How the DOJ/MS Settlement was Reached

Drek was among the many who wrote in to tell us about the following: "Wired is running an article about how the MS/DoJ settlement was reached. More importantly, the DoJ has set up an email address where citizens can send comments about the case: microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov. This might be a good way for Slashdotters to do their civic duty."The address has been around for a bit, but still, a renewed call for comment.

Comments

I've said it before...

[WasterDave]

...and I'll say it again. You have, on the one hand, a goverment that really wants to be able to bug electronic communications. On the other hand, a monopoly software company that controls 99.999% of desktops in the world. Now, the software company owes the government a favour so....

Dave

Read the Settlement.

[Futurepower(tm)]

I read the settlement. It is great for Microsoft, and almost meaningless for everyone else.

The provisions don't begin until many people have been pushed into using Windows XP (eXtra Pain), after which they will be trapped in ways that are not part of the case. Here is a quote:

"Starting at the earlier of the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP or 12 months after the submission of this Final Judgment to the Court..."

Why not starting now?

Microsoft must disclose APIs, but may charge royalties. This prevents competition from Linux.

There is nothing which prevents Microsoft from using secret Microsoft Office file formats in an anti-competitive way.

The settlement provisions apparently do not apply if Microsoft claims that its anti-competitive software practices provide security.

The provisions provide Microsoft significant benefits.

Re:Consumers just don't matter

[_Sprocket_]

If Breaking a monopoly up is meant to encourage competition, how will splitting Microsoft into an OS division and application division encouraging competition? Now you have two companies, one with a monopoly in OS's and the other in Internet and applications.

Do a little poking around. The concept, and the merrits of this idea, have been covered and debated rather well on Slashdot and a number of other forumns. Without going in to said merrits, I'll outline the basic concept as I understand it.

The basic idea revolves around Microsoft's using a monopoly in one area to enforce a monopoly in another area (and back). Product development is done with marketing and monopoly enforcement in mind as much as functionality. Spliting these divisions would remove the incentive to enforce another division's monopoly (or provide undue advantages to another division). The divisions would then be forced to compete with other products on a more even playing field.

Again - there's a lot more detail and a some considerable debate on the merrits of these concepts. Dig around. Its easy to find and repeated numerous times via numerous sources.

And when they seperate, what would hold the Internet/Application company from charging for Internet Explorer?

The market. Would you pay for IE after X years of getting it for free? Would you pay for it rather than use other free products? And if you had to pay for IE, would you then consider other products that also require payment (such as Opera)? Oddly enough - that's the workings of a free market.

Re:Consumers just don't matter

[Malcontent]

Althought not the ideal split it would still help a little. MS used it's monopoly profits to subsidize office. When office came out it also cost much less then competitive products because MS did not have to make money on office. Same with IE, money, etc. Now that monopolies have been built in office, browser, media player, operating system ms can subsidize things like passport and MSN. If any of these products had to live or die on their own merits they would cost much more. Can you imagine is passport was a company which had no other product but was trying to convince people to use it? Nobody would sign up and it would die. MS can force people to sigh up and feed money into it forever to keep it alive. Break up the monopoly and that money dries up.

Ideally they should be broken into a dozen or more companies.

Re:actually...

[Trepalium]

There's a lot more to it than that. Netscape's webserver used to be quite popular on Windows NT 3.5x. Many people would simply purchase a copy of Windows NT 3.51 Workstation, and install Netscape's webserver on there, and have a perfectly functioning webserver for as many hits as they wanted to get. Microsoft caught onto this, and modified the license agreement in Windows NT 4.0, to restrict the maximum number of concurrent connections to 10, in order to force more people to buy Windows NT Server (that cost $800 more), which just incidently came with a free copy of IIS. Lets compare here, shall we? In the NT 3.51 days, people often bought a $100 copy of NT Workstation and a couple hundred on Netscape server, versus ~$900 for the MS server, but with NT4, they HAD to buy the $900 MS server along with the Netscape webserver product if they wanted to run Netscape, or they could just settle for IIS that came with that already expensive server software package.

Microsoft insisted that the NT 3.51 license didn't allow use of a webserver, but it was vague enough that it probably couldn't have been enforced, but they made certain that it could be in NT 4.0. Netscape wasn't the only one that was bitten by this license change -- O'Reilly's Website server also fell victim to it. Today, the only places Netscape/iPlanet's webservers still exist are on Novell (it's bundled with certain versions of Netware) and UNIX servers.