. But from the normal or from the pro-MS point of view it's not. Because if I take a package like Red Hat in my left hand and windows 2000 in my right hand, what's the difference, except the price (functionality wise, not detailed) ? both are full blown packages with an OS, add on tools and other stuff to get me started right away.
Cutting the package up in my right hand makes it not comparable with the package in my left hand who still is allowed to keep all the stuff that had to be cut away in the right hand. Not very fair to me.
But it's also not official yet. It's a proposal of some layers working at the DOJ side. There are also settlementnegociations going on, plus MS has the right to appeal, which could take years to end. And who knows, perhaps by then we all eat MSAOLTimeWarnerGeneralMotors bread and butter
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
>So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers.
Not wanting to be a dick and all, but the Linux geeks around here seem to be of the opinon that "sub $100 OS packages" will be around for some time yet.
Microsoft is expected to reject the proposed breakup.
And the world emits a collective "Duh!"
:-P
This is either a good thing, or a bad thing, depending how rational your reasons for dislinking are. If you MUST DESTROY EVIL M$ EMPIRE JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE EVIL AND BILL GATES HAS MORE MONEY THAN YOU, hard luck, Micro-Soft will port, and develop all their horrible apps to 'nix. Given their track record, they are likely to dominate things too. On the good side though, Micro-Hard will probably lose out on their market share [People use M$ because they are ignorant, or they appreciate the fact that all their .docs & .xls' will work on any real computer with little difficulty. (Win-boxes...Eek!)] Once Micro-Soft supports 'nix, and 'nix becomes a bit friendlier, we will see a migration from Win to 'nix. But don't forget... there's nothing to stop Micro-Hard from releasing their own 'Bin-ix'
If, on the other hand, you dislike M$ because they rush products, make bad developement decisions, and lower the general standards of the entire industy, this is a good thing. The three new houses would be free of the constraints of inter-dependability, and thus may be able to concentrate on actually getting things right. There would be no need to rush, say, Office 2001 just because Win 2001 is due on release. Thus, added stability should creep into their products. Don't bring up the HP-UX version of IE, by-the-way, IE was developed to be an integral part of the Win OS', of course it's going to port badly. Also, you won't need that Win partition that you play games on once Micro-Soft start developing for 'nix. (I have to confess, KDE's Minesweeper sucks compared to M$'s). And how many times have you tried viewing a site which required a plug-in, that exists for Win/Mac only? Well guess what, people follow by example so if M$ will lead...
Of course, they could just screw things up, in which case, the status qou is maintained.
You'll notice I haven't commented on Micro-Net here. I don't see any negative ramifications from this change. Already Hotmail runs on FreeBSD, Apache is the dominant server, and M$'s security record is a laughing stock. The only innovation I have seen recently from M$ has been the Passport server system for e-commerce. See previous point. So I reckon the Micro-Net crowd will have their work cut out for them if they want to build a strong position. But who knows, maybe they can get their excrement together and produce something decent.
Like matter teleportation or something.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Gorilla wrote:
Nortel and Lucent certainly have some areas of competition (not a complete overlap, but then, few competitors really are) -- but what makes you think that the MFJ is solely responsible? Nortel could have decided "Hey, we're the biggest supplier to these guys -- why don't we start moonlighting already?!"
Cannot speak for other anti-interventionists, but for me the problem with regulation of (voluntary, contractural, risk-laden) business activity is the presumption that the future has arrived, or is least close enough to know. Who could have known 20 years ago the various travails that AT&T, IBM, Exxon and other mondo-friggin'-huge companies would have faced between then and now? Or that a tiny company of well-positioned nerds making, of all things, something as abstract as software would now be driving the engines of fear, resentment and envy? (Or, if you'd like, read that as "the engines of prudence, caution and better judgement.";) )
This tendency to see the present *as* the future is one of my beefs about any of the specific breakup plans. I think it might be in Microsoft's best interest to split its divisions anyhow, but I hope they don't do so only to appease the gov't bullies. But consider: right now, early 2000, there is lots of software for which it would be difficult to separate the "Internet" component from the "Application" component from the "OS" component. Could the components be separated? Sure, but it could be in any of several ways -- depends where you prefer to separate your abstractions. Presuming that an outside body has the right to micromanage the development and the abstract design of code is
Remember, a big complaint agains Microsoft as a "bad-guy competitor" is that Microsoft bundled software that was "good enough" for free or cheap with their OS, thus stifling competition, because that competition would have to compete at an impractically low price level.
So what about Linux? My system has Mandrake 6.1, and various free applications. Should the DOJ, it its infinite wisdom and foresight, break up Linux development for the "harm" it's doing to them market by lowering the cost of good software? (Rhetorical!)
Just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This is very discouraging news. I'm afraid I'll have to ignore it and hope it goes away. :-(
If they would at least split the windos and NT products into separate companies, there'd be some hope that all this litigation would make a difference. I suppose Micros~6 just points to its efforts to merge them into one OS to get out of that one.
Damn.
Let's compare Microsoft to the government.
When there is a stable and entrenched monopoly, like a big central government, it can only lose power if there is a revolution.
Microsoft has a monopoly in a rapidly evolving industry where people are free to buy or BUNDLE whatever they want. The worst thing that can happen to us is that we pay a little more for some choices. MS can't actually force anything. MS doesn't have any guns after all. If MS can force anything, it is only through government backing.
Lets compare MS to its competitors.
Given this starting point of instability and limited power, MS could rapidly lose market share if it stops innovating or makes bad decisions. Suppose MS did not change one line of source code. It wouldn't even exist five years from now.
Now you could point out that MS could buy up companies that innovate instead of innovating itself, and we would be using those new technologies instead, but isn't that what most critics want?
MS has always been vulnerable, but its competitors have made so many astoundingly wrong decisions that MS has won by default.
Other companies would have been far more nasty if they were in the position that Microsoft is in, which is one reason they are NOT in the position that MS in. Other companies STILL use the IBM tactic of running only on proprietary hardware, and are grudgingly attempting some backwards compatibility because of competition from MS.
