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Be Sues Microsoft for Violations of Antitrust Laws
Eugenia writes: "While Be, Inc had the information for over 3 years that Microsoft 'through a series of illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts designed to maintain its monopoly in the Intel-compatible PC operating system market and created exclusive dealing arrangements with PC OEMs prohibiting the sale of PCs with multiple preinstalled operating systems' they filed a suit against Microsoft only today. Today Be employes a single person in a tiny office in Mountain View. Great ..."
In my opinion, some times a single person without the red-tape of a corporate environment can get a lot more done...
Does Be have any assests or $ anymore?
What does Be have to gain from this, this late into their corporate demise/OS trip into obscurity?
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Should they change the name of the company to 'am' or 'is' since they only have one guy now? ;-)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Its about time. I've about had it with Microsoft forcing PC vendors to install Windows on ALL machines. Not only that, but most of the new machines don't come with the Windows media, only shitty recovery disks. Maybe this will make Microsoft/vendors to think twice before pulling their BS.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
At least they won't have any problem demonstrating irreparable harm.
And the brethren went away edified.
Based on this article, if the company only employs one person, s/he must be...
A LAWYER!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Now that it's become popular for other companies to sue Microsoft, who will the next one be? Novell seems to be a possibility. IBM should for the same reason as Be, due to OS/2.
Today it employs only one person in a tiny office...
Sounds like you're wondering why they'd do so *now* of all times, when they can't do anything.
Easy: Nothing to lose. The company has nothing left. Normally it is unwise to sue MS. They'll just drag it on and you won't get a significant gain (i.e. Apple's suit), even if you do win. But now, the worst the spending can do is bankrupt them: which is basically where they stand now anyway. OTOH, the damages they could land could put Be back on its feet.
Sounds like the smartest option left to them.
Companies will do things like this after the game is over to try and get some nickels on the dollar for the VC's. I would expect them to settle for a low dollar amount.
end result, one really rich BeOS employee due to out of court settlement? the mind ponders.
"It has always been this way and it won't change, god bless the fucked up USA" The Briefs
Excellent hardware, excellent operating system, and an incredible talent at making fuss and noise even years after you've lost everything.
Of course, in Be's case, what really is the point of filing now? Is someone going to do this work pro bono hoping (hah!) that they can afford to battle Microsoft in court and win? Seems like they're too late, but then I come back to the first question: How many are there?
Um, they did?
e m& item=2003816966
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt
It would be nice to see Be make a come back. If they got a good settlement out of this, it might give them a new lease on life. The problem would be buying their intellectual property back from Palm. Does anyone know if Palm is planning to use it for anything?
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
After all, you can't bring back the dead, it's not like the murderer can make restitution, so let the murderer get away with it. No use prosecuting, just a waste of the prosecutor's time and taxpayers' taxes.
Infuriate left and right
a) they already pretty much closed up shop and there are no debts left.
b) apple seems to do quite well at selling an OS. even if they also make money on hardware and some crappy little mp3 player.
c) investors would get the money since they got the stick from the anticompetitive practices.
They did. Ever hear of the BeBox?
Microsoft Bad. Anybody else good.
The geek sympathy card goes to BeOS on the simple reasoning that they're not Microsoft... When in reality, any failing company could probably find one simple tiny little thing Microsoft may not have even known what they were doing, blow it out of proportion and use it to reason why their business failed.
Conclusion? If you told your local l33t hax0r a way to break into Bill Gates' computer, they would do it, right? Simply because they'd believe in the purpose enough and they probably wouldn't face too much discrimination amongst their peers, because Microsoft bad.
Without actually knowing the clear evidence presented, it's quite possible that this is just a last-ditch effort to save BeOS by picking everybody's favorite enemy and slinging a little bit of mud in their direction. Embellish a few details, and you've got a case on your hands. And nobody will object, because, once again, Microsoft Bad.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Well, I wish the litigator success, because it would definitely be a boon for PC's sold today to come equipped with more than one OS. However, nobody put a gun to the head of the OEM's who produced single system PC's. To win this case, you would need to demonstrate that the contracts between Microsoft and OEM's violated antitrust laws. Quite frankly, I doubt that this could be shown. Despite the finding of fact in the antitrust lawsuit, you would have to show that it was impossible or next to impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's.
But Dell has been able to sell Linux (which apparently they dropped, but don't worry, HP is now selling them). And other PC companies have been able to do the same (albeit in limited numbers).
To prove that it was impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's, you would need to demonstrate some sort of collusion between Microsoft and Intel, making it difficult for developers to produce alternate OS's on Intel CPU's. That clearly has not happened. The x86 Intel platform certainly didn't hinder kernel development, and Intel has been relatively open about publishing specs.
Good luck Be. Truly, I feel your pain.
Robert Nagle Idiotprogrammer
Austin, Texas, idiotprogrammer, Technical writer
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Is the mailroom clerk, who stayed on just so he could file this lawsuit. When Microsoft settles out of court for 3.7 million he will become the highest compensated employee in the history of Be.
Is someone finally paying attention to the fact that Microsoft's OEM license agreements don't allow vendors to install multiple operating systems? Amazing!
I doubt the courts will do anything about it though; they seem willing enough to uphold trivial patents and ROT13 encryption under the Disney Millenium Copyright Act. But hey, it's worth a shot... Go Be!
---
I lot of people have commented on how this is only happening now because Be is now as good as dead. Be has brought up this complaint before, but they can actually do something now because Jackson's finding-of-fact gives their allegations some teeth. They probably would like to wait even longer, and hope that they have even more to hit MS with, but their time has just run out, finacially speaking.
I fully agree with Be's suit.
Microsoft hit BeOS hard with the release of Windows Me. You see, BeOS PE needed a way to exit Windows without shutting down. This was possible in Win 95 and Win 98, but removed in Win Me.
Microsoft never gave a reason for this, and it is assumed that MS made this change to restrict other OSes from running along side of Windows.
Microsoft's strong-arm tactics in OEM licensing also hit Be hard. Many companies were going to start shipping BeOS machines, but they noticed a clause in their license that would require the purchase of a Windows license, even though Windows would not be used. This would be very costly, so the OEM BeOS idea failed.
Some have said that the size of Be will hurt them. I diagree. Think from the jury's point of view.
You see one large company against one man. That one man used to be a large company, but the other large company killed it.
It is just this kind of tale that will help Be the most in the courtroom.
-twb
-can't seem to make up his mind whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to oppose and end them.
Something rotten in Denmar...err. edmond, hmm?
First, nothing begins if not opening
Does it seem like the only purpose of suing M$ is to get some PR for your company? I can't tell you how many people in management at my company learned of Lindows after the lawsuit...
MS has been found to be a predatory monopolist? Granted, Be could have filed after the appeals court upheld the FoF in the USDOJ case, but these things take time...
Be can now use the fact that MS is a convicted predatory monopolist as part of their case.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Ok. So Be has been sitting on Information for 3 years (3 YEARS!) and they expect to get somewhere now? You know, I've heard of a lot of odd legal ploys, but this just doesn't make sense. When your company is gone, why sue then? Absent your masochistic desire to lose EVERYTHING you have, this smells strange to me. Someone has to be propping Be up for this. Methinks a conspiracy is afoot.
Witty quotes suck.
