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Second Thoughts: Microsoft on Trial
Microsoft's gargantuan and controversial presence triggered a techno-social revolution over the last decade. Microsoft's dominance -- and as some describe it, predation -- helped shape the computer revolution and the new economy. It was also instrumental in spawning Open Source, Free Software and the related individualistic, decentralized media that may well have saved the Net from the corporatized fate of much of the rest of the non-virtual information culture.
One of the problems is that our media has become a mob, lurching one way, then the other.
Perspective and clarity is hard to come by.
For more than a decade, the popular press uncritically accepted just about every single thing Bill Gates and his company said or did. Big media were instrumental in uncritically promoting products like Windows 98 and in establishing the notion of Microsoftian omnipotence. Gates couldn't have done it without them. They slobbered over his bland pronouncements, his shamelessly excessive mansion, his inane books, and his company's workable but decidedly uninspired and proprietary software.
Now, by and large, they've turned, and just as uncritically accepted the notion that Microsoft is an illegal and predatory monopoly and that the company needs to be broken up. Gates' astonishing arrogance -- lying to a federal judge comes to mind -- is much to blame for this change. But monomania isn't a crime.
Some articulate federal appeals court judges -- the case is before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia -- appear to be challenging the finding in the Microsoft trial, although they've yet to make their ultimate findings. And they and others are raising some troubling questions about the conduct of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who has himself told interviewers he knows little about the issues involved and believes there are good grounds to appeal his ruling. (The transcripts are available from the Federal Document Clearing House, a private subscription service that is not online, and from various online news sites. They make compelling reading).
I was always uneasy about Jackson's ruling and posture. To me, Microsoft's crimes were arrogance, mediocrity and greed, the hallmarks of our corporatized culture -- none of them, alas, illegal in our business world. Much as people fault the quality of Microsoft's software and decry its practices, the truth is that tens of millions of people have used their products successfully to access the Net and the Web and run their PCs. And the idea that a Microsoft break-up would enhance competitiveness and creativity have always seemed dubious, even menacing. The Net has been so creative and explosive in part because the government didn't know enough about it to mess it up. That's a dangerous precedent to change.
I'd rather see MS challenged creatively in the marketplace, or by the generous spirit of movements like Open Source, than by a bunch of admittedly clueless federal bureaucrats, or an erratic judge. It seems clear that no one in the federal government from Congress to the regulatory agencies to the White House -- is in a strong position to oversee or regulate the Net or the increasingly disparate tech nation.
The appeal raises a host of complex issues, many of which fly well over my head. But the heart of the government action against Microsoft is clear enough: the U.S. accused the company of paying ISP's and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers) hundreds of millions of dollars to shut down Netscape's distribution channels. It also accused Microsoft of illegally tying its browser to Windows; of predatory pricing, and of exclusive dealing. But several questions about the government's case seem legitimate, even troubling, and it seems both fair and appropriate to launch an open discussion about them, to see whether they have any merit -- or not.
First:
Antitrust law says that for a company to behave illegally, it must establish a monopoly (not in itself illegal), engage in anti-competitive practices, and perhaps most importantly, harm consumers. Were consumers demonstrably harmed by Microsoft? If so, how?
Did government antitrust prosecutors actually prove that Microsoft prevented Netscape, or any other rival, from bringing new products to the marketplace?
According to unchallenged testimony in federal court this week, Netscape distributed 160 million copies of Navigator in l998 alone. At the time, according to the appeals court testimony, there were approximately 100 million Net users, which means every one could have acquired Netscape's product if they wanted to. Is it true that these users were not free to choose Netscape?
In ruling against Microsoft, Judge Jackson defined the "relevant market" that Microsoft controlled as operating systems and replacements to operating systems. He then found that Microsoft's admittedly aggressive tactics harmed Navigator. But Microsoft's lawyers have repeatedly argued -- correctly -- that Navigator isn't an operating system, and that Netscape had neither interest in nor means to supplant Windows. Was Judge Jackson wrong when he concluded that there was a direct link between Microsoft's bullying tactics and direct harm to consumers in the "relevant market?"
Judge Jackson also found that Microsoft had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by tying IE to Windows. Appeals Court Justice Stephen Williams sharply challenged that view in court this week. Whatever Microsoft's conduct was, he argued, "it's not tying." Several other justices said they were sympathetic to Microsoft's argument that it integrated IE with Windows because there was little or no real market for computers without browsers. Isn't that so? In this time period, as the Web was exploding, why wasn't Microsoft justified in integrating Windows with its much-hyped OS? Wouldn't doing otherwise prove corporate suicide? Was Microsoft really supposed to sit back and allow competitors to dominate this critical market, surely threatening Windows in the process?
The Justice Department has been struggling in the appeals testimony to respond to arguments that computer operating systems by their very nature might have to be standardized, and that as a result a monopoly was inevitable. If Microsoft didn't create one, its lawyers claimed, somebody else would have and at least some of those potential "other" monopolies had a vested interested in seeing a divided and weakened Microsoft.