Does anyone really think that the government or MS competitors really care what is in the customers' best interests?
I think that less successful companies are using the government to kill off one of their competitors. I find this far more offensive than anything Microsoft has done.
Jim Hammond
So lets say that by forcing the company into smaller shops, it has the intended effect of opening up the undocumented APIs. It would have to because how would each of the shops be able to create new products with secret features when there would be communication barriers between the shops. I'm though that at first, the secrets would be very slow in leaking out, so you could probably count on Word, or whatever, to be dominant in it's market sector for the forseeable future.
Take it a step further. Let's say, for purposes of illustration, that this actually has the intended effect. Suddenly the market is opened again to competitors, and companies such as Corel with their WordPerfect suite start to gain marketshare again. Companies start to make a lot more money when competeting with the children of MS on their old turf.
I'm really curious what this would do to the open source movement. I find a lot of new (and lots of the old) open source supporters have a very anti-MS stance and it seems that a lot of the reasons for open source software is in reply to this inability to compete with a closed source monopoly. But if there was a new way to compete on the Win platform, would a lot of people abandon doing open source stuff?
I can see a lot of people saying with great invective that this would never happen. That open source is the way of the future. But I suspect that once the lucre begins waving in front of peoples' noses, that there is a chance of moving back to our cathedrals.
Just a thought. (Probably been thought before by better people, but I thought that it was approprite).
-- kwashiorkor --
Pure speculation gets you nowhere.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
The trial wasn't about MS being having a monopoly because they are the market leader. It was about MS using their market dominance to lock out competitors.
... I just dont know what. The split just doesnt seem like enough for their past disregard for the law, maybe a nice public caning?
A companies #1 goal is to market their product to as many users as possible, and create a monopoly. M$ did this well, but then used this monopoly illegally, as the findings state. Just as Billy (Clinton not Gates) getting a bj from his intern isn't illegal, but lying about it in court is, M$s monopoly wasn't illegal, there use of that monopoly to stifle others was.
As 3Com (Palm, USR) nears a PDA monopoly they will hopfully continue to offer an improving product line, contrary to the M$ strategy. A monopoly can work for the consumer by improving standards and therfore a products quality, this doesnt seem to be a M$ philosophy though. M$ needs not only to be split up but also some actual punishment
rm -rf ms/*
In a rejected submission for Slashdot, I provided a link to a Q&A period with Judge Jackson (author of the Findings of Fact in this case.) In his responses, the Judge said he did not think breaking up Microsoft was the appropriate legal action to take. He also thought Linux had a bright future 2-3 years hence, but wasn't a true Windows competitor now, at least not for the market at issue.
Unfortunately, I've lost the link. (I think it was linked to by Ars Technica, but their search engine isn't functioning at the moment.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
... 'mere' users don't have the chance to figure out messes in M$ stuff. And 'mere' users have STABLE stuff under Linux that WORKS, not the BSOD-generating fluff that populates the M$ world.
Is poor Bo Gritz down hot Porter Lee Nadman's pants?
Don't break them up, just send the key players to jail for a few years, and take all their money.
The amount of time wasted by all computer users waiting for windows to reboot after a crash, must amount to at least a lifetime, if not more. So Bill's crimes can be considered as serious as murder.
More six months ago the internal structure at MS would have made this type of division easy, because that is more or less how the groups were divided.
About six months ago, Bill reorganized the basic structure of MS internally. No one outside noticed, because it's not something you would notice. Reorgs happen almost continuously there, but this was different - BIG!
The company is now divided into units by usage; Corporate, SOHO, Home, etc. Naturally each unit contains a piece of OS, application, internet, and so on. Much harder to divide a company along the normally thought of lines when it cuts against the internal grain!
Bill foresaw and planned for this. I'm certain he'll use this as an argument to prevent this kind of split - never mind that is exactly how the company was divided less than a year ago.
If they break M$ up like that, one of the baby bills will still have an os monoply. It may be one with only a small set of products (OS's). if there is a breakup there it needs to be split into os parts, so one baby bill would get win95/98 and the other would get winNT and another the rest of the os look-a-likes(winCE).
Tim
--
I don't know anything.
Of course, Microsoft could just do what IBM did after they lost the fight to bundle the software with the mainframes: start charging a lot for the (non-OS) software.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's really amusing... :) 'I want to let MS publish all the api's! and all the protocols! and all the fileformats!'
well read http://msdn.microsoft.com/libary Learn, absorb knowledge and get productive. The world is not served with tears from eyes who just see what the blinded mind wants them to see.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Forget about whether this is a good idea or not (for a minute). But assuming it does happen, where would they draw the line between OS and apps?
Obviously, MS-Office would go to the apps company, and MS-Windows 9X and NT would go to the OS company. But who would get IE? What about Notepad, Wordpad, Paint? (They're currently distributed with the OS, but they are applications.)
Who would/should decide this? What would MS want? What would the DOJ want? What would we want? Why?
Any thoughts on this out there?
And does a MS Internet Services company have a chance?
This would be a bad thing? Why?
DNA just wants to be free...
For a while, it looked like the DOJ was paying attention to some of the better potential remedies they elecited. It's disappointing to see them go with the old, obvious, easy-to-implement plan.
Does anyone else find it interesting that CNN (now owned by AOL) is reporting the breakup, and MSNBC (owned by who else?) is rebutting it? Hmmmm....
I find it interesting that the DOJ supposedly "denies" it, yet the only site that reports this is MSNBC. Is there any other source to back up this claim?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
So now there's an OS company, an App company and and an Internet Services company. This would solve a lot of the problems related to monopoly abuse... IF the OS company behaves like a really really nice girl. But remember that this whole trial revolved around Microsoft's claim that Explorer was part of the OS! I heard about it, I've read about it, I've just written it, and I still can't believe anybody could ever hear that argument and not break into uncontrolled laughter. But they said it repeatedly, with a straight face.