I for one am glad that Be is sueing Microsoft, and I don't think it's as futile as some think either. If you read the article, the entire suit is based on the destruction of Be, majority of it because Be was unable to get PC OEM's to install Be on PC's they sold because license agreements with Microsoft prohibited that from taking place, else they violate their agreement with Microsoft, and will not be allowed to install Windows on any machines. You cannot get anymore anti-competitive. Plus, with only a single person left in the company, and 99% of its assets sold off, you can't get anymore proof the business was indeed destroyed. The burden on Be now is to prove that is was indeed largely Microsoft's fault and not other elements such as poor business plan, or a product the market didn't need. Hopefully it'll get more press coverage, this should continue to help prove to the average Joe Windows that Microsoft didn't get where they are today because they make a good product.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Due to the conviction of Microsoft as an abusive monopoly and the many businesses they have destroyed more suits will likely emerge. The fact that Microsoft will battle multiple fronts will probably make it easier to win a suit. When Sun, DOJ, Be and AOL togheter pull resources in different directions it will be hard to focus. This will encourage more stomped companies to file aswell. I think that this also has a good side effect, that is open source will maybe have a window of opportunity to thrive. Microsoft will have their hands full for a while now, especially if IBM and other joins the fight.
HTTP/1.1 400
Seriously, MS has already been found guilty of being a monopoly. It wont take much to show how they single handedly destroyed BEOs. I remember so many PC makers who tried to offer Be on a pc till Microsoft totally went agro on the makers and made them stop. BE never had a chance, and the OS from my point of view was incredible. They had way too many walls to face with Microsoft doing their evil. It's time for Microsoft to start paying out for the damage that they've done. No smack on the wrists, but serious hard damage.
A lot of people who helped develop Be probably want to do the same thing again. If they can force MS to let PC manufacturers install other OSes on their machines, it'll give the former Be-folks another shot at making a fortune. (and maybe Palm has the same aspirations, for that matter)
Whether they'll be successful is another story altogether...
Teaching, coding, coffee, revolution.
To have more lawyers than employees!
BlackGriffen
Elizabeth sits in a closet now
and the blissful memories fade
visions of objects and mime-types
and the neat little scripts that i made
Hope for the future has past
from my elegant blue Beth
to various *n*x machines
what little hope I have left
For as much as gnu's full of bounty
and the empire looks to fall from it's hill
I remember a time that was simpler
only a BeBox my wish could fulfill
There's a fantastic book out there called the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It's a fascinating read and contains many case studies to back up these "Laws".
The place for #3 in any market is always small, but obtainable. Linux now owns this space in the desktop OS market (with Apple being #2). Be failed to really develop themselves and build what is known as "mind share". How many people have even HEARD of Be? Not many.
As entertaining as it might be to generate conspiracy theories that somehow the big evil M$ "kept them down", there are other more down-to-earth reasons why Be has always been doomed.
Linux squashed Be. This is because Linux caught onto a market wave as it was happening (the open source movement).. Be tried to catch on to this as well but it was too little too late.
mje0w!!!1!
Those who can, compete...
Those who can't, sue...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I thought I remembered reading that article before, and after skimming it again I was correct.
Since Be is getting into the ever technical legal system with their actions, this could be a very good case, however I feel Microsoft will win this one.
If the contracts Microsoft signed with OEMs stated that theirs was the only OS to be installed on computers, then that is clearly anitcompetitive, and this is what Be is alledging (only Windows on a computer). However, from what I gather from the article Microsoft's contract with OEMs made it so they could be the only OS listed on the boot loader.
Now, this may be cutthroat business, but it's not what Be is alledging. Their software stinks, but Gates is a ruthless business man, which I do admire to a certain extent.
Thus, in this world of legal technicalities, I think Microsoft will win.
When Be had an agreement to ship pre-installed on laptops from a major distributor (I forget, was it HP?) Microsoft stepped in and said "did you read your license agreement? You can install other operating systems if you want, but you cannot boot from them or display how to get to them." So the machines shipped with Be installed, but most people never knew it. This cost Be quite a bit of money.
They tried to get the DoJ to use this in the antitrust trial, but the DoJ said that their case was for illigal tying, not for exclusionary agreements. DoJ urged Be to go to trial separately.
When BeOS was purchased not too long ago, they reserved the right to sue MS based on the judgement of the court in the DoJ trial. Since it appears that the DoJ sold out, Be is finally doing what they should have done earlier.
Better late than never. Good luck, Be!
If there are enough companies to sue MS over a long period of time, suddenly that huge war chest of theirs will start dwindling simply on lawyer's fees alone.
Couple this with the loss of expected revenue from the whole licencing and 'why would I want to upgrade from 2k' issues (that's not to say that they won't make a bundle from XP, just less than they intended), and suddenly you may have a company that has to play by more of the rules than it would like because it hasn't the horde of money to throw at whoever or whatever they like.
This is a step in the right direction, for Be and to bring MS into line.
Wait just a couple of years, and I think Linux will be there. Already, distributions like Mandrake are packaged quite nicely, and GNOME 2 is showing very impressive results. In the meantime, good luck, Be, for whatever it's worth.
didn't jean-louis gasse (former ceo of be) testify during the ms case??? where was this info then???
Why is this a troll? I advocate both Linux and BeOS (now OpenBeOS I should say). All of his points are valid, though perhaps more specifically, he should have said: "charging for a desktop OS for the x86 architecture is never going to work again for anybody other than microsoft ..."
Ultimately what will bring down Microsoft isn't any sort of half-baked government settlement. What will doom them is having to fight a ton of little court battles against every company who ever thought about competing against them. Even if they win a lot of these cases, the pure distraction of having to fend off all these suits is going to hurt them.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
As above. Palm Inc of PalmOS fame owns Be's assets etc including their IP and the OS. Perhaps this has something to do with that? No idea why Palm would want to hassle MS.
---- Drinahn
Even worse, the beast may have infringed on Be's trademarks.
According to legal opinion in Redmond, "Lindows" may confuse consumers into thinking they're getting "Windows". So switching the first letter of your product name with that of another player is bad, right?
Well, "Be" only had two letters to begin with, and MS went and took one of them for their shiny new consumer OS! It's like the David and Bathsheba of the software world. Truly shocking.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
this is the same corporation that sold/auctioned all its assets (down to the last coffee mug) including all its intellectual properties. Shame. Now they try to recuperate some of their lost assets by suing Microsoft. Great. I am always for suing those, um, gents.
question is: who is going to profit? If they are still listed on Nasdaq (which I doubt with their lack of assets), some shareholders will get a penny of their money back. What else will happen? Nil.
Let it go, Jean Louis, Let it go.
You lost to NextStep, remember???
The people who the government let into the court room already spoke of how they were forced into only letting them distribute one OS on their machines, otherwise their MS "rebate" was invalid and would lose a lot of money. BeOS was one of the people who testified in front of then along with a smattering of other companies. It was very frustrating to see BEOS offered on all these killer PC makers for about a month till Microsoft forced to shut them all out and not offer them their rebated because this broke their contract. This was one of the big things that made Microsoft GUILTY of being a monopoly. Now all these companies have to do is walk in and ask for insane amounts of compensation and walk out. I'd be expecting MS to be losing billions and billions over the next few years from companies like Be, IBM, Novell, etc..
