Slashdot Mirror
MS and the DOJ Return to the Ring
Johan Jonasson writes "ZDNet reports that the opening round in the appeals phase of the Microsoft case gets under way Monday, when the company is scheduled to fire the next salvos in its battle to prevent a breakup. In a 150-page document, the company will try to convince an appeals court to overturn a lower court ruling that would split the software giant into two parts."
... the M$ antitrust lawsuit or the election?
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
It says that part of their argument will be based on the fact that including IE with windows gave users "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser." And what pray tell would these features be?
Kiss me, I'm blueberry-flavored!
Someone please moderate the above post as Troll, because only a moron would think that the AT&T breakup was a bad thing. The only thing that has died was an illegal monopoly that overcharged for everything and didn't offer any new services.
Here are some of the new technologies and products that have come out since the break up:
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
With the embarassing Presidential struggle under way, I think the Microsoft case is going to go largely unnoticed now.
Is David Boies still involved with the appeals process regarding Microsoft? If so, I believe his roll will greatly diminish with so called "contests" being readied in Florida.
My take...Microsoft comes out of the Court of Appeals just as they would like, and there is a President Bush Part 2.
Jeff -- skibum, among other things
If it was a Linux antitrust case, we could have got twice as much argument in our favour in 35 pages. We have benchmarks to prove it.
Troll? You don't have to be an anti-Microsoft zealot to realize that Microsoft only became a significant player long *after* home computers were common. Really, DOS/Windows machines weren't popular in the home until the early '90s, although they certainly were popular in offices earlier. Apple and Commodore were much more significant in establishing the home computer market.
Microsoft's effects on innovation have largely been exaggerated by both Microsoft and by the main stream press. Windows 3.1 was a major innovation; Windows 95 was a major innovation in the interface. However, Windows 98 shows that their innovation has largely petered out. Windows 2000 is NT 5.0 repackaged with again minor changes and improvements. Look at ME and you will find exactly the same thing. Microsoft's response to innovation has usually been to buy up the competition.
.net for example.
Linux, BEOS, Free BSD, even OS And the other up and coming operating systems have done more to foster innovation by forcing Microsoft to adapt and break the fossilization that in the end takes large companies and stops the innovation which made them so successful take
The linux window managers and the linux app programmers need to standardize the interface so that most if not all linux programs have a semi consistent look and feel. This is the one area Microsoft has been stomping linux. We can win the individual battles but without doing this we will loose the war in the end.
The next area Linux OS's needs to head is new protocols and new methods of accessing net services. This will insure that Linux maintains the edge that draws power users to it in droves.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Innovation did not die. Look at what we have now. It got better.
MS is not *responsible* for the acceptance of computers into the home.. that would have happened *anyway*, as technology progressed. MS just leveraged it so they would appear to be the sole player.
And this is *not* about the 'Linux' community, it is about antitrust law.
And this will stand as an example to all corporations who think they are above the law.
You seem to be counting innovation as "changes relative to earlier MS OS products".
Some of us seem to recall there being a consumer OS that provided a GUI interface having been available from a company other than MS since, oh, 1984.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has set up a web page for No. 00-5212, United States v. Microsoft, and No. 00-5213, New York, et al. v. Microsoft. The page includes a schedule and court documents.
In addition, you can join an official mailing list to be notified of submission of new pleadings or court orders.
According to James Grimaldi of The Washington Post, Microsoft intends to target District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in its 150-page appeal Monday. Others predict it is a distraction to demand recusal for Jackson's comments to news media, released after his decision.
As I mentioned in discussing another /. topic, the D.C. Circuit Court judges are exceptionally savvy about technology, and are equipped with Apple Powerbooks. Unfortunately, however, it appears that some of the judges on the panel will have to recuse themselves because they were Justice Department employees before becoming judges--and those judges had considerable antitrust experience, in contrast to the remaining judges.
Let's hope that the current popularity among some "pundits" to bash the judiciary does not carry over to politicizing and weakening the verdict all of us need in this case in order to carry out business in this new era.
(BTW, what's "outwith"? I know "outwit"...)