So what's to stop the OS company from pretending, a few months from now, that a spreadsheet is OF COURSE an inseparable part of the OS? OK, that crappy Linux thing does work without one, but that's just a sign of how far back they are from the cutting edge. Or more likely: who will prevent the App company from creating an OS that runs their stuff, and start with their bully tactics all over again? Sure, they COULD play fair. But they haven't showed any sympathy for fair play so far, so why would they start now?
The only real solution to this problem, the one that would solve the problem, not just for Microsoft but for the general case, is to pass legislation to require all closed-source software to publish their complete API and file formats. This would even have a very nice secondary effect: for the first time in history, software companies would have to publish a specification for their software, and they would actually have to live up to it. Accountability! A warranty that would go beyond replacing the CD! No more charging for upgrades that solve bugs that shouldn't have been there in the first place!
Hey, the government is desperately seeking something to do to prevent its obsolescence, they could do much worse that enforce this.
Also, no more squashing a competing application by extending the OS to include the equivalent of their application.
How exactly does this benefit Microsoft? Writing a piece of software and giving it away as an OS-bundled freebie may drive out the competition, but it doesn't do them much good. Besides, there are a number of companies that create products that are already in the OS (web browsers, disk tools, text editors, etc.) The fact is that a lot of their software is so awful that people will buy the competing product even if the Microsoft alternative is being given away for free.
I'm amazed at the ability of slashdotters to interpret everything Microsoft does as evil. If any other company gave a product away for free, Slashdotters would be happy about it. But when MS does it, it's "predatory."
Similarly, it is now possible to develop a competing OS, since the only requirement is providing a fully functional API. This will be possible because the API would be fully documented.
There are already several competing OS's. They just aren't very popular because they all suck from an average user's standpoint. And there's Mac OS, which is a perfectly acceptable substitute for Windoze.
p0z3r.
"THE REPORT WEDNESDAY in USA Today, which quoted unnamed sources" ...
"However, an official at the Department of Justice told CNBC that"...
Wonderful. No news report has identifiable sources, which means that for all we know both could be making this up. Dave Barry sure is facing serious competition these days!
An OS should be just enough to boot a 'puter and no more. Make everything an application. This will allow other companies to compete in spaces now considered to be 'part of the operating system'(lets face it, windows isn't an OS, it's a UI).
I say, give micros~1 the kernel space and open up the rest.
_________________________
You're contradicting yourself. Driving out the competition is exactly the goal in and of itself.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Bad for the government, which cant make up its mind what its doing about encryption. If windows defaulted to a system where there was a legal (in the u.s.) level of encryption, with the easy ability to crank it up to 1024 (or whatever) bits, you can say goodbye to echelon, packet sniffing, seizing harddrives or whatever the hell else the american (or whatever) government wants to use to keep an eye people. At the moment its up to the user to install pgp. I`m a programmer, and when i played around with it, i found it awkward. The average user, even one who wants to encrypt stuff, will probably give up - certainly it limits its appeal. But if every last file thats written to the disk is encrypted automatically, where is your average policeman going to start? So, yeah, anyway, its just something that came up in a conversation the other day, and i thought it was a good idea.
Achieving a monopoly through legal business practices may not be illegal in the US. But simply having a a monopoly, no matter how it was achieved, may stifle innovation, present insurmountable barriers to entry to competitors, and allow companies to charge for their products amounts that are undesirably high.
Regulating these falls outside the purview of the legal system, but it is legitimate business for legislators. Many behaviors that used to be legal were found undesirable and subsequently made illegal or regulated.
If monopolies exist on essential services and infrastructure, no matter how they were achieved, that is sufficient by itself to consider government intervention and/or regulation. And while many people seem to believe that the US has a laissez faire system where anything that's legal goes without government intervention, even the US (like any other democracy) has a long history of regulating essential services and infrastructure. For example, the communications infrastructure, media companies and utilities all fall under ownership restrictions and government regulations, even though they could (and would) otherwise achieve monopolies through legal means.
Maintaining a competitive, open market is one of the key functions of a democratic government that has chosen a free market approach. Government regulations and ownership restrictions are an essential part of that.
Of course, the question before the court is narrower. The court cannot create new government regulations, only enforce existing law. It is in that sense that the court has limited options for enforcement, and it is in that sense that "monopolies are not illegal".
While the court's options are limited, during an out-of-court settlement, everything is on the table, including remedies that the court could not legally require if the case went to trial.
And Microsoft has an interest in considering consenting to such remedies because if the legal system does not provide relief, lawmakers will take up the issue. That is a much bigger gamble for them and a much harder case to negotiate than settling this quietly with some government legal representatives.
I think the word you mean here is legacy ;->
'mere' users don't have Linux.
And with the trends in Linux GUI development, neither will anybody before long.
I didn't hit preview (that should read "in front of them", not "in front of him"). Plus I think I might have submitted it twice by accident. And thirdly, I was being a bit melodramatic. I don't mean to imply that Bill Gates is comparable to a murderer. All I meant is that I want positive results for me, not negative results for Bill Gates. :)
I guess it's going to be one of those days for me
Once the The Microsoft OS Company and The Microsoft Applications Company realize that they are now competitors, two things will happen:
(1) The Microsoft OS Company will claim that the browser is part of the OS, that the word processor is part of the OS, that the spreadsheet is part of the OS, etc.
(2) The Microsoft Applications Company really will ship MS Linux.
The last time I checked, a monopoly does not necessarily force people to use their product. It simply has all or most of the market. Of course, we must remember that the important issue here is, and has always been, not only IF there is a monopoly, but IF there is a monopoly AND its power abused. Let's try and end the general assumption that monopolies are bad and need to end. There are cases where this is not the case, and we should keep this in mind. For example, consider a company that has a monopoly simply because it produces a superior product. (Although I'm not saying that this applies in Microsoft's case)
I hope that this speaks for itself. How could driving out the competition not benefit Microsoft?