Look, i'm sorry but this is complete crap. What if OS/2 had won and driven MS out of Windows... would that have meant that MS could have sued IBM? Signing exclusive agreements is NOT illegal! What is illegal is saying you're going to pay for a copy of the OS regardless of whether or not you ship a copy of the OS on the machine (this is what the consent decree from the early '90s was about, before Be had shipped an OS at all). Further, if they added x or y to prevent Be from booting/installing/whatever, that's LEGAL. They're competing products!
Please folks... substituting MS for a society where companies cannot compete due to fear of lawsuits is about 100x worse. Be messed up bad, and now they want a lawsuit to recover as much as they can. I hope that the libertarian folks among you can see this at least.
Flame on.
"He's not quite dead yet"
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Now that it's become popular for other companies to sue Microsoft, who will the next one be? Novell seems to be a possibility. IBM should for the same reason as Be, due to OS/2.
Since Microsoft is a convicted monopolist who has been proven to have abused its market position to destroy competition (and thus numerous companies, disrupting countless lives), calling this "fashion" marks you clearly as a Microserf, at least, and quite possible a paid PR lackey (as so many who pollute open source and free software sites such as this with their nonsensical "astroturfing" campaigns).
This isn't fashion, it is justice, and long overdue.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Of course he is. Dan Johnston, longtime general counsel for Be, is now the CEO (and receptionist, and IT staff).
I'm just wondering what PC manufacturers they went to in an attempt to get them to carry BeOS.
It looked like a nice OS, although I never got it working on my system. Of course that may have been a significant barrier for PC makers too, as far as hardware support. Technical support may have been another issue. I'm sure they already have their support staff trained for Windows, where BeOS would require retraining. All that for an OS that's really a hobbyist OS doesn't seem like a wise investment for PC makers to jump into. It's not liek Be was finding it's way onto corporate systems anywhere.
I agree with the other poster that said Be should have made and sold it's own systems. Maybe with some hardware specially designed for musicians. They may have even gotten some school contracts with that, but I guess lawsuits are the only remaining option.
The problem wasn't that OEM's couldn't offer another OS, it was the fine print that said if you offered Windows, you couldn't make any changes to the boot loader. Hitachi had a PC, the Flora Prius, that had BeOS installed on a seperate partition, but in order to use it, there were instructions you could get online to make it bootable. Good article on it here.
No way man, MS has so much money there's no way they're going to run out just from getting sued. I mean, they've been in multiple simultaneous court cases since the early 90's and they're still in the black! The only way to win is technical superiority (which Linux has), PLUS mindshare superiority (which Linux doesn't have, yet.) Besides, who wants the american lawsuit industry to thrive? :)
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Microsoft will desperately try to settle this out of court rather than go to trial. If it does go to trial and they lose (and they WILL lose if it goes to trial), not only will they have to pay out more damages, they'll also face the repercussions in PR and in their stock value. Just wait and see...
taco
"Corrupting our youth one mind at a time"
What bearing does Palm Inc. have on this lawsuit?
.
." - Qui Lime Pi, The Phanton Menace
With Microsoft making inroads into the PDA market, is this lawsuit just a ploy by Palm to distract the competition? It forces Microsoft to expend additional resources, while Palm can focus and regroup. Or so they might be thinking . .
"My young apprentice, there is something else behind this . .
Any relation to Was (Not Was)?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I think people are missing the brilliance of this tactic. Yes, Be is no more. It has ceased to Be. (haha) However, they are illustrating the WHOLE POINT of suing by being out of business.
What better way to illustrate a Monopoly that prohibited vendors from bundling competing products, therby limiting the market and competition to any Microsoft monopoly, than to be a competing product driven out of business by the same monopoly?
Now, as long as they can afford the legal fee's, they may actually have a chance at illsutrating WHY MS should be broken up, and WHY MS IS a monopoly in the truest sense of the word.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
You can't say with a straight face that any of the companies bitching about MS executed their strategy perfectly, especially Netscape. They sat on their ass for too many years and tried to increase the revenue on the server side first. MS went the other way and said that once we have the end user mind share, we can take the back end.
we still can't get rid of topic number 87... (BeOS)
I'm a concientious
Microsoft has too strong political support to be touched, it's sad but they have let them go too far and I doubt this monopoly is gonna stop anytime soon. This further suit seems to be aimed to squeeze a few extra bucks before disappearing more than fixing this situation. I think this giant monopoly it's sad because we lost a lot of the variety of choices we had in the past, monopolies kill creativity, initiative, and in the end they end up damaging the economy. Ofcourse until the political class will be composed by individuals who think about screwing Enron stock holders, and to spend public money to finance the weapons industry in exchange of a personal benefit, all this sounds useless, to say the least.
I can dream Can't I.... 8-)
And, as we all know, Microsoft is expert in taking our back ends.
Consider that they may have purchased Be only to use it as a battering ram against Microsoft and all this time tossed it a carrot here and there and finally closed it down after suffering enough losses to look good in court. Depending on how the judge decides to view this it may work, it may not, or Microsoft may just say, "How much do you want to shut up and go away?", and settle out of court.
A sad end for Be, anyway, particularly after watching something like this happen to my prior employer. The name may be the same, but there's a different soul, not to be trusted as the old one was.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I guess that's why I never saw the BeOS in computer stores. MS probably made a deal with them so they would not put BeOS on there shelves :)
From the early license agreements, Netscape was free for educational use. Businesses and personal non-educational use required you to pay for the license. I remember seeing boxed copies for sale all over the place back in 1995. It was available for nearly every flavor of *NIX, Mac, and Winblowz. They sold the "killer app" that made the web a household name. There's no reason they couldn't still be licensing Navigator to this day; except for one: Microshaft's fear.
Microshaft pissed in the punchbowl. They dumped an inferior web browser (everything before IE 3.0 was a joke) on consumers and killed of what could have been a serious cash cow. They did this because they couldn't compete on any real merit (typical Microsoft there) so they undercut the competion on price relying on the OS monopoly to fund the dumping untill they drove the competitor out. They did this with word processors, and spreadsheets if you ever stop to wonder what happened to WordPerfect and Lotus 123. The OS monopoly funds screw-up after screw-up of crappy versions and learning while eating into the competitors customer base with cheap prices. By the time version 3 is out, they've cought up. This "business strategy" works great if you've got the cash to burn and nobody to answer to for doing it since smaller companies don't get to spend years screwing up at least three times .
My point is this: Netscape's complaint is more than legit. Microsoft's monopoly/preditory practices go way further than Netscape or BeOS as well. With the finding of facts to go on, over $20,000,000,000.00USD (yes folks, that's over TWENTY BILLION in the bank), a huge list of enemies, a corporate culture of arrogance, and the current economic slump, they're a prime target to get swamped with lawsuits for the next 5 to 10 years.
It's been a long time coming, they more than deserve it, and I for one am looking forward to watching the show.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Oh right, a MacOS runs great on x86 hardware, doesn't it?
The only reason Apple didn't go the same way is because they brought there own hardware, so how can MS stop resellers installing MacOS on Macs the same way they did to BEOs???
M0571y H@rml355.
The DOJ isn't doing jack shit. It's the states' Attorneys General that are pushing for access (not necessarily public release) of the source code. The DOJ and some of the more weak-willed, pussy states are the ones trying to settle with Microsoft. Get your facts straight before you spew misinformation in public.
...splitting Microsoft in two companies? Yeah, they could use a separate corporation of lawyers only!
