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".

Comments

I don't think this will work.

[himi]

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

We're missing the point here...

[LLatson]

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

Pre-loads and vendor support are the keys

[Scurrilous Knave]

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:

• Require all system vendors to offer a minimum of two choices of preloaded OS, if they offer any preloads at all. The different OS preloads must be on equal terms--same level of support, same hardware supported, and so on. Only the price difference in the base OS can be passed along.
• Require all hardware that comes with specialized drivers to provide drivers for a minimum of two OS's. As an alternative, they could publish complete specifications of their device's interface. Any provided drivers must provide equivalent functionality.
• Require all software that communicates with other software (like over a network) to be accompanied by complete and accurate specifications of the protocols and formats involved in that communication.
• Require all software that saves data in files to be accompanied by a complete and accurate description of the formats of those files.

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.

Breaking up is by far the best solution

[czei]

Contrary to popular belief, the reason MS is in trouble with the DOJ is *not* for being a monopolist. It is not illegal to be a monopoly! There's nothing wrong with being a monopoly, as long as you obtained it using legal business practices, and don't try to use your first monopoly to create others.

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:

• Each separate company would retain it's own intellectual property. Linux advocacy aside, there is no viable solution that would rob a company of it's intellectual property. There is no way in hell any government is going to throw out hundreds of years of precedent simply because of the open source movement.
• Much less oversight of the broken up companies is needed. Any behavior based solution (we promise never to screw anyone over again) would require close up monitoring of the behavior, and they would in the end simply do whatever they wanted and hope for a better deail at the next trial.
• Each separate company would act in its own interest, which acts to prevent monopolistic behavior. For example, an operating system company could no longer offer deep discounts to the hardware vendors who also shipped Office, since office would be sold by the applications company. An operating system company could no longer threaten to cut off a hardware vendor who bundled non-MS applications. A separate internet/services/ISP could no longer have a reason to pay all of the ISPs hundreds of dollars every time the ISP converted to using an MS application.
• In the end, the cleanest, most effective solution is breaking up MS.

Ok I see 3 Problems with this

[GW Hayduke]

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