Actually, it's a common myth that AT&T built our telephone structure. If you look back at the early history of telephones in America, you'll see that there were literally hundreds of different companies that built the infrastructure and offered services to various parts of the country. All AT&T did was leverage their dominance to swallow up these smaller competitors until they owned nearly the entire national telephone grid (note: a few of the early AT&T competitors resisted and still exist as small regional telecom operations today). At the same time they were buying out, or crushing, their competitors, they also got some effective legal protections in place to secure their monopoly (like having municipalities pass ordinances specifying that only one telephone line could be strung on municipal poles, and AT&T maintaining an iron grip on those lines).
I'd also like to point out that the Internet probably wouldn't exist in its current form if AT&T had remained whole. Much of the modern Internets resilience comes from the fact that packet traffic is routed through multiple fiber backbones from multiple providers. Those providers simply wouldn't exist if AT&T had retained its monopoly. And do you think AT&T, a single profit driven corporation, would have installed multiple backbones to keep the network running well? Heck no, they would have gone with the cheapest option available. It's also likely that AT&T would have tried to exploit the Internet boom by instituting fees and rates to increase their profits. Higher Internet access costs would have muffled the growth of the Internet, and would have likely dampened our long economic growth period.
And you think breaking them up was a bad thing?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Yeah this Christmas at a cinema near you "The Fellowship of the Ring"
Starring:
Bill Gates as Sauron
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson as Gandalf
Association for Competitive Technology as misc Orcs and Wargs.
AOL as Saruman
I see. And what innovations 'died'?
The Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only browser that shows the full range of the Microsoft Standard Code for Information Interchange characters. Other browsers either show the smart quotes as ? or not at all.
First off, one thing to remember about appellate judges. They're extremely busy people, with very little time to waste. If you want to score points with an appellate judge, the way you do it is to keep your arguments clear, concise, and realistic. If there were three "real errors" in your trial and another twelve "didn't affect the outcome, but still wrong", ignore the twelve and focus on the three.
If you put all fifteen in your brief and force the judges to figure out, on their own, that three of the issues were worthwhile and the other twelve was just attorney ego-stroking, don't be surprised if Los Federales take a very dim view of you.
Microsoft lost in trial court, but they wouldn't have lost as badly if they hadn't committed the cardinal sin of pissing off the judge. You can get past any legal hurdle in any courtroom except that one.
With a 150-page legal brief, which the appellate judges will have to examine point-by-point in their opinion, Microsoft is guaranteeing to make a lot of judges on the appellate bench unhappy, too.
Were I Microsoft, I'd have focused on only a handful of issues (and maybe made a token attempt at discrediting James Allchin, since he turned out to be Boies' best witness). I sure as hell wouldn't go about writing a 150-page monster which is guaranteed to make me enemies of the judges before I ever set foot in their courtroom for oral arguments.
that the court's web page is running IIS
First, you aren't allowed to introduce new evidence at the appellate level (except in extremely unusual circumstances). There's no new testimony allowed, there's no new evidence allowed. All you're allowed to argue on is the court record.
Microsoft had plenty of opportunity to show "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser". The reality of it is, not only did they not show this, their own witness discredited this claim.
James Allchin's direct testimony (submitted in written form) claimed that customers benefitted from the integration of browser and OS in ways which were not possible with the products being separate. He had seventeen or eighteen points which he hammered on.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Boies' cross of Allchin ought to do in the Litigants' Hall of Fame. Allchin was bloodily eviscerated on the witness stand, and Microsoft's strongest witness turned out to be the strongest witness, all right... strongest PLAINTIFF'S witness.
They might argue that IE/Win is beneficial to the users, but the court record shows MS's own witness admitting, seventeen times, that the integration conferred no benefit.
In other words, they're just putting that argument in there to look good. I'd expect the appellate judges to come down pretty harshly on them for it.
Another thing to keep in mind--the last time the appellate bench overruled Jackson, they said that tying products together was lawful as long as it conferred a benefit to the consumer. Most people don't remember that; all they remember is "they said the `integration' was okay". Microsoft is apparently depending on the appellate court to say that integration is always okay.