While I may support open source, getting window open sourced it is adouble edged sword: on the one hand it would reduce the financial input that MS has from selling the product, but on the other hand increase the user base as Windows advocates try the impossible by porting it to other platforms. This is the sort of pressure that non of the other operating systems need. MS-Windows is already available on more machines than it should be due to piracy, so we don't really need to help the profiliration with an open-source MS-Windows.
Also, remember that the availablity of the source is only as good as the license that gets bundled with it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The whole point of this article is that what MS did is illegal by anti-trust law. MS having a monopoly is not illegal. But leveraging that monopoly to to continue to keep competitors out is illegal.
Therefore actions which by themselves might not be illegal, when taken in the context of a monoply can be illegal.
Look at it this way. Pretend Ford owned 95% of the gas stations in America and said that their gas could only be sold to Ford cars. Now you (the consumer) want to a buy a car. Normally you would never want to be limited to a car that can only use one vendor's gas. But because Ford own's 95% of the gas stations, you have no choice. If you buy a non-Ford car only 5% of the gas stations will sell gas to you making it unlikely you'll find gas when you need it. Take that one step further. Since everyone buys only Ford cars, no one is going to start a non-Ford gas station since there aren't enough non-Ford cars to support it. Hence Ford can sustain its monopoly through its monopoly power. There is no way to break out of this cycle, no matter how much better or cheaper compeitors make thier cars. The only way to open up to competition is through government intervention via anti-trust law.
We made a niche operating system and Linux stole the spotlight from us. We supported PPC only in the beginning, then dual processor Intel, and final any Intel. But has to be Microsoft fault we didn't plan too well.
If they were to call the Be employees who had dealings, it could be a long trial! One person, that could take AGES! Seriously though, I think that this is great timing (and that's probably what they've been waiting for).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is a double edged sword. People bought MS because that is all they were using at work. not because it worked. Windows 3.0 was a mystery to most people, however 3.1 opened the floodgates. it was a decent interface, and people could get away from the DOS prompt. This is what MADE MS the juggernaut. However, the ONLY way they could acheive and maintain this status was to LIMIT what people could order on their computers when they bought them! It is in the HISTORY of computing. Microsoft forced a vendor to choose either to ONLY load Windows on machines, or not load ANYTHING MS related. Their were limited choices back then, however their WERE choices. OS/2 was one, DesqView (and X) was another. Once MS achieved the foothold, they simply tightened the grip until they were able to FORCE others out of the market. People didn't use Windows because it was better than the others. They used it initially because it was what the computer came with.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
But hey, it couldn't have been too bad of a move for the company, they're stock shot up 20% today (to 0.12/share... but still ;).
Are you talking about the Lindows lawsuit?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Or were you referring to the parent?
And the brethren went away edified.
Also: impetus on taking this case forward didn't really arrive until the Supreme Court refused Microsoft's appeal on the finding that they are a monopoly. Given that finding, they no longer need to do the heavy work of proving the existence of a monopoly. 'All' they really have to do now is prove that Microsoft's application of that monopoly power drove them (almost) out of business.
This means that the real work has really only been going on for about 6 months. -- not a bad time scale for filing a complicated suit.
----------------
Even if the Bush administration manages to completely trash the Netscape case, they won't be able to undo the supreme court finding in agreement that Microsoft is a monopoly. My expectation (hope) is that this is just the opening of the legal floodgates upon the big boys in Redmond.
----
Oh yeah... and filing the lawsuit against MS will also probably extend the life of the company.. Many shareholders driving to disolve the company may hold off in hopes that the lawsuit will give them some of the profits that they originally envsioned getting out of the OS.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I can dual boot Windows and RedHat so I'm sure Be could have devloped a workaround.
If they (he) wants to sue Microsoft they should sue them for using the word Me which is so similiar to Be. After all, Microsoft is suing Lindows for using a name similar to Windows.
Microsoft supporters have put about this idea that unless a company executes its strategy perfectly, it has no right to complain about unfair or illegal competition. That is obviously ridiculous, because no company EVER executes its strategy perfectly.
> MS went the other way and said that once we
> have the end user mind share, we can take the
> back end.
Sure. With billions of dollars in cash and guaranteed income from its monopolies, Microsoft can afford to lose money in other segments for years if it makes strategic sense (e.g., it's driving its competitors out of business by giving stuff away). OTOH, companies like Netscape need actual revenue to survive and can't take losses indefinitely.
It has not yet, it lives on in it's two new forms, OBOS and PalmOS.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
What I want to know is, other than deep pockets why is only Microsoft being sued? If the PC makers were in collusion with microsoft - IE they agreed to this tactic - they are just as guilty. MS has deep pockets and can afford slimey lawyers and lobbyists till the stockholders come home, but I guarantee you sue the OEM manufacturers and you'll get somewhere. Afterall, microsoft makes an OS; You have to have a computer to use windows, but you don't have to have windows to use a computer.
What bearing does Palm Inc. have on this lawsuit?
Short Answer: Nothing. It is Be as a Corporation that is suing. Be Inc. was not included in the Palm purchase
Help fight continental drift.
you guys are *so* pedantile.
If OS/2 had won and driven MS out of Windows, and If OS/2 had a legally determined monopoly (as the courts have already ruled in the case of Windows), and If IBM forced OEMs to exclusively distribute OS/2, then, yes, MS could sue IBM for the illegal exercise of monopoly power.
Be literally could not give it's OS away because of MS's license agreements - they offered BeOS for free to any OEM who would distribute it. Only one (Fujitsu, I believe) took them up on it, and Fj was told by MS that, because of their license, they could not let the PC boot to anything other that windows, and could not make BeOS visible at all to the user. As I recall, they shipped a pamphlet with instructions for how to enable the dual-boot capability, but really, how many folks do you think are going to go in and muck with their BIOS?
What MS has done is NOT legal. When you have a monopoly, you have to play "nicer". The fact is, under current market conditions it is virtually impossible to market a commercial OS for x86. Linux doesn't count - it isn't commercial.
Unpopular opinion? No. Ignorance. Plain and simple.
Most murderers will kill again.
be-os failed because it was too hard to pirate. linux, bsd, etc... are holding on because you can try them for free. think about it, if you wanted to try the new MS OS, you'd just borrow a copy and give it a roll -> instant widespread adoption of new products -> then people will buy them, cuz they're already using them and know they meet their needs, or at least suck less than the old version. If Be wanted widespread adoption, they should have pulled an Internet Explorer. Not like they were making any money anyway...
- Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
so if Be wins and goes back into business and then folds again (which is a STRONG possibility) will people still blame it on the M$ giant or on the fact that BeOS never caught on to the masses? (as in the amount of users needed to stay alive not as in the amount of people to join a fruitless cult)
Ave Molech Setting
You're either for individual freedoms, or you're for letting a handful of enormous corporate entities dictate what kind of world we inhabit. Choose one.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
If I were an OEM, I could install both Linux and Windows on the same machine, and be able to offer my customers a simple multi-boot solution without having to modify the boot sector at all. It's called a boot disk. Insert this disk when you want to boot to Linux. The disk contains nothing more than SysLinux, which is set up to boot the linux partition off of the harddrive. There, OEM License problem is solved.
Then just put a little icon on the Linux desktops. "Tire of using a floppy to boot linux?" Curious users will click it, and it will Druid them right through installing a multiOS bootloader on their harddrive. Probably LILO or GRUB. And voila, you're done.