Plenty of questions remain about Microsoft and its practices. Did the company ruthlessly, or illegally, discourage competition? Did Microsoft make it too difficult or in some cases, impossible, for consumers to remove IE from their desktops? Did Microsoft unfairly -- or, more to the point, illegally --wipe out or damage potential competitors? But there are civil, criminal and other remedies for this behavior, if it occurred, short of chopping up the company.
The truth is, there is a fine but important legal line between ruthlessness, avarice and illegality. There are also profound implications for the tech world if Microsoft does, in fact, break apart, especially if it happens for the wrong reasons.
Now there is also the question of judicial bias. Some legal ethicists -- including nearly all of the appeals judges -- have sharply criticized Judge Jackson, whose dislike for Gates sometimes appeared personal -- in one interview, Jackson linked Microsoft to drug gangs -- and who made critical comments about Microsoft and its founder to reporters while the appeal process is still underway. The appeals judges are so upset with Jackson that they are reported to be considering sending the case back to a different judge. Jackson's behavior is considered grossly unprofessional, especially in the federal judiciary. Something seems off about this judge. The final decision in the Microsoft case will shape software and new economy laws for decades -- the ruling ought to be credible and beyond doubt.
Another problem is the selective nature of the Justice Department's prosecution of Microsoft, which suggests the government is regulating predatory corporations when it certainly is not. In the Corporate Republic, the land of AOL/Time-Warner and the Disney Corp., is Microsoft really that unusual, or even particularly predatory?
Are other giant theme park operators really free to create new versions of Disney World, whose synergistic marketing "tie-ins" would seem to a non-tech layperson to dwarf the alleged linkage between IE and Windows? Can new information content and delivery providers possibly compete with the monster that is AOL/Time-Warner, a truly awful merger with dreadful implications for privacy, free speech and competitiveness; a link-up that the very same Justice Department only recently approved with hardly a blink? This is a company crying out for a break-up from the day it merged.
Microsoft appeals trial transcripts are available on almost all major news sites -- USA Today, CNN.com, the Washington Post and the New York Times. People can reach their own conclusions about the testimony, and the appeal court's questioning of lawyers for both sides. It's implicit that your comments are always welcome on this site, but your thoughts about these questions would be particularly welcome.
There is nothing illegal about having a monopoly. If I was the only person in the world to produce thingamagiggies, I'd be perfectly legal.
If Bob entered the market for thingamagiggies, producing them in his own, non-patentable infringing way, but I still sold 95% of them to the world, I'd still have a legal monopoly.
But if Bob's sales numbers started to increase, and to combat it, I drastically undercut the price of the product, taking possibily a loss while increasing sales, such that the reduced profits that Bob might have made forced him out of business, then I could be illegal in using my monopoly power to stifle competition. And that's the heart of this case.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Ok, 2 faults here. First, you're completely wrong. There were a wealth of personal computers before MS came along. The C64, the TRS-80, the Apple-II, the BBC Micro. MS had some minor parts in some of these computers, but they certainly weren't instrumental in making computers affordable. If any single person could possibly make that claim it would be Wozniak.
Second fault, you are implying causation when all you have is correlation. Computer prices were dropping ANYWAY.
Microsoft Windows has consistently gotten more expensive. It has quadrupled in price since the first real release (Windows 3.0) even when taking out the effect of inflation.
Nonsense! SQL Server is junk. People who deal with large/complicated datasets recommend either DB2 (the proper mainframe version) or Oracle. MS SQL Server is a toy.
MacOS, GEOS, Desq-View, OpenLook, CDE, OS/2, GEM, WorkBench, ... Every single one of them was arguably better in at least one category. And I would say that 3 from the above list were better than Windows 3.1 in every category.
Linux was released in 1991. It was usable for my purposes in 1992 (I dumped Interactive for it).
More confusion over the difference between correlation and causation. Here's an extreme example of your mistake: 100% of people who ate carrots in the 1800s are now dead. Your logic produces the conclusion that carrots cause people to die. This is because you confuse correlation with causation.
Check the price of computer hardware 20 years ago. Microsoft doesn't produce hardware, yet you would seemingly give them credit for the reduction in hardware prices too.
When Word started to dominate the market it was demonstrably inferior to WordPerfect. Word had an inferior interface. Word was slower and consumed more disk. Word corrupted your documents on a regular basis. Word supported fewer printers. Word had fewer features. At the time I always thought Word was a rather poor knockoff of MultiMate, and nowhere near as good as WordPerfect.
So why is Word dominant today? It certainly isn't because Word was a better product.
The only meaningful way to split up Microsoft is to put their marketing in one company, engineering in another, and forbid all contact between them.
It would work! Engineering would be forced to make products with MERIT, and marketing would be forced to hire a new round of engineers (and probably destroy themselves by being a well-funded dotcom with all hot air and no product). And in both cases, we get what we want - an opportunity for third parties to move in and reclaim market segments that were lost to questionable MS tactics years ago.