But if the appellate court holds to their earlier opinion, Microsoft is in a hell of a lot of hot water.
When one has to choose between pine, mutt, and so many other options, and, in the end, uses Netscape as the mail and news client, installation looks much harder than it really is.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think this applies to Win2K as well, but in ME, you right click on the desktop, go to 'Active Desktop' and then 'Show Web Content'
------------
CitizenC
My name is not 'nospam,' but 'citizenc'.
I'd agree that Win98, Win98SE and WinME are not exactly stellar
advances on Win95, but you're being unfair about Win2k: it offers a
lot of important improvements over NT4 (eg. long uptimes, improved
scripting and remote administration, much improved security features
in the registry, rebootless device changes). Win2k is a plausible
server OS, a claim I don't think was true of NT4.
How likely do folks think that this will go to the Supreme Court? The
case will only be heard if the Supreme Court decides to hear it, and
they decided not to hear it earlier. My guess is that if the appeal
court largely agrees with Jackson's legal judgement, then they will
not examine the case, in which case we can expect the case to be
finished by summer next year. Opinions?
The reason Europe and Japan have the lead in mobile phones is that the area to cover is FAR smaller than the U.S. You cover more population with less investment.
Go read up on how BT is doing. That's the UK's monopoly telephone service. Guess what, they're just starting to put out DSL. Why? Not as much profit as ISDN. Oh, don't forget the "no free local calls" bit. My first phone bill over there was 600$, 90% local calls!
Duh, of COURSE AT&T built most of the modern telephone structre in the 70's. Who else do you think would do it? Dunkin Dounuts?
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
In all these M$ v/s DOJ, we seem to forget who is the real winner here by including a browser with the OS. Solaris does it with their HotJava browser. Linux does it with Netscape. Irix does it with Netscape. So why is it strange that when Microsoft try to ship their own browser with their OS everybody jumps 50 feet high? The truth is, may be most of the /. users would rather use Netscape. Good choice. But we seem to forget that 90% of Windows users out there (think about the +40 age group or the not-so-computer-savy user out there) would rather simply switch on their computer and surf the net, without having to do anything. It's already terrifying for them to even switch on the damn box, let alone removing IE and installing NS.
That's what I always do anyway. I want a browser independent of the OS. But that's my choice. Most people just want a browser that works.
Now what is disturbing is the fact that whenever you buy a PC you get M$ Windows automatically with it. Hopefully things are starting to change and we are today seeing the major PC manufacturers offering Linux as a viable alternative OS.
So what's the point? M$ stand a good chance of walking away a clear winner. Consider the # of browsers currently available for Linux. Now that OSS is clearly being made more public, more and more people are aware of better alternative out there. Besides, the software landscape 5 years ago (whenever the initial suit was established) has changeg so much that will the case still stand on its 2 feet?
Oracle software is run on the major intnernet sites, and Sun hardware obviously own the market on the hardware side. Shall we break Oracle too? What about Sun?
Today M$ stand against much more competition that ever. Linux is growing leaps and bounds every single day. Star Office is turning out to be a wonderful replacement for M$ Office. Netscape will always be the browser of choice for Linux/Unix users alike.
Do we still think that M$ still holds a monopoly and is worth breaking up? AOL should definitely be on the list.
--
> being a monopoly is illegal.
Is the cable company illegal?
Is the gas company illegal?
Is the electric company illegal?
Is the water company illegal?
Is the US Mail System illegal?
Monopolies, by themselves, are NOT illegal.
The state recognizes certain monopolies.
You can see the categories here.
Gates will be forced to _choose_ a company with which to have is stock in, so he could either have stock in the OS company, or he could have stock in the applications company. This would be a difficult choice, as I see it, the apps company would make more money, but Gates not going with his roots on the OS side could be interpreted as a vote of non-confidence in the flagship product.
Going to be interesting to see what happens. Personally, I think cokehea^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, Bush will overthrow the decision, or interfere at the least. All those campeign contributions gotta count for something (although, last time I checked, microsoft gave money to both campeigns, more to Bush, I believe, though).