Of course, most OEMs aren't too bright when it comes to getting around license restrictions. The legal departments tend to jump onto the MS bandwagon pretty quickly since it's been their bread and butter for so long.
rough going for the man all on his lonesome, fighting against the giant evil corporation... But would anyone buy a box preinstalled with BeOS anyway? I guess it's better than Windows... -Archan
Blah to the skins and Blah to the punks and Blah to the world and everybody sucks.
YIPEEE!!!
I stole this Sig
Those who can, compete,
Those who can't, commit criminal acts to drive the competitors out of business
It's no exaggeration to say that Microsoft is a criminal organisation - as a corporate entity, they've been found guilty of committing crimes under US law. As a corporate entity, they have committed and continue to commit unethical acts. It has been found by a court of law that these acts in the past don't just stretch the laws to the limit, they fragrantly break them. Without a change in corporate culture, they won't make my shortlist of recommended vendors, regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their products. We can't afford to be tarred with the same brush in some future lawsuits by some savvy lawyer. "Why did you recommend a product produced by a Criminal Organisation, Mr Expert? One that is so flawed as to cause my client such irreperable damage?" No thanks, I don't need the hassle.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Everyone should bring his own suit against M$ as everyone has been harmed by their anti-competitive practices. At least in CA, "any person" can bring an action for, among other things, violation of the unfair competition laws and could potentially recover attorney fees!
It is about time that Be filed their law suit. But, Be is not the only company yet to file their law suit.
IBM is still there in the dug-out. SUN is on deck. And, RealNetworks is no doubt talking to the coach. And, it hard to tell whether Gateway, HP and others might also join in the fun.
Just remember, antitrust law has nothing to do with "your" choices or desires. It is about making sure that all consumers have choices and alternatives.
The universe does not rotate around Redmond and only the innovation and products with the Microsoft brand can count. Microsoft may be arrogant enough to think so and dumb enough to still not understand the law.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
You are the man Dan.
...
History repeating
remember David against Goliath
Go Dan Go
my best wishes
I am so tired of the following arguments:
1)You can't blame Microsoft for running a business for profits
2)You can't blame vendors for wanting to sell to largest majority
3)MS is simply giving the consumers what they want
etc. etc.
LISTEN: It doesn't matter if you are anti-MS, a VB Developer or Linus himself - Microsoft is a monopoly. It "earned" it's position in the marketplace through illegal practices.
It broke the law. It didn't do this yesterday, or a couple days ago, it's been doing it for years, ever since it came to be. All of the above arguments for "get off Microsoft's back" are invalid by means of history. The current industry landscape wasn't anyone's choice - it's the result of a crime.
"vendors install MS because they know people will buy it"
No, vendors install MS because MS has a monopoly on the OS market, giving them LITTLE CHOICE. This isn't conspiracy theory, it's fact.
Let Be sue Microsoft. We all should be suing Microsoft. How many hours of productivity have we lost to operating system which stole the industry? How much money have we given Microsoft without having a choice of where to spend it?
This isn't a "Microsoft sucks" thing - it's a "Microsoft broke the law" thing. Just because the Bush administration asked the DOJ to back down doesn't mean it wasn't illegal. They were still found guilty.
Thanks to this, we have Windows. We have an OS based on business, not technology. We the government buying it droves, which not only makes our national security at risk, but has actually caused battleships to "crash" (Anyone else remember the "smartship" that had to be dragged back to dock thanks to NT?)
Nobody should be letting Microsoft off early, especially Windows users. Imagine how much better Windows would be if they had a little competition to keep them busy?
inky
But with that out of my system, you do have a point. Part of the reason MS is so successful is the publicity they get, whether good or bad, with regards to their products. I suppose OS/2 is proof of that ... not too many people ever found out about it before it was too late.
I really do hope that Linux, or any of its siblings, can drive MS back to its humbler origins as just one of the *many* providers of OSes. With that, good luck, Be.
When MS controls the market like this, this deal is not optional for the OEMs. Consumers demand MS windows and they want the cheapest prices they can find, all other things being equal. An OEM that either cannot furnish Windows pre-installed or cannot furnish it at a competetive price is dead for all intents and purposes. Thus, there is no option for the OEM. Although you might argue that this creates room for niche OEMs to sell alternative OSes (note: They are few and far between), it adds a very large premium onto the price of the end product. The reason for this is simple. Only the larger OEMs can generate enough volume to compete on hardware pricing. It's not at all unusual, for instance, to see a smaller OEM buying the same equipment for 5% more than the larger OEMs sells the equipment for (that's AFTER their profit and additional costs). Depending on the kind of system you are talking about, the difference can be between 20-30% of the price of the system all told. Even then, the consumer still has to worry about the quality of the OEM.
So what this all means at the end of the day. Is that BeOS, or whatever OS you prefer, is just STARTING to compete with, say, a 300-400 dollar disadvantage on the hardware (and associated service) and a likely inferior OEM that the customer is not familiar with. That's not competition; it has nothing to do with what the alternative OS company can be reasonably expected to bring to the table.
In other words, even if a company could come out with a version of windows that was perfectly compatible and looked and felt exactly the same as windows with 10% fewer crashes and 10% speed increase [and this is a long shot given other facts], they would have a damn hard time selling it in any significant number.
This particular form of anti-competive advantage means that no mere significant, but incremental, gain in over all quality is going to win customers. Only a very large jump in quality [enough to justify the huge premium paid and/or a massive surge in preference] will even put a competing company on the map and that's ignoring the other issues entirely. This is just one anti-competetive act, mind you. You add this with MS' other behavior and you have a damn near unseatable monopoly and none of it has anything to do with MS or their competitors' product.
The end result is that MS rarely has any incentive to improve their desktop OS since they have no credible threats. The amount of money that they invest in Windows is a pittance compared to the size of the market.
The OEM Licensing agreement you are refering to is considered a trade secret. NOBODY but the legal teams at the OEMS are allowed to read it. Your idea assumes that the licensing agreement doesn't explicitly exclude the "loophole" you described.
Okay, giving your idea the benefit of the doubt, Microsoft's OEM licensing agreements are contingent on the whim of Microsoft. If an OEM, and I'm not talking about Joe OEM, I'm talking about the big names, Gateway, Compaq, Dell, even look at Microsoft crosseyed, Microsoft may yoink their OEM license agreement, which would subsequently mean immediate death to said OEM. They can't afford to sell computers if they aquire Windows at a retail price. This means that Microsoft has a lot of leverage outside of their exclusionary licensing agreement that does not leave a lot of room for OEMs to be "creative".
This topic is what Be's complaint is about. When Compaq announced that they were going to market a Internet Applicance running Be's BeIA, well, read this quote from Be's complaint:
Microsoft used monopoly illegaly (tried and convicted by the highest appeals court). Their control over OEMs extends past their written contracts.
The question of whether Novell or Netscape were competent enough to execute their plans to compete with Microsoft is irrelevant to the legal question of whether they violated antitrust laws. If you get caught cheating, it's not a valid defense to say the other team sucked so you would have won anyway.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/24134.html
0 001/0827_hacker.html Byte's take on the bootloader issue.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21410.html The register's summary of this Byte article:
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt20010824s
daniel teske
Now that's a business model! Buy a bankrupt dot-bomb and you get the right to sue Microsoft. How much do you think to buy Quarterdeck from Symantec?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft will probably simply claim that it was simply exercising it's government granted monopoly - i.e. its copyright - including the right to control the creation of derivative works.