Obviously this will never happen - it's too likely to work, so no one will have the nads to attempt it.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
After all, Microsoft didn't use threats of increased prices and delayed shipments of Windows stop OEMs from making new systems start with Netscape as the default browser instead. Oh, wait, they did. Microsoft didn't use their monopoly position to demand that ISPs remove references to competing browsers from their literature and web sites and limit the percentage of users using Netscape or risk losing access to the Windows Referral Server. Oh, wait, they did too. Well, Microsoft certainly wouldn't use their monopoly position to force the exclusion of Netscape browsers from web sites on the IE Channel Bar. Oops, I guess they did that too. Well, Microsoft couldn't have threatened to kill Microsoft Office if Apple didn't make IE the preferred brower on Macs. Oh, they did that too?
Gosh, I can't see any possible reason why customers lacking knowledge of options is Microsoft's fault. It's not like they orchestrated a campaign to deny information to consumers.
Check the Findings of Fact. Especially the section Excluding Navigator from Important Distribution Channels.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
If you don't remember how consumers were hurt, reread the findings of fact, especially section VII, "The Effect on Consumers of Microsoft's Efforts to Protect the Applications Barrier to Entry. It's a remarkably readable document and the reasoning is easy to understand. In short, Microsoft took choices away from consumers and OEMs who wanted the choice.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
In this time period, as the Web was exploding, why wasn't Microsoft justified in integrating Windows with its much-hyped OS?
:)
No doubt I'm going to get jumped on for pointing out a logical error in this article, but this line made me think.
Why wasn't Microsoft procescuted for requiring Windows to run on top of it's OS. They don't give you a choice of Window manager. You only get one choice. Microsoft Win32. What happened to Desqview for NT? Why couldn't IBM port Presentation Manager to NT, along with the PM API? Because MS has used a secret API (the Native NT API) and only allowed people to use the Win32 Window Manager and it's API (which in Many cases is just a wrapper to the Native NT APIs.
We should sue
-- Hulver's site
1. Before MS came along, computers were unaffordable. Now we all reap the benefits of a computer in every home.
Apple? Anyone? I know that I was in Elementary school in the mid 80's everyone had Apple IIs
2. MS have consistently brought down prices - they cut prices in the spreadsheet market; they are producing software that is cheaper than what was their before. And they're still doing it. MS Sql Server, which is at least on a par with Oracle, is much cheaper than it, and thus benefits consumers that way.
Really? Linux is free, so is free BSD. Even Linux companies selling the software sell their Proffesional editions for less than Win98. The same stuff that Win2k can do. And I won't even touch lisencing issues for the number of users. Still don't believe it? If they aren't a monopoly then why did WinME start off at $50 and go up to $89 after everyone had been locked into it?
3. Believe it or not, Microsoft actually do produce good software. Certainly Windows 3.1 wasn't very stable, but in 1992 what competition was there? Certainly not Linux. And even given that, if you ask me if I want my secretary on the current state of the art Linux, or on Windows 3.1 and Word 2, I'll bet you a dollar to a hundred that she'll be more effective on Windows 3.1
Competition? What about Mac? I'm not a Mac lover but I can tell you that Mac was better in 1984 when it came out than 3.1 ever was. And I'd give my secretary Linux with star office. Its more compatable with Office now than Word 2 would be!
4. Microsoft have benefitted the US economy. It really has. Compared with the UK, for instance, the strength of the US IT industry is vast - and much of this strength is due to Microsoft.
It would probably be stronger here and strong in other countries had MS not stiffled competition all over the world.
5. Nearly all opposition to MS comes from jealous competitors. Netscape have been beaten fair-and-square by MS, for instance -just compare Netscape 6 with MSIE, for instance. This just backs up my point - Microsoft software is of exceptional quality. They hire the best programmers because they can afford to, and they release top software. Word beats anything else on the market, and as a usable OS, so does Windows (and on stability, Windows 2000 ranks pretty highly to). Combine this with easy administration - the idiot in my office is in charge of DNS administration, which he can easily do using MS DNS manager, because it's just point, right click/properties. He'd have no chance with Bind. The fact is, for a small business with not many staff, Microsoft software allows them to compete with the big guys - they can offer ISP provision, because they don't need highly paid admins. This is great news for the economy and great news for them.
I've worked as a Unix admin and I doubt that I could pick up Win2k or NT and just know it out of the box like you suggest. Just because something is point and click doesn't mean its easier (fact is alot of people find it to be a pain). Win2k isn't all that bad I agree, I have friends that use it but they are highly trained proffesionals, Joe user can't pick up DNS and operate it until he even knows what it does. If MS products are so easy why does MS have the MCSE? And why are there countless Word for Dummies type books?
6. The fact is, as I have stated, there is a lot of jealousy and resentment out there - whereas the truth is that Microsoft produce damn fine software, and their very low prices (believe me - just check the price of a spreadsheet 20 years ago), mean that although they have a monopoly, that has come through selling good software at low prices and therefore high volume. Damaging Microsoft would damage the consumer. What do you want people to use? Star Office?
Actually as has been shown countless times their power has come through threats and lying and theivery. Not just netscape but as mentioned above, Samba, Wine to name a few. Microsoft doesn't play fair and we'd all have better software if they had to compete. And for the record some people like Star Office and Netscape and don't have compatability issues with it.
