Continuing Twists In Microsoft, Intel Cases

An Anonymous Coward writes: "New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and California Attorney General Bill Lockyer have threatened to pursue their own sanctions against Microsoft if they conclude that the Justice department isn't being tough enough. Amongst other things, they demand that Windows XP "receive close scrutiny in arriving at a judicially ordered remedy. Go NY!"" NaughtyusMaximus points us to this message at Anandtech about Via reacting to Intel's patent-infringement suit by turning around and suing Intel -- for patent infringement -- in Taiwan and the U.S.. Via is also countersuing Intel in England.

Comments

It'll be interesting to watch this one play out

[alewando]

By which I mean the federalism issues raised on all sides. The current administration supposedly believes very strongly in principles of federalism. The current supreme court has come down recently in favor of federalism. So the Federal government will just do its thing and let the states go ahead and do their thing, right?

Unfortunately, no. If there's one thing the current administration believes even more strongly in than federalism is political power to override such matters of principle when a pet interest is implicated. If the feds aren't going to break Microsoft up, you can bet they're going to do everything in their power to make sure that their will isn't obviated by some ragtag liberal states like New York or California (both of which voted for Gore).

It's going to be one hell of a political grudge match ahead. The trenches have already been dug; we'll have to see who's the first to start lobbing chlorine gas.

Re:It'll be interesting to watch this one play out

[startled]

"The current supreme court has come down recently in favor of federalism."

Was that before or after they overrode Florida's decision on how to handle their elections?

DOJ attack on MS helped cause the dot-com crash

[billstewart]

The anti-trust attack on Microsoft was one of the three main causes of the dot-com market crash. The two others, which were more obvious, were Greenspan's jacking up interest rates in a capital-dependent market, and the fact that the dot-com boom was partly a tulip-bulb bubble, driven by hype and boundless optimism, so negative public opinion about the realism of advertising-funded petfood.com biz really can lead to the market declining.

Microsoft's vital contribution to the Silicon Valley business models, besides being the Evil Borg, was that the two main profit-realization methods for startups and their VCs are to either Go Public or Sell Out - and the big companies to sell out to were Cisco for hardware startups and Microsoft for software and services startups (e.g. Hotmail.) By threatening to rip Microsoft into little pieces and stomp on them and cutting its stock price in half, the anti-trust attack entirely destroyed MS's viability as somebody to sell your startup company to, which also means that VCs are less likely to give *you* funding because their only ways to make tons of money from your company are to Go Public in a now-shakier market or to Actually Make A Profit, which is a much slower and more speculative approach. But at the same time, the VCs' pool of money was drying up because the interest rates were getting jacked up and because the stock market was being hit hard by MS's nose-dive and by the simultaneous nose-dive of the money-intensive telecom sector, which had just acquired gigabucks of debt funding the fiber optic glut and was looking pretty shaky itself. And Actually Making A Profit was also becoming much harder, because the services startups and internet-doubling-every-15-minutes ISP expansions were Cisco's big revenue sources, so it's a vicious cycle spiraling downhill.

Microsoft's insistence on PC vendors' using their OS on everything may be overly greedy, but the Bundling Internet Explorer For Free issue that dominated the anti-trust hype is a bogus issue. First off all, it was largely PR and lobbying from Netscape, who had gained their market position by giving away their browser for free, so it's pretty hypocritical of them to complain that MS is doing the same. But beyond that, the Java/Netscape/Sun/Corel/Linux world was making it clear that once everybody had a Java-capable browser, the operating system underneath would be basically irrelevant, so you'd be able to replace the MS-DOS underneath with something Much, Much Better and still use the same applications you were comfortable with. I happen to think that's true, pretty much, and *I'd* like to jump in that direction at the office as well as on my home PC, but it is a machine gun pointed directly at Microsoft's heart, and they really had no choice but to derail it by trying to offer their own substitute for it. And having your competitors threaten to give away free software that makes your entire company obsolete and unnecessary would seem to be a reasonable justification for doing the same thing in response, and it's unfair of the AntiTrust thugs at DoJ to bust them for it, especially when it's that conspiracy of competitors that lobbying DoJ to do so. Even if they are the Borg.

Re:you have no idea what you are talking about

[FFFish]

No, please, do go on and on.

F'rinstance, destroy what $270b in wealth? Until one cashes out, it isn't wealth: it's hypothesis.

And I'd like to hear you expound on how MS has paid employees with stock. They've been diluting their own stock, to a ridiculous extent. That scam has worked really well, as long as everyone was duped into driving the price up, and no one cashed out bigtime.

I'm curious how breaking up MS would be a net loss in wealth. Seems to me that there'd be greater competition in the marketplace, allowing other companies to gain a foothold and expand. We'd have more products to choose from. There'd be more people working. All of which sounds to me like a net increase in wealth. Except for Bill. He might experience a decrease. And wouldn't that just suck.

So, do go on. Teach us.

If you MS haters are so smart, answer this.

[profeti]

Why not get together and put your money, talents and intellects where your collective mouths are?

Build a company that will kick Microsoft's ass in the marketplace. If each of you were to throw in say $1k and perhaps build on some existing projects, I'm sure you could come up with products that would be superior to the stuff MS puts out (not much of a challenge). Then all you need to do is to be really good at selling it (if you don't want to make a profit that is up to you but you need to make the masses want and need it). I'm absolutely serious here and don't intend to sound sarcastic.

Now I know someone will say "M$ will destroy any company that tries to compete with them" but that doesn't fly, it's just an excuse, if your better at playing the game you win. Logic and history suggest that no entity, regardless of power or abuse there of, is unstoppable.

Any takers ?

For the record: I think that most MS products suck, bless there little hearts they just aren't very good at writing software, but they sure know how to sell the stuff. And I'm typing this from OS X.