The problem is not with driving out the competition. This is what every company ultimately wants. The problem is using an existing monopoly position to strong-arm their way into another market, and choking the life out of their new competitors by weilding the power of the existing monopoly.
[As an aside, I'm not buying the story that Netscape lost to Internet Explorer based on product quality. Internet Explorer won because the consumer usually had no choice but to have it. (Can somebody explain to me why I was required to install Internet Explorer before installing Visual C++?) If I've already got a web browser soaking up multiple hundreds of megabytes of my hard disk then why would I install another, regardless of quality? The average user will just put up with the one that MUST be there.
Microsoft can easily pay several hundred people full-time salaries to develop Internet Explorer because that's pocket change to their existing monopoly. Netscape can only do this until they run out of money, which isn't very long given the above situation. In the end, the quality of Netscape's product fell behind as a result. But product quality is not why Netscape lost; poor product quality was the result of their losing.]
I'm amazed at the ability of slashdotters to interpret everything Microsoft does as evil. If any other company gave a product away for free, Slashdotters would be happy about it. But when MS does it, it's "predatory."
There's a big difference between giving something away for free and being predatory. Don't even get me started on the list of underhanded things Microsoft has done to further their dynasty.
There are already several competing OS's.
Apparently I wasn't being clear here. I was speaking of the possibility for a compatible Windows alternative, like DR-DOS was to MS-DOS. DR-DOS was possible, by and large, because the DOS API was known, even the undocumented part.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
This comes out the DAY AFTER the Caldera settlement, and is followed by an official denial.
I think it's an "unintentional leak" designed to scare Microsoft into a settlement. Perhaps the DOJ thinks MS got off lucky with Caldera, and doesn't want MS to get a set of balls after that experience. A sly negotiating tactic.
In the end, my prediction is, this case will end with an out of court settlement consisting of an undisclosed, but 10-digit dollar figure. Which may throw-off MS's game for about a year or two, but will ultimately not be nearly as crippling as Linux and Apple's resurgance will be.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Some Microsoft divisions do good work. It's the marketting department that screws everybody over, I think--and the business end. Maybe the solution is to force the marketting people to be their own division, and let them set up an agency or something. Then split the rest of the company into OS and non-OS.
No special deals -- prices should be set purely on volume. Forbid bundling requirements and discounts (as in, Windows+IE).
Everybody (including OEM's and VAR's) should be able to do what they want with the software they buy. Ban MS's requirements on "startup screen" and desktop configuration.
No mergers and acquisitions for a long time (20 years). Let them try some R&D for a change.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
... which is about all I will say, since my departure from that company is still fairly recent (love those NDAs hanging over your head)...
Lets say that Joe Average wants to go out and buy his first computer. Lets examine the choices. He can buy a off-the-shelf major manufactred machine, with either Windows (2000?) or some variant of unix (Redhat Linux, most likely, I've seen them around.) Same hardware, yada yada. So lets look at the cost of the operating system on the machine (after the MS split, this is speculation based off my own knowledge, and from whats been said here on the boards.) Windows 2000 Operating System, single user. $140 This includes a networking functionality, Notepad, WordPad, MS-Chat. (Note price increase from an OS only Microsoft corporation.) They say they want to be able to *do stuff* on the Internet, salesperson points them down the isle. They then go and purchase the software they want/need, because nothing of any real useful value will be allowed to be included with the operating system. They go buy a browser (Is netscape even on the shelves anymore? / Internet Explorer), a mail client (Eudora? Netscape? Outlook Express?), some sort of Mp3/streaming media player. There they go, they're set. $60-80 worth of 'extra' software, on top of the cost of the Operating system. Rough average cost: $200. (Of course, if they sign up with AOL Time Warner, they won't need any of that, because its all bundled with the service. Moot point.) Lets say that they get the Redhat-style machine. $30-60 for the OS. They don't need to buy a mail client or a browser, RedHat comes bundled with a browser. The media stuffage, I'm not sure on, someone will have to fill in that blank. It even comes bundled with StarOffice and a free copy of Oracle 8i. Much cheaper. So, my question is, where is the choice for the user in this situation?
There is no division. A filesystem is an application, as are memory management, and process scheduling, they just happen to be general purpose applications.
Well, the big difference though is that these "applications" are necessary to provide a programmatic interface to hardware. For example, a file system is something a user never interacts with.
Maybe this points to a way to cut the Gordian knot. Maybe Microsoft should be be broken up not not into separate OS/application units, but into two classes of units: a single company which develops APIS, ports them to various kinds of hardware, and licenses them; and maybe two companies that do everything else but are prevented from developing any privately owned APIs. The API company would be prohibited from giving any licensee more access to kernel source code or API information than anyone else.
These non-kernel companies would essentially be in the business of creating Windows "distributions". They could create their own applications as tightly integrated with the browser or whatever as they like. A company like IBM could license the API implementations and create their own "windows distro" with their own user shell and utility set. Not only big companys like IBM -- anybody who who holds his or her own license for the Windows API set could create their own competing operating system on it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I am amazed at some
What you are suggesting, in essence, is that the entire computer industry be forced to change the way it does business because you aren't satisfied with the way it is being done. You seem to have no respect for the rights of companies or the individuals who make them up. If I want to write code that uses a proprietary API, is undocumented, and only runs on one OS, that's my right. If I want to sell said product, that is also my right. For you to come in and tell me that I'm not allowed to write such code, or to force me to do all kinds of extra work for the priviledge of releasing it, is nothing short of naked aggression.
There's a reason that a lot of code is not well documented, and it's not just because coders are evil. Writing good documentation is a lot of work, and a lot of programmers are simply too busy to do it. Imposing this requirement on them would reduce productivity and force them to spend all their time filling out paperwork so they can get government approval to release their software.
I don't even want to think about the enforcement headaches or the massive disruptions this would cause due to people trying to circumvent the law. If such a law were to be passed, I would seriously consider leaving the country. The above suggestion is Orwellian in its implications. It says that you don't have the right to write or sell software unless you did it in a way the government likes.
