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Dan Gillmor on WinXP
A reader writes:There's a new column from Dan Gillmor on SiliconValley.com about Windows XP. The column calls for an injunction stopping the shipping of WinXP. Dan's got a well thought out list of reasons why and how it would work."
The case isn't really about trying to help another OS establish itself in the market. Indeed, Microsoft has every right to have a monopoly position in any particular market. What they don't have the right to do is to use that monopoly position to aquire market share in another market. While the fact remains that MS has a desktop OS monopoly, they have the ability to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace, and from their claims to manufactorers that DRDOS wouldn't work with Windows to their refusal to license Windows95 to IBM unless IBM stopped putting their own OS on machines as well (with the actual phrase "who else are you going to go to? We're the only game in town." being used in one communication submitted as evidence during the trial) to using preditory pricing on their Internet browser and then bundling it as an included application in their os to the current efforts to include everything from firewall software to video editing software, that (using their desktop monopoly to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace) is exactly what they've done and continue to do.
That's what the case is about, and why even an appeals court that has shown itself to be very pro-marketplace upheld the full verdict of guilty.
"Why should they be expected in include the VM if they don't have any control over it."
So by extension, why should they include anything in the OS if they don't have control over it?
I am sure they would love to have proprietary versions of TCP/IP, DNS, and SMTP, but at the moment they do not have any control over these things, and yet the OS still supports it.
Why should a JVM be any different?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
wow, didn't realize MS made a single perfectly safe product. let's see, there's the whole office suite, with macro viruses up the ass and sideways.
then there's the win9x series of OS'es, which put you online in the goatse.cx position, ready for action.
oh yeah, about outlook, i think it might be vunerable, but i forgot how exactly. i think i might have read it at Gibson's site..... something about viruses.
then there is crap like code red, designed to go after MS servers.....
MS has a really bad track record behind it. they have a large, intelligent computer geek base who hates them, as well as some of the crappiest security/coding in the business.
i think the last quality MS product i used was scandisk.exe for DOS. now that was a nice little program.
If there is an OS out there that is actually better than XP, let it fight it out in the marketplace. This is the USA after all.
I hate microsoft products, but I use them all the time. This is because at this moment in the development of the information revolution, they are the best tools for the job.
If there is a better alternative, I am sure American consumers will vote with their wallets as they always have done.
Surely the last thing we need is for the lawyers($$$) to get involved ?
Okay - and then doesn't that mean Compaq has every right to NOT include MSN icons on its desktops and only AOLs? They tried. But Microsoft saw a threat and stomped on it with a last minute licensing change requiring no online service icons on the desktop or MSN had to be included if ANY other service's icon was.. See how unfair it can be when you're NOT the Monopoly? I say shut them down - its sucks, yes and it gives you a dirty feeling, but he's right - Microsoft only understands the use of force and its the only way to get them to behave.
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Then Kelley tried to repeat the trick and wrote a book about the UK Royal familly, oh dear. The problem was not that people did not want to hear bad things about the Royals, quite the contrary, after the soap opera divorces, familly feuds etc. the monarchy had become very unpopular. But Kelley's book made a whole series of unsubstantiated tabloid rumours that the Buck house PR team could explode with little difficulty. At the very time when the country was sickened by their reaction to Princess Diana's death the Kitty Kelley nasty-ography brought them undeserved sympathy.
I think that the Gillmore article and others like it are likely to cause the same reaction. It is very noticable that the Slashcrew have got seriously out of sync with the readership on this one. Most of the posts are saying 'why give us this ill informed made up crap?".
After all if we are going to start attacking MSFT on the basis of made up stuff it might as well be good made up stuff.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Here's the fundamental joke in capitalism: in order to have a free market, the government MUST interfere. It sounds incredibly moronic, but it's one of those funny little paradoxes like how sometimes we have to make war to have peace.
If you give companies complete and utter free reign over the market, they quickly do everything they can to squash all competition and then the free market goes away. You may think, "Well, those companies that do this are better than the competition and hence deserve control over the market." The problem with this reasoning is that once a monopoly is obtained, the company can leverage that power to keep competition down while offering an inferior product.
We have seen this happen in the U.S. during the latter portion of the 19th century, and for this reason anti-trust laws were invented. If the government doesn't stop monopolies from acting unfairly we end up with a situation that is unfair to consumers as well as competitors. A monopoly by one business is just as bad (if not worse) than a government controlled situation. The free market will destroy itself given enough time and no governmental interference.
"Java is hardly a standard and instead it's Sun's way of strangeholding the marketplace to try to sell more Solaris boxes."
Java has not been formally standardized, but specifications for the language and the JVM are freely available. It is not difficult to determine what is Java and what is not. MS changed Java in a couple of key ways. First, they added keywords. Second, they had their compilers put attibutes into class code that only their JVM understood. The JVM specification says that you can put such attributes into the class code, but they cannot affect the semantics of the object. When the class files are executed with the MS JVM, they behave one way (such as calling a COM object), while execution with another spec-compliant JVM (that doesn't understand MS' attributes) will behave in another. This violates the JVM specification, and is why Sun sued to make MS stop doing this.
As for your comment on this being a way to make people buy more Sun boxes, is there anyone that had to buy a Sun product, let alone a Sun computer, in order to get the Sun JVM? Your comment makes absolutely no sense.
"The only guilty party for Java's removal is Sun and their injunction which had the specific intention of crippling Microsoft in the Java arena to allow Sun to become the standard."
Sun went to court to enforce their contract, and prevent MS from passing off their polluted version of Java as the real thing. This is what the courts are for, enforcement of contracts and law.
Your comments lead me to believe that you are from an alternate universe, in which logic works exactly opposite of how you would expect.