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
Katz has IMO missed one or two things in his summary. The key to Microsoft's guild is, I think, in the motive.
One could suppose, as Katz put it, that any company that didn't try to tie it's browser to it's "much-hyped OS" would be committinc corporate suicide. Fair enough. The real question is not "Should they be allowed to do it?" but rather "Why did they try to do it?".
The key to that question is not to try and answer the question through hindsight. We have to put ourselves in Bill's shoes when he made the decisions he made. Let's break it down back in 1995 or thereabouts:
Which brings us more or less to today. It's easy to look back and say "Well, Microsoft should be allowed to integrate the OS and the browser, it's an obvious step." Sure it is. Of course, Microsoft probably stumbled onto it by accident, and it's ludicrous to decide that they should never be allowed to do this natural step just because they did it orginally for malicious purposes.
But that's the point! They did it for malicious purposes! They tried to use their existing monopoly to destroy a competitor. That's an anti-trust violation. It all comes down to motive. It's like an old legal riddle. If a man tries to fire a gun at you but doesn't know it's filled with blanks, what is he guilty of? He's still guilty of Attempted Murder even if he couldn't have suceeded becuase in his mind he was trying to do the deed. Simillarly for Microsoft; there may have been no actual threat (not really) but they sure tried to quash it and they should pay the price for their abusive actions.
There are, of course, other issues in the trial. The OEM licensing thing is IMO a damned good illustration of abuse of monopoly in and of itself and was part of the trial but doesn't get the coverage to the same degree that Netscape or Sun does. And at the end of the day, the truth is the trial demonstrated that Microsoft makes use of all its applications and software to defend it's OS monopoly. Although breaking them is hardly an ideal solution (even IMO), it would at least divest their OS division of an arsenal that it's been using to stave off the slightest bit of compitition. Which creates new products and ideas (I will not use the dreaded I-word if I can help it!) which is good for consumers. And if you don't take that into account when deciding if Microsoft's monopoly is good for consumers, you're just not seeing the whole picture.
My (long-winded) $0.02
Wood Shavings!
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
Think back to the AT&T breakup example. When AT&T was the only long distance provider, the system ran on copper. AT&T and Corning had invented fiber optics years before, but were in no hurry to role it out. After AT&T had competition from Sprint and MCI, fiber started be planted in the ground like it was going out of style. When you think of the major internet backbones, how many of them are (or were) run by AT&T? Few, if any. All of the major high speed fiber links were run by MCI and Sprint. (If my memory is correct.) Fiber is what makes the Internet possible today. AT&T's monopoly may have caused us to still be using 28.8 connections, with slow backbones, had they not been broken up.
.net means your web browser is now a platform. How many of you really believe Microsoft's .net products will work just as well on third party browsers as on Windows/IE?
Also, think of all the features offered today on your phone line. Compare that to the standard applications that come with windows. Call waiting, three-way-calling, caller id, etc., can be compared to "paint.exe", "wordpad.exe", etc. Since Microsoft has a monopoly on the consumer OS market, what incentive do they have to improve any of the feature already included with the opperating system. When is the last time and upgrade to windows included a better paint program? They've had since 1995! In six years, they should at least be able to upgrade it to be a mini-photoshop, much less handle more than one image at a time! If AT&T had not been broken up, whether we would have these inovations in telephone technology is a real question.
Look at KDE and Gnome. Even though they are not commercial products, they keep up with each other in terms of many of the "core" features. There is incentive to expand on the core features because there compititions has offered an enhancement. Microsoft does not have any of that incentive in the desktop market.
Also, the statement that Netscape had no chance of becoming a platform is dead wrong, and Microsoft knows it. It can be explained in four characters...".net".
Lastly, the punishment is not set in stone. I have heard lawers argue last week on CSPAN that it was never intended by judge Jackson to stick. A remedy needed to be entered for the trial to go on to the next step. The appeals court has the option of saying "we disagree with finding of fact A and D", therefore a trial must be held to come up with a new more fair remedy. More importantly, if they disagree with A and D, then B, C, and E are no longer open for discussion, since two courts have upheld them.
With that said, I would just like to say that the lawers in court right now have no clue what the case is really about. Get them off of their bullet point items, and they have no clue what their arguments should be. At least in many cases this is true for both sides of the case.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Using that key sequence to bring up a login dialog effectively prevents the "false login screen" style of password sniffers.
Control+Alt+Del only pulls up a login screen in GUI mode. Recent versions of Windows NT (4.03 and later including 5.x) include a technology called DirectInput that lets programs easily read the keyboard as a set of 104 buttons (which is how games prefer to read the keyboard). For example, if Control and Insert are player 1's and 2's fire buttons, and Alt and Delete are jump buttons, you don't want to put up a login screen when player 1 is firing and both players are jumping. Thus, a program that uses DirectInput can spoof a login screen.
"But NT isn't designed for games. Use Windows 9x instead."