I am appalled at this poster's lack of understanding of the way law works. He seems not to have considered that his personal open-source wet dream is not necessarily good law, and might hurt the very people it is designed to help.
</rant>
MS's monopoly isn't based on it's OS. It is based on MS Office. The only way to fix this is to force MS to publish the file format specifcations for all of its Office Productifity Applications. These are the applications which force Companies to stay with MS today. Any company that wan't to switch to a "better" platform MUST have the ability to continue communicating with the rest of the buisness world..ie Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project. I don't care how good a Linux base Office Suite is. If it can't speak MS file formats, it's dead before it hits the door.
Bart
"there should be preventative legislation that creates an environment which discourages the formation of monopolies, but like everything in life, need will find a way"
If your corporate income tax rate was set equal to your market share... There would still be loopholes, but it's a start.
"No more sub $100 OS packages." Is that supposed to be a *good* thing? Once again, this shows that the real purpose of this suit is to steal for MS's competitors (Sun, Nutscrape, etc.) what they could not get in the free market - NOT to help consumers.
Conversely, W2K deserves its own company. It has virtually zero real marketshare, really severe hardware requirements, but all reports seem to indicate that it is not as bad as w95 :)
The apps could either go to both companies, or they could all stay with the W95 company. That would be an interesting move- take all the legacy, historical stuff and concentrate it. Make one company that is still hugely powerful and integrated but by splitting off the newer stuff, define the bigger company as a caretaker entity. Make a littler company with nothing but the newer stuff like W2K- and give that one Gates and Ballmer. Such a plan might ironically appeal to them as much as it annoys them :)
Actually, the linux OS would probably be free bundled with a PC. If the PC's come loaded with RedHat or Mandrake they'll probably include the manual, install CD, probably that app CD that comes with RedHat, and maybe even the bumper sticker. Since the newer versions of Red Hat have IRC clients, Netscape, X11Amp, and all those goodies you are essentially getting all the same stuff for free. Adding StarOfiice to the mix adds an interesting point. The average consumer sees Windows, Office, Encarta, and all the other addons as "freebies" from the computer manufacturer. Of course, the cost for these is probably in the $100-200 range but the consumer doesn't see that. Most consumers however will understand Microsoft products and may even choose the Microsoft PC just because they're familiar. I like the idea of having a choice when buying a PC, especially if the linux PC is less.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Corel linux aside, this is where Corel steps in. We've been running Wordperfect since version 4.0. Wordperfect 2000 outperforms Word in a second. We've been using Lotus since ver 2.3, but are considering switching to Quattro just for the compatibility thing with WP. As an IS tech I know the joys of working with outside vendors who use only MS Office. A struggle, yes. But it's worth the fight. Keep all your versions up to date and you can conquer Microsoft.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
They would be forbidden to have any closed technology sharing agreements for several years. That would keeps MS busy for a while.
I guess you are meant to think of them like a fine wine or something. To emphasise the point they have a huge image of a bottle of wine (of indeterminate vintage)
I've got this nice '94 HP-UX 9.04 machine. I think I'll lay it down in the server room to mature for a bit longer. See if it becomes more stable.
In my job, I wade through pages and pages of marketing BS every day. A not so nice side-effect is that I can spout it along with the best of them. Describing problems as issues, re-synergising my paradigms to leverage my time-to-value in today's fast moving E-conomy etc etc etc. Someone at HP Marketing at least has a sense of humo(u)r. I wonder if Carly is aware.
My product is vintage
Your product is legacy
His product is obsolete
Yeah, that's competitive...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Um... "FIRST POST MASTAH"? Don't you mean ASSMASTER?
That was like so cool. Have you got any more ?
Driving out the competition is exactly the goal in and of itself.
How does that benefit them if they're giving the competing product away for free as part of the OS?
the idea of breaking MS this way has been discussed in a number of other forums and one of the themes which arises is that while what you propose (so called 'horizontal' breakup) would do the most to kill the monopoly, it also does the least good for the customer for various reasons. there is of course the danger (or the gurantee) that windows would fragment. while that would make joe slashdot happy, it wouldn't actually be much fun for the hoi paloi.
as for leaving the OS monopoly intact--what of it? the OS monopoly is a perfectly legal thing. what is illegal is for MS to push into other areas (applications, internet content, etc...) by leveraging this monopoly, and that's precisely what the DoJ is targeting. in this case, i must think that it is not the DoJ who needs to get a clue from slashdot, but perhaps the other way around.
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
I can't believe all you freedom loving people want the US government to dictate what MS should do! You could be next.
As an aside, I'm not buying the story that Netscape lost to Internet Explorer based on product quality. Internet Explorer won because the consumer usually had no choice but to have it. (Can somebody explain to me why I was required to install Internet Explorer before installing Visual C++?)
I don't know, but I don't see as it matters. After all, there are *lots* of programs that come as part of the OS, and if Microsoft shouldn't have included IE, what else are they not allowed to include. For purists modern OS's are not OS's at all but merely massive bundles of API's and utilities. But if you stripped Win95 down to its kernal, you wouldn't have much left.
So sure, the consumer was "forced" to install IE, just like they were "forced" to install Windows Explorer, Notepad, the Start menu, and dozens of other OS components. If we're going to tell Microsoft which products are allowed to be bundled with their OS, why stop with IE? Why not boot minesweeper, telnet, and probably dozens of other crappy add-ons?
There's a big difference between giving something away for free and being predatory.
Actually, my impression is that giving a product away for free to undermine a competitor is the definition of being predatory. Which is why it's such a silly concept: all companies do it, there's nothing unethical about it.
Microsoft can easily pay several hundred people full-time salaries to develop Internet Explorer because that's pocket change to their existing monopoly. Netscape can only do this until they run out of money, which isn't very long given the above situation. In the end, the quality of Netscape's product fell behind as a result. But product quality is not why Netscape lost; poor product quality was the result of their losing.