They didn't tell the OEMs they could not sell BeOS, or couldn't put a BeOS installer on the same drive, nor (in this case) say that they'd charge more or hold back Windows if the OEM tried to sell BeOS systems. They just refused to allow BeOs (and Linux) a free ride on Windows' popularity. (Harsh, but true.)
I'd guess that a way around the specific terms of the Microsoft license would be to have OEMs partition the drive, and pre-load Linux on there - but NOT enable it to boot. Note that Hitachi got away with that, for BeOS.
Arrange to put a couple of popular games or something equally popular on that 2nd partition as well, so people need to activate Linux in order to get to the games.
Provide an "enable Linux and games" floppy that makes the Linux partition primary with the option to boot Windows (so there's no need to disable Linux to get to Windows). And include a very visible option to un-do this change - counter-productive as that sounds - so consumers feel safe doing it in the first place.
True, Microsoft would probably soon change their license to prevent it - but only after a burst of Linux dual-boot systems got out there.
"While Be, Inc had the information for over 3 years [..snip..] they filed a suit against Microsoft only today."
If you read the press statement, it's for "for the destruction of Be's business". It would have been fairly hard for Be to sue Microsoft for destruction of their business three years before Microsoft had finally destroyed their business.
When you're trying desperately to stay afloat and keep your shareholders on board, the last thing you do is publicly sue someone for having irreparably harmed you. Admitting that you're sunk simply guarantees you'll lose whatever remaining chances you have.
I know, I'm looking through mine now. I bought Win95 as an upgrade to Win3.1 (and let it spin through my hard drive for 4 hours installing on my 486DX33) the week it came out. IE shipped MUCH later on, but it was not on the original CD's. They didn't even get Spyglass's source until Netscape was starting to take off.
Now, NT4.0 did ship with IE 2.0, so they were make progress by '96, but IE 1.0 was not on the first Win95 CD's out the gate.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Actually, Be did exactly this. I know, because I wrote some of the docs for it.
And guess what? It didn't work.
The fact is, sticking in a floppy and a sheet of paper is vastly inferior to having the software appear in front of the user when they boot.
So, you can get around the letter of the license agreement with this tactic, but you can't get the same market leverage. And it's market leverage that pays the bills, not a "clever" legal trick.
I agree about the government establishment point, but the important distinction to me is that in the classic monopoly the company has some ability to restrict total supply of the product in the market, thus restricting the ability of customers to take their business elsewhere.
There is not a single customer of Microsoft who didn't have an alternative product that they could have bought. They all chose to buy Microsoft products in spite of those alternatives. I would argue that they did this because Microsoft's products were the best deal.
I recall all the articles posted to slashdot about BeOS, and how nearly every one of them was greeted by jeers and disgust.
/. masses.
:-)
"Be wasn't free, it wasn't open source. Who wants to use that crap anyway?" was the response of the
Now the slashdot masses want to complain that Microsoft killed Be?
This is hilarious.
Palm bought BeOS for the technology.
Palm only bought Be's intellectual property. Palm did not buy Be, Inc., which still exists as a separate entity (albeit one which no longer owns BeOS). Palm is *not* a party to this lawsuit.
I'm (still) a Be shareholder, and I know whereof I speak.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-820227.html
Once again, Slashdot shoots itself in the foot with an overly editorialized "news" post. You know, I don't entirely disagree with your oh-so-cynical view of BeOS, but how about if you just post the news and leave the opinionating to the readers?
Does Slashdot even know what it wants to be? Sometimes it poses as a journalistic outlet. Sometimes it's an opinion site. Interesting how Katz posted another poorly-informed rant earlier today, about how the media "lies to you." Hey guess what, whether or not they'll admit it, Slashdot is part of that Media.
--------
"The indiscriminate use of vulgar language is the linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - Author Unknown
Then M$ shoved DOS 4,5, and Windoze down our throats - under which FoxPro was (natively) worthless. I still have a shrinkwrapped copy of the M$ FoxWin runtime - anybody want to buy it cheap? (to be fair, DOS 6 was OK for the purpose.)
Still, I made a living, barely. I could not bring myself to overcharge clients for putting a stable version of whichever M$OS on their boxen, because I'm just that kind of guy. By now I'm stuck. So, I plod along being honest (sorry, [insert client name here] I'll give you a break on this, because it's really M$'s fault)...countless non-billable hours.
Then like a brainwashed moonie, I continue the saga: I get MCSE Certified, give up 45 clients when I go to work for a certain accounting firm's startup computer store here in the boonies for the MSCSP "prestige" (the "partners" were so greedy I spent a third of my time explaining the billing...and the rest repairing registries and replacing perfectly good Novell server installs with NT).
So - I quit. Now, here I sit reading Slashdot, licking my wounds, wishing that I'd learned a 'NIX OS and been out of the consumer OS loop all along (or maybe I should have stayed in the band...)
Ask Slashdot: Who knows a good pro-bono lawyer? (a portion of above rants courtesy of too many hours on /.)
*sigh*
db
Cig:
ôô
Now that Palm owns Be, is it any surprise?
IMHO, Palm is about to get its clock cleaned in the handheld arena. MS has all the desktop connections, and the ability to push 'seamlessness'. MS is finally up to speed on what is A Good Palm OS (relatively) and are about to thump Palm.
Some Palm advocates, which I have no trouble with, would probably disagree. The trouble is MS has NEC, Toshiba, Casio, Compaq and HP all locked up with PocketOS devices -- hardware that no Palm can touch.
Im not bashing Palm, but ONCE AGAIN MS is using its Desktop monopoly to push into a new market. Palm is about to be the next victim. Palm havin Be launch this suit is a good thing. It may slow MS down somewhat or give the DoJ a spine.
There have been quite a few posts flogging the dead horse of whether MS is a monopoly.
Enough already ! Listen - it doesn't matter whether you think MS is a monopoly. It doesn't matter, even, that you may think that the judges were wrong in ruling that MS is a monopoly.
The fact is, they did rule that MS is a monopoly. And because of the legal doctrine of issue estoppel (whereby something which has been litigated in court and been the subject of a final decision by the court cannot be relitigated), Be doesn't even have to prove that MS is a monopoly. They can simply tell their judge that the court has ruled that MS is a monopoly - MS cannot argue this point any longer.
So all that Be now has to prove is that MS did some illegal monopolistic acts (remember that certain acts which would be legal for non-monopolists are illegal for monopolists) and that such act caused damage to Be.
IMHO, a fairly simple issue to prove. They don't even need to prove that it caused their downfall, ANY damage is sufficient (it only affects quantum of recovery, and since Be's broke, any money is better than none. Don't forget that since the lawyers are acting on contingency, Be has NO cash outlay for the trial).
You are telling me that a small technological change in a never to be widely adopted OS killed a whole enterprise? I hope you will not ask me to cry for them.
Please do not misunderstand me, I hope Be (whatever this means by now) wins this case. Any chance to restrict Microsoft monopolistic practices is welcome.
But for crying out loud, were these guys so enticed with their bells and whistles that no one could code a decent bootloader?
How come Linux runs alongside anything Microsoft has today, if "it is assumed that MS made this change to restrict other OSes from running along side of Windows."?
This reminds me of Nextwave in a lot of ways.