Games are just another application. The only reason Windows 9x wasn't a version of NT is because of marketing.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Thanks to Apple, who made the first affordable home computer, and Compaq, who reverse-engineered the IBM PC. If OS/2 had won the desktop war instead of Windows, computers would still be cheap. If neither had won, and each had 50% market share, computers would still be cheap. Microsoft deserves exactly no credit for this.
MS have consistently brought down prices - they cut prices in the spreadsheet market;
Kindly name 3 spreadsheet programs that cost more than Excel. Can't do it? Didn't think so.
they are producing software that is cheaper than what was their before.
I could flame your spelling of "there", but it seems like a very fitting malipropism this time. :)
And they're still doing it. MS Sql Server, which is at least on a par with Oracle,
Bzzt. People pay more for Oracle because it out-preforms MS SQL.
is much cheaper than it, and thus benefits consumers that way.
PostgreSQL is free, runs of free operating systems, and works great.
Believe it or not, Microsoft actually do produce good software. Certainly Windows 3.1 wasn't very stable, but in 1992 what competition was there?
There was the Apple Macintosh, which was a better GUI, more stable, far easier to learn, and even ran MS Office better than Windows 3.1 did at the time.
Certainly not Linux. And even given that, if you ask me if I want my secretary on the current state of the art Linux, or on Windows 3.1 and Word 2, I'll bet you a dollar to a hundred that she'll be more effective on Windows 3.1
I'll take that bet.
Microsoft have benefitted the US economy. It really has. Compared with the UK, for instance, the strength of the US IT industry is vast - and much of this strength is due to Microsoft.
Microsoft software is also used in the UK, so that statement is just silly. Or are you trying to imply that the economy would be weaker if we were buying most of our software from other US companies? That's even sillier.
Nearly all opposition to MS comes from jealous competitors. Netscape have been beaten fair-and-square by MS, for instance - just compare Netscape 6 with MSIE, for instance. But IE 5.5 beating Netscape 6 is not what happened. At the time when Netscape's business model was scuttled by MS's illegal practives, IE sucked! Had Netscape remained a strong company with lots of resources to command, the browser they would have developed by now may have been outstanding... but we will never know, thanks to MS and their illegal abuse of monopoly power.
This just backs up my point - Microsoft software is of exceptional quality.
Anybody who says that clearly has no experience working with exceptional software. It's like the old saying goes, "I used to think I never had a bad day, until one day I had a good one."
They hire the best programmers because they can afford to,
No, they hire green, mallable kids right out of college, and mold them into the One Microsoft Way.
and they release top software. Word beats anything else on the market, and as a usable OS,
Word is not an OS. It also is not the best word processor available. It's widely used because it's been bundled with "Business PC's" for a decade now, and people who don't know any better think that .doc is a standard.
so does Windows (and on stability, Windows 2000 ranks pretty highly to). Combine this with easy administration - the idiot in my office is in charge of DNS administration, which he can easily do using MS DNS manager, because it's just point, right click/properties. He'd have no chance with Bind. So, you are saying that Windows is the ideal server environment if you want your network to be run by idiots. That's pretty tough to argue with, I guess. :)
The fact is, for a small business with not many staff, Microsoft software allows them to compete with the big guys - they can offer ISP provision, because they don't need highly paid admins. This is great news for the economy and great news for them.
Small businesses would be much better off using free software and spending a couple hundred bucks on O'Reilly books. Not only would it be cheaper, but then they would be using a variation of UNIX, just like the big guys do!
The fact is, as I have stated, there is a lot of jealousy and resentment out there - whereas the truth is that Microsoft produce damn fine software, and their very low prices (believe me - just check the price of a spreadsheet 20 years ago), mean that although they have a monopoly, that has come through selling good software at low prices and therefore high volume. Damaging Microsoft would damage the consumer. What do you want people to use? Star Office?
Now you are just repeating yourself, because you ran out of arguments.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
However, their attempts to cut off Netscape's OEM channels did appear predatory, and it may have fallen under anti-trust law. Yes, lots of folks downloaded Netscape, but this was before fat pipes to the home - many home users would have had to do an overnight download over 56K.
Furthermore, a starting user who wanted Netscape would have to use MSIE to download the software - I seem to remember MSIE was pretty bad at downloading more than an hour at a time. Was that a strategy?
Even if a new user wanted Netscape instead, he had MSIE, and could not excise it from the operating system. It may be free, but the end user already paid for it hard disk space. If he had to re-install Windows, there it was again, the default option, only a Windows Update away from the latest version.
MS will release IE 6.x soon, and they are already debating whether to release it on Windows 95 or not. This means that existing users will have to upgrade their operating system to browse with the latest browser. Yes, it's been done before, but Microsoft has a way of adding features so that in a few years, you won't be able to browse many sites without IE 6.0 or later.
Government intervention may not be the best bet, but something will have to give eventually. We should re-double our open-source, free software efforts.
Introducing artificial barriers to interoperability when one is a monopoly seems to me to harm the consumer.
-Craig
--
Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Lets see here:
1) Microsoft makes money charging for software.
2) Netscape had grand visions of a browser-centric model of computing.