So now it's a crime to spend more money on a product than one's competitors? Sure it's "unfair" that Microsoft has more money than Netscape. But that's life. It's downright bizarre that you would fault Microsoft for outspending its rivals to get a better product. Are you saying that companies should make sure they spend the same amount on its products as the competition?
When you form a business to compete with an industry leader, you'd better have the capital and the determination to stay in business. In fact I think Netscape did that-- they managed to stay ahead of IE through version 3 at least. But today, Netscape is no better than IE, and on the Mac side I'd argue that it's an inferior product. And it's looking like IE 5 will widen that lead. Yes, it sucks for Netscape, but antitrust laws were not designed to protect businesses. They were designed to protect consumers. And the browser wars undoubtedly helped consumers by creating two vastly improved web browsers and forcing both companies to give them away for free.
If you ask me spliting MS is a good idea but i think a 2 way split would be good. First a consumer software company with it's hooks in the internet. Then a company that controlled software for the busineses. But no bill gates in either company or any upper level microsoft management because of what he did and windows would either have to be given away to a competing company or group of open source developers. Or sold to the highest bidder. Once bill gates is gone much control is gone he is really the one who built the monopoly. Also giving windows to some open source developers would make a monopoly dissappear because, window would no longer be a behemoth and finally under other OS's win32 software would work. Once win32 is free what apple did with carbon could be done with win32. Also I think that Apple should make Cocoa, yellow box or openstep on all platforms and have a universal api that allowed non competition. No need to deny that Openstep is one of the best api's
what could this be win 3.11 a window manager, no It actually was similar to XWin, a set of graphical api's to make graphical development easier and yes a large part of it was a shell run ontop of the api's. by the way it is total crap in that it is 16 bit, without memory protection and crashed more than anything I ever saw. It was close to maybe beta quality software, being a a beta tester for certain things i wouldn't have realeased this software.
Many SlashDotter seems to be either ignorant of or
just ignoring major issues.
For example, who controls COM/DCOM? All
MS Apps rely 100% on COM, and the OS relies
100% on COM. The MS APPS group isn't going to
port Office to any OS that doesn't have
COM, and whatever OS best supports COM (which
will be windows) will always be the preferred platform for the apps.
If you give joint ownership of COM out, you have
a big mess when someone changes it. You'll have
the situation where Office runs on old Windows + apps group enhanced com, but apps group enhanced com doesn't work on enhanced windows from OS group.
While the resulting confusing will certainly cause numerous problems for Windows users, much to the joy of Linux advocates everywhere, I thought
the DOJ was supposed to be looking out for the consumer.
Or is this really a "stick it to Bill" solution, and nobody cares if the consumers get screwed?
The Corporate death penalty.
Revoke Microsoft's corporate charter.
Put everyone at the director level and above behind bars.
Let's see them leverage a monopoly there.
Can you bundle some free sodomy with that license plate? Come on buddy, let's see you innovate this!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Microsoft bought IE when it was called Sprynet , I think and they had 2 versions a mac version and a windows verson. The motivations of these browsers was that microsoft would stuff it's proprietary internet shit in it and make websites incompatible with netscape and other browsers. Lets just say microsoft saw the internet as the future and wanted to make windows and other non threatening platforms the viewers. Why else would you has Jscript, active X, and other microsoft technologies. It didn't really work because netscape a very established browser company didn't just fade into obscurity it is stil very used.
I'm amazed at the ability of slashdotters to interpret everything Microsoft does as evil. If any other company gave a product away for free, Slashdotters would be happy about it. But when MS does it, it's "predatory." Um, yeah. That's because when Microsoft gives away a product, they're paying for it with the billions of dollars they rake in from OS sales. And they always do it to stamp out a competing product. Most of the time, when other companies give products away, it's because they're trying to get recognition. Often, they're paying for it in relatively non-tangible ways, like stock options. (thus, the programmers will work for free - or next to it - for a time, in the hopes that what they're working hard on will make them lots of money sometime in the future.) These companies are making a gamble that they hope will pay off... Microsoft isn't making a gamble, they know that the 95% market share that they enjoy can be used to destroy anything that crosses their path. It's not the methods that are predatory... it's the intentions.
breaking up microsoft is stupid -- it'll be just like the sorcerer's apprentice -- you'll just end up with lots fo little microsofts.
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Articles
The solution to the Microsoft problem lies in this -- that there must be
seperation of RIGHTS (i.E. Who sets the STANDARDS), and of Economic
Interest (those who produce the software which EMPLOY the standards, and
go by them as a guide to create the product of their labour called the
"Operating System Platform"). So long as they remain coupled, the abuses
of monopoly power will be able to continue. The solution to monopoly
problems is to deccouple the FEELING / RIGHTS / STANDARDS DEFINITION
BODIES - from the PRODUCERS / THOSE WHO PRODUCE WHAT IS DEFINED BY THOSE
STANDARDS. Microsoft's monopoly has resulted from the ability for a
proprietary standard to exist. The proprietary standard could not arise if
you decoupled these two functions. Instead of having the vested-interest
manufacturer defining their own standards and letting the economic force
run amuck, it is in the public interest to have economic power trimmed and
pruned to grow appropriately to what is good for the consumer (the people)
by the democratic exercise of FEELING, rights, and standards definition as
a seperate, non-biased entity. A failure to seperate these two will always
eventually result in a situation where an abuse of monopoly power can
arise.
In a worst case scenario, you end up with a permanent balkinazation of the hardware market, similar to what exists now in UNIXs from various hardware vendors.
Yeah, that would be nice, a good solid, legal, binding definition of a minimal OS.
Problem is, you do that, then the applications side of MS wins. Because the OS loses it's significance, because the monopoly was never about the OS, it was about the platform, which demands a very blurry line between OS and applications, which includes MS Office, IE, the file-formats, Exchange Server and Outlook, Microsoft Visual C++, and Visual Basic, etc.