BG: Nextwave was the company who bought the spectrum many of the cellular companies are deploying new services on. Well they didn't pay their bills and the FCC took back the spectrum and reauctioned it. Nextwave sued the FCC for taking it away and it dragged through court for about three years and Nextwave won. Now their worth a TON of money because, the Cingulars and Verizon's of the world already have service. Guess who the FCC has to buy from to get the spectrum back.
Now let's apply this to the current situation. Be is currently worth about 4.4 million total right now in stock. Since the company doesn't really have any debt anymore roughly $1.5 million with most of that in current liabilities so the company is close to $3 million total.
Roughly 130 million computers (got this off a CNN article correct if wrong) were sold last year. Now watch this. Judge finds that Be was killed by Microsoft. Take the previous two years of sales will say 225 million PCs. Judge says 150 million (round ball) were shipped by OEMs and Be considering its size would not be have penetrated no more then 2% of the market. That means they could have put their OS on 3 million computers. Ok, let's now say Be charged $25 for each copy (below MS because they are trying to gain market share and they will be considered an inferior product to most of the marketplace). Now we have at least a verdict of $75 million or roughly a 17x the current stock price. Of course Be is a penny stock at 12 cents and they very well could lose the case but if you got money that you would take to Vegas it might be worth a shot.
BTW, we haven't even talked about the chance for punitive damages and if MS lost the case and decided to settle you could be looking at handsome pay day.
HT
Why would an OEM put something like BeOS on their computers?
Because Wintel computers are all the same boxes. The manufacturers need to give customers reasons to buy THEIR computer instead of someone else's.
If they could say THIS computer ALSO comes with BeOS, and a bunch of great audio apps, and Gobe Productive, then they offer a great reason for people to buy their computer.
It's called product differentiation.
Couldn't agree more... how can they be punished for being a monopoly when they legally *weren't* a monopoly until the court ruled them one? Since there's no standard for what makes a software monopoly, how was MS supposed to know when they became one?
It might seem pedantic, but think about it -- nowhere else in the law (that I'm aware of) can you be punished retroactively to before your infraction was established.
does anyone know where i can download a copy of beos?
or buy it, for that matter.. i found a few sites on the net with links to download it at the beos site.. but be has shut down most of its site, so it isn't available per say..
I just visited his website, and this guy really
got it.
Well done Mike, and to the moderators, shouldn't
this be insightful?
--
Dell charged more for a linux box than for a Windows box. Why? Linux is almost free. support? They had to support windows too.
They stopped selling it because most people who use linux professionally will save the $$ and install themselves..
"Their software stinks, but Gates is a ruthless business man, which I do admire to a certain extent."
:). Sure, MS hasn't committed mass murder (of people anyway, just companies), but in the business sense MS/Gates are about as pathological as they come. That is not something to be admired, but pitied.
This just confuses me. Many, many people hold the opinion that ruthlessness in business is somehow to be tacitly approved of and (not-so)secretly admired. Yet when I think of world leaders who fall into the ruthless bucket, I think of such luminaries as, not just the love-to-hate-him Hitler, but other nice fellas like Idi Amin(sp?), Pol Pot and Papa Doc Duvalier (sp again?
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I have Windows ME and when I wanted to create a Linux partition, I used a newer version of Partition Magic to create a Linux partition. It required a restart which started Windows in something with a name like Windows Millennium Emergency DOS Boot where it makes its changes. Sounds like there's a way to get to the underlaying DOS in Windows ME. Not finding it seems to be a shortcoming in Be, not a lockout by Microsoft.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
It'd be great to run BeOS on a G4, except, of course, that Apple never released specs for the G3 and G4 chips (despite requests from Be for the tech info).
Apple did this to keep BeOS off Mac hardware, to protect Apple's OS. But how different is it from what Microsoft did?
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I wonder if that sole employee got to keep his Aeron chair.
If not, maybe he'll get enough from the suit, to pick up a new one at Sam's Club
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
That's just foolish. It's a formula for going out of business. If it was a workable buisness model, VA Software would still be VA Linux.
Take a look at QLITech.com. They are a Linux systems seller, and they are doing well. Though many, besides those in the KNOW, have heard of them. They sell custom Linux systems, as well as Linux Laptops...
Linux is a workable business model, and they have proven it. They cater to anyone who desires to be free of M$ Windows, or just using a better Software base (GNU/Linux).
DocChaos -------- I may be crazy, but then again I may be crazy.
This reminds me of the userfriendly cartoon here
Tiago
Damn I wish I had mod points right now! ROFLMAO
I'm sure this is redundant, but here goes anyhoo.
In order to recover damages (i.e., money) you have to show that you were, well, damaged. And Be can easily demonstrate now that they've been harmed by Mickey$oft.
Keep in mind that M$ has had to pay dearly for this sort of thing before. They settled with Caldera over DR-DOS early last year IIRC. And M$ noticed it - they admitted having to take a charge against earnings to pay it. It happened close to trial when M$ was getting ready to take a beating.
Make no mistake about it - Be can win and they can win big. After all, the law firms representing them have agreed to take the case on contingency, meaning if they don't win, the lawyers don't get paid. One should wonder what they know that we don't.
Be has every reason to sue. i dont think ill have and agruements on that. some people do argue that it is a little too late.
i dont agree that it is too late. Be waited until the end, hoping it could survive against microsoft, so they deserve credit for not jumping on the "sue M$" bandwagon. Be went until the bitter end. Now its time to sue when their is NO doubt that M$'s negative monopolistic practices saturated the market with its products, and pushed out fair competition.
Everyone is tied to windows, even hard core linux people are tied to windows in some way. Windows is in every corner of the market, and not because it is THAT much better than everything else, because of illegal monopolistic actions to destroy fair competition. Be could have lived as a dual boot OS for specific tasks until it could grow into a complete OS(complete meaning OS AND a competitive program library)
One big arguement for Windows being a "superior product" that i have heard, is the "look how many leading apps are for windows only", BullSh*t!!, how do you think windows got all those leading apps, because the GUI was soo cool!?!, because of some technilogical advantage?!?, no! Monopolistic practices that nearly wiped out apple before, and rescently wiped out BeOS.
Be. Inc. , i hope you can present a good case, i hope you can bring some of the lost profits back to your shareholders, and maybee even salvage what is left of your business.
ummmm.... apple?
fuck dell. fuck compaq. fuck all of them.
they have no huevos. they should get sued just like m$.
punish the servant and the master.
help out.
Isn't Be owned by Palm now?
We've seen Palm OS loaded on other (cheaper) PDAs. The Palm-based PDA seems on it's way out. People want more power and "multimedia", so they are turning to more robust systems.
So, if Palm's OS gets bought less, and Palm's PDAs get bought less...
Then maybe they can make money sueing M$, using Be as leverage.
Today Be employes a single person in a tiny office in Mountain View.
Hmmm... you'd think he would just telecommute, no?
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Yes, BeOS demise was partly due to the lack of software and drivers. But there is also a hint of moment 22 in here.
Why wouldn't companies develop drivers or software for BeOS? Because there wasn't enough users at the time. Why wouldn't the users choose BeOS? Because there wasn't enough software or drivers at the time AND because most OEM manufacturers woudn't preinstall BeOS on boxes.The fact that Microsofts license agreements stopped the OEMs from preinstalling other OSs is probably why they (he/she) have choosen to sue Microsoft.