3) Microsoft gives away IE. This is a money-losing proposition. It doesn't make sense if you're playing "fair" - not trying to manipulate the market
4) Netscape gets obliterated.
There's nothing wrong with this?
The problem with the MS monopoly is that for average consumers there's no alternative to using MS software. This means that their no longer subject to the pressures of the market - you HAVE to buy Windows, and it can be whatever they want it to be.
The stealth DRM in Windows ME is a good example. MS will eventually disable your machine's ability to play any MP3 you haven't had "blessed" by MS. They plan to activate this feature once they have "acquired sufficent market share" - doubletalk for "once we've driven the competition out of business."
But unless I'm a real geek, I don't have an alternative. In a normal market, the competition would be running adds with slogans like "Don't let Microsoft control your computer. Use Bob's OS instead." But there's no choice. Linux, maybe, but the average person doesn't want to install a frickin shareware program on their machine. They're gonna run Linux?
The only competition that can survive is free software, because MS can't use it's predatory pricing to drive it out of existence.
Did Microsoft get a fair trial? Probably not. Bear in mind this America, you no longer have the right to a fair trial. You can be sentenced to death while your lawyer is taking a nap and that's not grounds for a new trial. Microsoft got something that approximates a fair trial better than a lot of trials. Tactless comments by the judge don't change the facts - they're anticompetitive.
Previous antitrust actions in overly concentrated markets have had the desired effect - Long distance is cheaper now than it was before. Going back to the heydays of antitrust, our petroleum-dependent economy would have been bled to death by Standard Oil. Our information-dependent economy will be bled to death by Microsoft if we let them - subscription software is how they'll suck the life out of you.
Similarly, how the judged seemed to downplay Netscape as a competitor -- certainly not now, but in 95-96, they could have been big. I remember distinctly Netscape and Sun saying that with the browser and Java, you could have your own operating system, and they were pushing that as the Microsoft killer. However, when MS included IE and their specialized Java VM (which they have already been punished for branding as such), they broke a lot of Java code, and since "everyone" was using IE, Netscape could not break into this market further.
Plus, you need to consider that Netscape at one point was payware for commercial use -- they only dropped the fee when IE started to gain market ground. That's rather strong evidence of a monopoly using their power. Of course, nowadays, a non-free browser that doesn't have something extra (read: Opera) is considered laughable.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
This is where I have a big problem with your post. Yes, MS products in the past have had really shoddy stability. But NT 4 works well, and 2000 is even better. If you are using 95 or 98 in the office, you deserve to have to reboot it every day.
I've got two servers at work. One is running NT 4, and I never mess with it. It's a PDC for a small network. I've been ignoring it for months, and it's still going.
My other server is running W2K. It's a domain controller, DNS server, SQL server, and IIS server. I hammer on it every day. It's current uptime is about 52 days. So far this semester it's uptime is 99.995% and counting. That's not bad considering it's not on a UPS, and I'm just a lowly undergraduate student without any professional supervision.
I'm not MS fan. I run FreeBSD in my apartment, and I love it. I won't try to defend Microsoft's idealology or actions. But to say "oog, I reboot windows every day" or "oog, blue screen!!!!" just shows ignorance and the inability to think objectively for yourself.
What further doesn't make sense about this whole situation is that Jackson seems to be targeting the ties between Office and Windows as the big threat. This is Microsoft's current power base and Jackson realized this, but I think the leap of logic to say that because of the netscape debacle they should break up the office products from the OS is pushing it. The great danger with IE has nothing to do with office, but rather that they can leverage that monopoly to push a monopoly in the server realm (proprietary ties between IE and IIS that push people away from open platforms). In fact, if you look at Microsoft's current models it looks like they want to get rid of the traditional packaging of Office and replace it with pay-per-use on-line software driven by a Microsoft server and browser.
So, I think that the DOJ and Jackson really dropped the ball on this one. I think that Microsoft is a dangerous monopoly, and once this suit falls apart (which I think is an almost certainty), Microsoft will feel free to start using both hands again to strangle competition. Microsoft won't really learn anything (except that it's a good idea to send large checks to politicians) and we'll continue to have a Microsoft dominated industry for the foreseeable future.
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No. You're mistaken. You compare "install Linux" to "use Windows". You think most people can install Windows themselves? They can't. They rely on whatever comes with the computer. Many don't even differentiate the OS from the hardware. And MS created a monopoly for itself at the computer manufacturer level back in the late 80's early 90's with the predatory practices that eventually caused them to settle their original DOJ case.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
- The ILOVEYOU virus and its infinite children. Though MS didn't write the virus, the existence of the hole combined with the monopoly they have in the OS market are what really caused the problem. If somebody wrote a virus for a tiny hole in BeOS would it have affected the world like this one did?
- Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format."
- Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day.
People *ignore* these things, because they figure that it is just par for the course. Know what? It's not. I call it demonstrable harm to the consumer. People hate Windows, we know that. All day, on the subway, at lunch, in meetings, you can hear people commiserating over their latest crash or virus. But they never blame Microsoft. They never say "I'm not going to use MS products." Why?Because they don't even know that other options exist, for the most part.