But this is the very reason why splitting Microsoft like this won't work. Because you have to define the cut-line to be at a place that doesn't make sense technically. The cut-line has to be arbitrary, and in the software business, every time either company comes out with a new product, you're going to have to get some government official involved to bless it. So the line gets constantly tested, streched, bent out of shape, and redefined.
IOW, it simply wont work. But I guess the DOJ is hell-bent on trying to prove me wrong. I hope to God I am wrong.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yeah. Very smart. MS is forbidden from bundling IE with Windows but Linux vendors can go ahead and do the very same thing ?
Bullhshit.
...Is that no matter how well you do it, it will never compare to having the source.
:/
They can document the interface as well as they want (I actually think they do a fairly good job with most of the Win32 SDK), but without knowledge of the implementation, or concrete knowledge of API interdependence, you can easily get burned.
In the long term, the main advantage of splitting out the OS from the rest of the company would be to force them to have the same access to the source that the rest of the industry has.
As it is, I would do _much_ to get my hands on the source for GDI or RichEd32 source. I can't count the times that RichEd AV's on me for no reason that I can see.
Pax -- Ob
Once upon a time, Digital Research wrote a nifty little OS called CP/M. They then extended it to run multiple instances of CP/M on the same box - Concurrent CP/M.
Then, they updated it to handle MS-DOS 3.0 calls, C-DOS.
Then they updated it with better memory management, better MS-DOS support (3.11 calls) and even came out with a single-instance version most of us remember as DR-DOS. (see also Caldera)
Long story short, DR got bought by Novell, who didn't want M-DOS. They sold it to three companies, one in Europe, one in the U.S., and one in Australia. Those groups were free to tweak and innovate, and charge for support.
Last I heard, the European group had made some damn good improvements, and were gaining market share there and in the U.S. while the U.S. group were just sucking wind.
Long story short, there are precedents for the type of split MS really needs - MS-OS-1, MS-OS-2, MS-OS-3, MS-Apps-1, MS-Apps-2, MS-Apps-3, MS-Inet-1, MS-Inet-2, MS-Inet-3, etc.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
AME is not saying that, but disagreeing with the claim made by M$ apologists that IE's market share has nothing to do with M$' tactics and is only due to the superiority of the product. Don't put words into peoples' mouths please.
Back to the M$ party line: everything we do is to benefit the comsumer. Oh, aren't they sweet. Well, making a competing browser helped consumers, for the reasons you cited. But if you think M$' other tactics helped consumers, you obviously haven't read the Finding of Fact. (They have Acroread for Windows, you know.) There you can read about all the consumers who wanted Netscape pre-installed on their systems, but couldn't get it due to M$ licensing agreements. Or the OEM who had trouble maintaining profitability because of the costs of providing tech support to all the customers calling asking where Netscape was. (IANAL, but I believe that businesses that are downstream from a supplier are considered consumers for the purposes of antitrust law. Remember that most of the charges against the early trusts involved their effects on business consumers rather than on individuals.) Or how heavily integrating IE into Windows98 made it difficult for consumers to control their kids' access to the internet, since IE would pop up in all kinds of situations.
None of these other programs act as a barrier to third parties or even Microsoft itself selling other products in the same arena. No copy of Notepad ever prevented someone from buying Word or some third party text editor that has some of the many features notepad lacks. Minesweeper doesn't make it harder for people to write game software for Windows, and the bundled telnet software doesn't keep me from purchasing a good terminal program. These are all examples of applets, small programs of limited functionality and usefulness that prevent Windows from being just a hunk of dead weight on install.
Internet Explorer is another matter entirely. Its very presence and behaviour make it difficult for a competing product to gain any market share. Personally I loved Netscape Navigator, but after it got caught up in the browser war, I eventually switched to IE, partially because I was tired of dealing with the two trying vying for control of all the HTML file types and partially because with all the effort MS poured into IE, it actually became a better product in some ways.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
AME is not saying that, but disagreeing with the claim made by M$ apologists that IE's market share has nothing to do with M$' tactics and is only due to the superiority of the product. Don't put words into peoples' mouths please.
Then why did he bring up the fact that Microsoft outspent Netscape?
They have Acroread for Windows, you know.
I love how people can't distinguish between liking a company and standing up for its freedom to innovate. For the record: I avoid using Windows like the plague, do not own any MS software, and in general think they make crappy products. In the case of browsers, however, they did a decent job, and Netscape did a pretty rotten job for the last couple of years.
you obviously haven't read the Finding of Fact.
Sure I did. I just disagree with its conclusions.
There you can read about all the consumers who wanted Netscape pre-installed on their systems, but couldn't get it due to M$ licensing agreements.
My impression is that they simply required that the IE icon be on the desktop and Netscape's not be. Some liscences might have been different. But even if it were true, so what? How hard is it to go on the web and download Netscape. And if you're not computer-savvy enough to do that, does it even matter what browser you're using?
Or how heavily integrating IE into Windows98 made it difficult for consumers to control their kids' access to the internet, since IE would pop up in all kinds of situations.
How is that related to unfair business practices? This sounds to me like an OS design issue, not a legal one. After all, if Microsoft writes a buggy Window manager, or an insecure telnet client, or any number of other lousy features, that's a bad thing, but it's hardly illegal.
Microsoft did a great many things, and yes, consumers probably would have been better off had Microsoft done things differently. But consumers are far better off than they would have been had Microsoft not written a browser and integrated it into Windows. The problems you cite a piddling in comparison the the benefits competition brought to the browser market.
None of these other programs act as a barrier to third parties or even Microsoft itself selling other products in the same arena.
Sure they did. Fewer people are going to buy a telnet client if they have one for free. Ditto with Notepad and Minesweeper. Granted, those applets are much simpler than IE, and so they probably had less effect, but that's a difference of degree, not any fundamental difference that merits legal distinctions.
partially because with all the effort MS poured into IE, it actually became a better product in some ways.
In other words, they produced a better product, and you switched to it. That's really the bottom line. So they made a better product, and you chose to use it. What is there to complain about?