..don't panic
Clueless fool. Being a monopoly is not illegal.
However, once you have a monopoly (regardless of whether it's Mediterranean/Baltic or Boardwalk/ParkPlace) different rules apply. You can't use your existing monopoly to get another monopoly.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
do we need any further proof that Microsoft is just delaying the hand of justice inevitably? The message couldn't be more clear: "go ahead, split us up, but not until we have our cross platform .NET stategy in place"
How we know is more important than what we know.
join the Young Microsofts
How we know is more important than what we know.
wow.. you really should publish this and have conferences on it and maybe a few court cases for publishing false history. Just because you lived under a rock until the Information Super Hypeway jumped into the limelight and conviced you to part with a few grand doesn't mean you know anything about the "home computer market".
Why don't you tell us all how the television set really wasn't popular until the VCR came about?
How we know is more important than what we know.
uhhh.. reverse engineering? After all, the code is there.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just picture this:
Judge: Will the defense lawyer please present their opening statements...
MS Lawyer: I'm sorry your honor, but my Windows 2000 Laptop Crashed last night in my hotel. So I tired to re-install it using the CD I brought, but I forgot the CD-Key back in the Office. So I had the document on a disk. Well when I gave it to my counsol, they had an older version of Word on it so I couldn't open it. (We know how that dang format keeps changing) Then once I retyped it, when I tried to print it I got a Fatal Exception Error and was forced to reboot once again, re-install the printer driver, and finally try to print it out. But then explorer crashed an corupted the video driver Vxd. So what I'm trying to say is that I don't have my opening statement.
It also gets brownie points for mentioning Linux before the mainstream media got hold of it :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Microsoft also is expected to question Judge Jackson's conduct during the trial.
In past filings, company attorneys have argued that Judge Jackson was biased against Microsoft and that he failed to provide them with an adequate arena to present their case. They've also accused Jackson of mishandling the case and applying antitrust laws too broadly. - from ZDNet story
This is incredible chutzpah. They started with a judge (Penfield) who was a political conservative disposed to be sympathetic, and then MS proceded to lie as lamely as possible and really piss him off. MS had plenty of chances to defend itself, but the facts, as found by Penfield, are that MS comported itself as a monopolist, engaged in restraint of trade, and basically has become a criminal under the antitrust laws.
Of course, it doesn't end there. MS then says that it's willing to discuss a satisfactory solution, in that it would simply agree not to be a bad boy for awhile. Its representatives are taken aback and offended at proposals to break MS up. Doh. If for no other reasons, there should be punitive considerations.
I use MSIE on my Mac, I use OE and the Office suite. The San Francisco MS team's Mac products are good. But MS's actions as a corporation have been found to be illegal, and need to be dealt with. Should they pierce the corporate veil, find the individuals who carried out intimidation and other anticompetitive acts, and punish them? I think that's too radical for the judicial system (it would mean nasty polluting CEOs could go to prison, not good for the DemiPubs)... so MS has to pay the piper. Amazingly, MS simply believes it never did any wrong, even as its attorneys were caught up in lies before much of the world press.
-Dave
Why is it that people totally miss the point here? Certain customers of certain PC vendors wanted Netscape preinstalled. The PC vendors wanted to do it to keep their customers happy. Microsoft, being a monopoly and thus having no need to keep their customers happy, threatened to raise the price of Windows, an unrelated product, to those PC vendors that preinstalled Netscape.
To continue your analogy, it would be as if RedHat told (say) VA Linux that they would have to pay more for their distro if they wanted to include Konqueror as well as Netscape on their boxes. Clearly this is not the same situation, because RedHat is not even a monopoly supplier of its own software.
The clue that most MSFT defenders need to acquire is that nothing MSFT is accused of would be illegal if they hadn't short-sightedly crushed all their competition in the desktop OS market. When you are a monopoly there are things you can't legally do. In the absence of market forces, the government acts as the regulator valve. Not always well, but better than not having any control at all.
--
--
E_NOSIG