Why? Because MS is a monopoly.
Isn't that demonstrable harm to the consumer? This is not a case of "what they don't know won't hurt them". They don't know that better solutions exist. It's hurting them, they just don't know it.
I do not run Microsoft products. I pay less for hardware and software, my computer runs faster, and crashes less. That, too, would seem like demonstrable harm by Microsoft. When I point out Linux to users of Windows they do not argue the qualities of the software with me. Know what they say? "I have to run Office2000 because everyone else does." That, again, is a sign of the monopoly that MS has.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
dmorin writes:
"Let's look at what else MS has given us:
The ILOVEYOU virus and its infinite children.
Though MS didn't write the virus, the existence of the hole combined with the monopoly they have in the OS market are what really caused the problem. If somebody wrote a virus for a tiny hole in BeOS would it have affected the world like this one did?"
Oh come on! You can't show that Microsoft "harms consumers" because some idiot wrote a worm and other idiots helped spread it by executing a script file attachment to an email. It's not like the thing just auto-spread. There was a lot of stupidity involved. You could as easily send a Perl script to any UNIX out there ask the users to save the attachment and then execute it. Same result. Granted Outlook didn't have enough warnings about executing scripts but to say tht it shows that *Microsoft* has harmed consumers is just plain stupid. I mean really, wake up!
"Incompatible file formats between its own products year after year. I love it when Office97 tells me "Oh, not everyone has Office97, you should save in Office95 format.""
Incompatible file formats is nothing Microsoft specific. If you wrote something with the latest version of Word Perfect, you can't open it in Word Perfect 4.2, nor can you open it in emacs or possibly in Star Office (not sure about that but you get my point). Yes, Microsoft isn't any better than the rest, and quite possibly is the worst of them all, but again, it's nothing that Microsoft introduced. The same problem has always been there. And at least Office supports a ton of formats so you can communicate with the rest of the world if you know what you're doing.
"Machines that you expect to have to reboot every day."
We have shitloads of servers at work - both Linux and NT, about 50% of each.. We run pretty similar stuff on them; a database (MS SQL and Oracle mostly), a web server (IIS & Apache), a Java servlet engine (JRun) and a variety of other stuff like SMS gateways, SMTP servers, LDAP servers etc. etc. and uptime is not a problem for any of these machines. Yes, the Linux boxes have less problems but we consistently have uptimes of several months on all of the machines. Rebooting typically happens when we need to do some major upgrage - not when something crashes.
As workstations, we have NT4's and Windows 2000 and there too uptime and crashes are not a problem. I can't remember when I would have rebooted my NT4 workstation last - must be several months ago. On my laptop, I have Windows 2000 and I haven't seen a single blue screen of death or OS crash.
To say that crashing machines and daily reboots are such a horrible problem, caused by Microsoft, is just a plain lie - or maybe you just haven't used anything Microsoft has made in the past couple of years. Maybe you should try so that you know what you're talking about.
Please people, realize that this isn't some blind pro-Microsoft post. I would just prefer that people stick to FACTS when they post their anti-Microsoft ramblings.
And you know, there are always two sides on the coin. I had HUGE problems with various Linux distros some time ago on my desktop machine at home. It would freeze every once in a while (maybe every 2-3 hours or so) under X, no matter what I tried. I changed hardware, changed my motherboard, CPU, memory.. no change.. Finally I installed Windows 98 on it and I had no problems. Sure, typically it would be the other way around, but if you have had 100 blue screens of death in one day on a Windows box, remember that there are people who have had similar experiences with other OS's. It's nothing Microsoft specific.
I heard a good explanation for the control-alt-delete to login thing. Whether or not this was MS's intention, I'm not sure, but it certainly works out well.
Using that key sequence to bring up a login dialog effectively prevents the "false login screen" style of password sniffers. If one of those were running, you'd press C-A-D to login, and get the wrong screen, so immediately you'd know something was wrong.
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"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
A number of errors here. Microsoft certainly triggered no such revolution - it rode a wave that was well underway, and excelled at profiting from it. At most, one might argue that they accelerated a revolution that would have happened no matter what. Microsoft certainly did not in any way "spawn... Free Software" - the GNU project started when MS was still a very small player, providing an early and primitive version of dos for IBM, along with their basic engine and the like. Free Software was a reaction, yes, but to the actions of the likes of SUN and DEC, not MS.
While I think I agree with the overall point of your article (certainly I agree that "One of the problems is that our media has become a mob, lurching one way, then the other. Perspective and clarity is hard to come by." and that Jacksons decision has some flaws...) I really can't imagine that you would want to spread such misinformation as this.