How does that benefit them if they're giving the competing product away for free as part of the OS?
Just because a product is bundled with something else for no additional cost, doesn't mean it's free. If I "give away" Cars, with the purchase of a new key, it sounds like a good deal until I tell you that the keys cost $25,000.
It's not the methods that are predatory... it's the intentions.
And that's fundamentally why I object to the whole thing. Legislating on the basis of intentions is a dangerous business, and I think this is a case where the crime is not so much anything specific MS did as it is the general fact that they have pissed people off. Microsoft hasn't done anything that many other companies have done, but because they do it better than those other companies, they are dispised. I think law should be objective, clear, and apply equally to everyone, and antittrust law is not and does not.
OK, so how does Microsoft get money from the Mac and Win95 users who download the product for free?
I don't know, but I don't see as it matters. After all, there are *lots* of programs that come as part of the OS, and if Microsoft shouldn't have included IE, what else are they not allowed to include. For purists modern OS's are not OS's at all but merely massive bundles of API's and utilities. But if you stripped Win95 down to its kernal, you wouldn't have much left
:)
Except that Windows 95 is a Microsoft program, and therefore has a HUGE kernel.
Of course, they don't get money from users who download IE for free. But, since they are covering the costs of IE development from sales of Win98, distributing it to other platforms doesn't cost them much, but it does provide them with marketing ammunition (ie, increased market share) to slam their competitors with. Also, just because IE is freely available now, doesn't mean it always will be. Once the competition is gone (ie, netscape), what stops them from charging for IE?
Compaq doesn't push MS Office. MS Works, maybe, on the consumer versions, but it's a small version of the office suite pie.
You used the term "freedom to innovate". Big mistake, we now know you are on the MS payroll.
who cares? Shoddy, second rate, over priced products. A constant reminder of why my firm runs IRIX, Solaris, and Mac OS9.
After, Government DOES know best.
.
So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers.
MS has already done away with the sub $100 OS. W2K is going to be selling for over $200. As far as free browsers go, MSIE was never free, it cost plenty, almost cost us a free internet!
But, since they are covering the costs of IE development from sales of Win98, distributing it to other platforms doesn't cost them much, but it does provide them with marketing ammunition (ie, increased market share) to slam their competitors with.
So the sales of Win98 were increased by including it in Windows? Does that mean they were simply providing an added feature to the OS?
Once the competition is gone (ie, netscape), what stops them from charging for IE?
Um... iCab, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx? Besides, Netscape is free. What's going to stop people from continuing to use it forever?
what would this accomplish ?
they would become richer while gaining more power
like any other company this happened to (att,
standard oil).
of course m$ would want this over most other
options because they know if it was broken up
the results
--SolidGold
--SolidGold
Everything you know is wrong. Or more accurately, inaccurate.
Windows 2000 offers EFS. Check out Microsoft's web site about Windows 2000. Some schmucks came out a while back and said they had already found a way around it. That's because they did not RTFM. They implemented it wrong, and did something that is specifically warned against in the documentation.
Hey, I thought this was funny. At least in the context of replying to the message I replied too. Damn, lost Karma points over this now. Some people just don't know how to take a joke.
T.
Forgive me for not reading every article on the list, but did anyone else notice that the report on the DOJ response to the rumors was linked to a MSNBC article?
"I don't know, but I don't see as it matters. After all, there are *lots* of programs that come as part of the OS, and if Microsoft shouldn't have included IE, what else are they not allowed to include. For purists modern OS's are not OS's at all but merely massive bundles of API's and utilities. But if you stripped Win95 down to its kernal, you wouldn't have much left"
You've missed the point. There is nothing wrong with distributing applications (Paint, MSCalc, Notepad etc) with your OS. The integration of IE is VERY different, in the sense that when you install Windows, you do not have the option of not installing IE - you have to install it - whereas all the other applications (Calc, Minesweeper etc) can be uninstalled with no hassles at all. There is a big difference between these two categories of applications. You are not forced to install stuff like Minesweeper.
The main reason this is "wrong" is that it was done for no good techical reason - this "integration" was done only for the purpose of pushing Netscape out of the browser market. Simple as that.
Most people would read the sentence Three separate company would need to be profitable on their own. in front of the sentance So that could mean no more sub $100 OS packages and no free browsers. and realize that the second was building on information in the first. Its the company that aquires the Windows OS division that will be unable to market an OS in that price range. Of course Linux will be able to continue what it does.
The question is not "Will MS be broken up?" but rather "What will the baby Bills be called?" It would be interesting to speculate on what they will be name. If they get Landor involved, maybe we'll end up with Officent, Internent, and Crashilent.
In my opinion, the best way to get past Microsoft, is not only to break up the company, but to make ALL code open source.
.. or something.. and sooth untrusting computer users.
By only breaking up the company, Microsoft will surely become an oligopoly, maintaining its stranglehold on good computing. Milking firms with yearly updates 'Windows 2001 (a hdspace odessy), 2002, 2003, 2003a, 2003b, 2004...)' and fixes that fix one problem and cause another.
Keeping the source OPEN will allow 'actual' competition in the OS market and software industry. With open source, several software companies can take compete fairly and with 'innovation' correcting many of the all too well known bugs, and improving windows to make their own version more competitive. Some companies (maybe even the US government) would even keep their source code open and allow individual programmers to get their hands in. The US government may even keep an open source standard OS, which the public at large can use, and all firms can efficiently write software to.
Open Sourcing would also open many of those 'wtf' holes in the current 'Windows OS' with unknown lines of code which only go by suspicious names, CIA$^^.frk
Microsoft must be stopped, competition must be risen from the dead. Open Sourced code allows for more innovation, and in its own right competition then the bloodsucking, sometimes even whole body takeovers currently employed by Microsoft. We must, for the sake of healthy economics and practical computing, OPEN the secret doors to the SOURCE of Microsoft.
gas@thespark.com
this is the first sensible opinion i have heard