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Proposed Legal Test For Combining Programs
MrKhuel writes: "Professor Lee Hollaar of the University of Utah School of Computing has filed a neutral friend of the court brief, which has been posted with other electronically submitted documents in the Microsoft anti-trust appeal, discussing problems with some arguments for combining programs and how to test for the legality of program combination in anti-trust cases." Beyond the Microsoft case, this has some interesting applications.
Yes, during the trial I really wished there was someone with half a brain in that court room. When the judge essentially said "take IE out of Windows until we determine if it is legal" and Microsoft's response was "If we do that Windows wont work!" the obvious and most sane response would have been "Well Windows 95 works just fine without have IE built in, you didn't have it before, why do you need it now?" but the judge couldn't say that because he isn't a computer programmer. Microsoft openly lied to this court on numerous occasions but no-one gets held in comtempt, no-one gets hit with perjury charges.
How we know is more important than what we know.
To sum it up: According to the author, Microsoft should prove that (for instance) combining IE and Windows has a real benefit to consumers that can not be achieved in another way. Since bundling IE and Windows has a bad effect on the possibility for competitors to market their products, this effectively destroys their market and the innovations they could bring to it.
This is a bit of a reversed way of thinking to me, because you can't seriously expect Microsoft to think about what is fair, honest and chivalrous to their competitors every step along the way of developing their system. For instance, on page 20 the author writes that marking up the helpfiles of Windows in HTML is basically a way of forcing the browser and HTML-parsing functionality into the Operating System without a legitimate reason. That's simply not true - as we all know HTML is actually a standard for marking up stuff like that, and Microsoft uses it to publish their help online aswell as in the Windows helpsystem.
Another example is on page 22, where the author writes that increasing the maintainability of applications written for Windows because a lot of functionality used by them is already built in the OS has no direct benefit to consumers. Again I disagree: for instance, if all applications use the same built-in serializer for a certain fileformat, changes to that format would only require a single componentupdate to the operating system. This means the consumer won't have to update all the applications seperately - not to even mention all the possible bugs that could result from the various implementations. Ofcourse, using a standard DLL in Windows to perform certain tasks doesn't require it to be part of the Operating System, but in what other way can you be certain that all your potential customers have it installed?
Wait just a sec here...
you can't seriously expect Microsoft to think about what is fair, honest and chivalrous to their competitors
I beg to differ. This anti-trust case has been about precisely that! Microsoft has always run their business with the specific intent of destroying their competitors. Look at their constant incompatible Word upgrades, the way they reported fake errors for DR-DOS, and on and on. I will admit the author is proposing the opposite action from what Microsoft has done historically, but the observations which cause those actions have always been there.
Whether or not the anti-trust case is useful / needed / evil is a different matter altogether.
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