As to the judgement, a deeper issue that you don't mention is that antitrust law itself is a tangled mess of subjective criteria to begin with. Monopoly is a concept solid enough to be fairly useful in economics, but not quite solid enough to be objectively definable in law. A monopoly is a single supplier in a given market. In order to determine whether or not MS "is" a monopoly, one must define the relevant market. Personal computer software? Not a monopoly. Desktop x86 computer software? Not a monopoly. MS-Windows compatible software? There they are a monopoly, and given the share of the total personal computer market that represents, that makes them a juggernaught, for sure, but there are some definate reasons to find such a narrow definition of the market for legal purposes quite troubling - it nearly makes them a monopoly by definition. By that criteria, Apple must be a monopolist (just a monopolist in a smaller market) and so is SUN, and hell, Symantec has a monopoly on Norton Utilities, right?
So I've watched this whole story with very mixed feelings. Microsoft has a tremendous market clout which they've used in VERY questionable ways. They do stifle innovation, they do harm consumers, and it's tempting to view anything that strips them of a little part of their all too great and all too often abused power as a good thing. But antitrust law is just as scary and abusable.
At any rate, a thought provoking article. Please do correct the factual errors before publishing an article like this in the future though - it's bad enough that an army of MS Marketdroids are out there misinforming people about the history of computing - the last thing that should happen is people like you helping them.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Your examples are too recent. M$ brought much more to us:
Basic everywhere. At time of smalltalk and lisp, they pushed basic. Thanks for that. They ruined my life.
DOS, EMM, XMS, 640Kb limit, A20 gate. The whole DOS api. It was not at stone age, folks, it was in the 80's. This harmed a lot of children, that ended-up re-developing unix in the 90's. Digital civilisation lost about 10 years in the process.
The paperclip. This harmed millions of users.
The login panel that is dismissed with the escape key. The 'control-alt-del' to login. Someone should pay for that.
Winmodems. Don't forget winmodems.
Oh, and the 10bits in the cylinder number. The 504Mb limitation of hard drive ? And the 8Gb limit ?
And FAT, the Fragmented Allocation Table ? Who should pay for the countless hours morons spend looking DEFRAG.EXE painfully moving blocks around ?
And the windows API ? Winsock ? The API where you need a hidden window to receive data on a socket ?
Oh my god. I don't want to break microsoft apart, I want to dissolve bill gates in an acid bath.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Capitalism does not reward innovation in anything but marketing. The best car is not always the best-selling car for example, it's an image thing. Capitalism only works properly when the consumers have all the information required to make the correct choice. Only then is innovation rewarded. The idea of marketing is to prevent this from happening. Letting the market decide has produced so many monopolies and cartels in the past 150 or so years that there has to be a balance, and the only organisation big enough to take on an abusive monopoly is a government.
Yes, it's not the government's business to mess around in the marketplace. Capitalism rewards innovation. Letting capitalism take its course may not produce results as quickly as the government would, but it will produce better results in the end.
And "Open Source" fits in with capitalism nicely (though RMS would disagree).
wishus
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Having said that, some elements of this trial do worry me. As an American ex-patriot, now living in London, I am worried about the ideaology that this trial represents. It didn't seem to be about Justice, it seemed to be about the government imposing its economic ideals.
Since I have lived in Britain for a few years, I have come to think that in affairs like this expediency is often the best way. Idealogy should be left to students and High School pupils - there is no place for it in the grown up world, because it leads to a divorce from reality/
Also, the hypocrisy of many people in the tech industry worries me. It seems that they are libertarian in their outlook everywhere, except for when it comes to Microsoft. Why the two-faced attitude? It is emotion clouding their viewpoint.
I am an expatriate; events like this are turning me into an ex-patriot.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Because they don't even know that other options exist, for the most part.
Why? Because MS is a monopoly.
And thats Microsofts fault? No, its the fault of the ignorant consumer. If you don't research your options you're going to have to put up with what you're given. For the 'average' user at home Windows is the best operating system. Most people couldn't even install, for example, Linux. Its simply not as obvious and easy to use as Windows. Consumers are a stupid bunch. They tend to like little paperclip assistants, 'Wizards', and autorunning CDs. It doesn't require any thought. That suits most people fine. Microsoft have dumped vast amounts of money into simplifying computer systems so that they can sell to as many people as possible. Maybe one day Linux will be as easy to use as Windows. Until then though Microsoft will not have a rival in consumer operating systems, irrespective of what the US courts rule.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The problem with this entire comment is it is only accurate when referring to Microsoft's behavior *before* it had acquired its monopoly. Low prices? Everything else in the computing world has demonstrated consistently dropping prices, *except* for Microsoft products. Priced Microsoft Office lately? Priced Windows, period? How come they're more expensive than they used to be? How come OS alternatives (read: Linux) are so much cheaper (read: free)? I won't say that Microsoft software is total garbage, but I will say that if it weren't for the monopoly they wouldn't be getting a 100% premium in price for it over products as good or better. That, simply, is harm to the consumer. And Microsoft had nothing to do with hardware prices. And Netscape wasn't beaten "fair and square." READ the findings of fact. READ the testimony in the trial court! What Microsoft supporters don't seem to be able to answer is: Why exactly did Judge Jackson, a Reagan conservative appointee, develop such an animosity towards this successful company which has supposedly brought so many benefits to the country? Why? Sure, he expressed his loathing for the company: but how did he come to feel that way? Read the transcripts.
TANSTAAFL