It was really a pity to see BeOS go, I had a feeling that they were just about to get over the userbase threshold and out of the moment 22 area, just as the financiers decided to pull the plug.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Hey wow... that's irony... as I type this, there's an ad for Compaq-sponsored SourceForge.net right above this.
A *lot* of you are citing exclusive agreements with Microsoft between other OEMs as support for Be. The fact of the matter is that OEMs have/do sell Non-MS based solutions.
In the case of Compaq, they have always sold non-MS solutions, and there's nothing that MS can do about it. None of the Presario line of computers have anything but Windows, but if you move over to the Deskpro, iPAQ, and Prolinea lines of products from them, you'll see everything from DEC Rainbow/OS (years ago) to Linux to Solaris to Compaq Tru64 Unix. They even have a tech. support department for Linux/Unix on these systems, with a call centre in Hull, Quebec.
The difference is that the product that's marketted to consumers doesn't have these as options. But tech. support won't stop you from installing another operating system. They just don't offer any support for them.
But honestly. Do you expect them to support every operating system under the sun?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
According to Scott Schnoll's article (above) IE 1.0 was included in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95. The Plus pacj would not necessarily be associated with the strategic plan of Microsoft (althought Pinball is fun).
aside: For myself, I first used the WWW as a AOL user in 1994 -- I was playing with gopher and saw a notice that a special preview of the WWW would be made available on request to AOL users. I remember Yahoo (and the path to the 'good stuff'). Those were the days...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
...rather than Microsoft.
I've never used Be, but I'm under the impression that Be competitors were really Apple and Linux/ Unix based systems rather than Windows. Linux is slowly becoming the only game in town as far as rivals to Microsofts operating system is concerned and I suspect Be was one of the early casualties of this fact.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
He said it earned its position in the marketplace through illegal practices, he didn't say it's monopoly was illegal, and microsoft wouldn't be in the position it's in if it hadn't leveraged its monopoly illegally.
However I'll say it (And I'm a windows user, no less), even Microsoft's actual monopoly is earned (or at least strengthened) through illegal practices - requiring that OEMs only sell MS-and-only-MS machines, with the price of OEM non-compliance being to make all their windows machines cost so much that they will lose out to compeditor OEMs who are in bed with the MS-and-only-MS concept is very anticompeditive, and hopefully very, very illegal.
Tut tut. Since the illegal practices are only related to what they did with their monopoly (exclusive licenses are only illegal under a monopoly), they DID earn their monopoly legally. There are no findings of fact to the contrary, are there?
What they did with the monopoly, however, is another story.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Great. "The company" is this one greedy guy (Dan Johnston
) and "its stockholders" knew the risks of stock investments.
If this would have been no-monetary-gains trial then all would be right. But now... I hope they find a court wich punishes them all, MS included, for greediness and wasting the courts time with such a stupid and selfish reason.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
You make a very good point.
But BeOS wasn't first a PPC thingy - It originally ran on the Hobbit processor, primarily because they were so cheap. Then the PPC 603 was available, very powerful considering how cheap it was, so they used that for their BeBox. Even though the 604 was more of a workstation CPU, and designed with SMP in mind, Be just haced up a reasonable 603 SMP setup. The idea was that 1x200 MHz processor was more epensive than 4x66 MHz or 2x133 MHz. Writing their streamlined multithreaded OS with this in mind, they could wring more performance out of cheaper hardware.
As much as this appealed the the hacker-geek, it turned out that a bit more work to get to Mac PPC 60x line was more cost effective, especially with the low end macs finally leveraging commodity components. Mac IDE was a reality, and becoming cheaper than a snazzy custom box woth a small target market (the intersection between hardware hackers and content creators).
Apple was very friendly at this time, and helped significantly with porting BeOS to Macs, which wasn't much different than the effort already underway to commoditize Apple hardware by allowing clones. This gamble was based on the increasing success of Windows PCs edging Apple out of their previous markets.
The fascism and xenophobic behaivor from Apple started after Jobs was brought on board, killing the clone program and closing off the software. And what the hell happened to MkLinux after that? Unfortunately those 3 interests of mine were slashed in one fell swoop, and The Bastard Jobs even (mass) sent me an insulting letter about how I would have just bought an Apple anyway if if weren't for (the innovative and cost-effective) Power Computing stealing 99% of their sales.
As much as I hated it, Apple never quite realized its (Gil Amelio's?) goal of becoming an open hardware platform, so Apple had every right to shut them out of their hardware. On the other hand, Intel actually supported Be pretty heavily at that time, which is why the focus at Be changed to Intel platforms, compatible with but AFAIK not optimizing for AMD processors.
Microsoft has no legit claims on x86, other than it was the most popular platform, and by nature of being the Monopoly they were entitled to shut out competeors with heavy handed tactics.
In summary, Apple hurt Be at least as much as Microsoft, but Apple didn't violate anybodys rights in doing so.
-castlan
p.s.
You have a point with the last bit too... Microsoft exchanged some beads with the creator of Quick and Dirty DOS (Seattle Softworks maybe) to gain the significant start of their empire, New York. This was a significant force in breaking the occupation by of IBM/England. Compaq was Philadelphia. And this nonsence was written by somebody who is delerious and in severe need of sleep.
Be failed on the Mac platform?
Apple shut Be out of their platform, so that none of the G3 Macs could run it. Be's failure on Apple is comparable to Netscapes failure on Windows 98, except that Netscape's product was free, and had legal defense against _blatant_ antagonism (as when MS temporarily broke Netscape browser support).
Lack of apps is a weak argument, unless you meant "Lack of apps by my favorite Mac/Windows software company." A glut of Windows apps doesn't mean that they are all necessary or even useful. In contrast, every commercial BeOS app I used was very high quality, and there was an abundance of genuinely useful freeware as well. BeOS was viable for just about any task the average user performs, and it excelled in some less common tasks. While MS Office wasn't available, There were substitute applications availale that could perform the tasks. Word processing was enhaced by the extensive metadata, so that a fancily formatted document could seamlessly be used by a raw text editor. While the bundled NetPositive was a rather basic browser, it was undisputably superior to the original Internet Explorer. Lack of Java was a definite negative, but more often an inconvienience than a showstopper. In contrast, it was faster, simpler and more robust than Windows Web Browsers. Opera was available if you needed heavy duty web browsing. An email client was included, many commercial clients were available. GNU utilities were available, as was a GUI development environment and no-brainer GUI controlled network services. As for the Mac, SheepShaver was available which hosted a virtal Mac environment inside the BeOS on PPC hardware, so even irreplaceable Mac software wasn't a barrier. Less refined emulation was available for DOS/Windows environments, but the "Lack of apps" charge is easily laid to rest when you consider the body of Free GNU/Linux software that wasn't much further than a recompile away.
As for the failure on PC hardware, sufficient reasons should be evident from browsing only comments scoring 4 and above on this story.
-castlan
Palm does not own Be. Be sold its assest to Palm.
Be, Inc did negotiate a preload deal, with a big vendor. The product actually did ship in limited quantities, after it got Microsoft'ed.
Be, Inc. and Hitachi created the Prius 1, and neat little desktop for the Japanese market. It was going to be a dual boot, Windows 98, BeOS box, with the 2 operating systems side by side. Before it shipped however, Microsoft evidently went in an played hardball, forcing the preload to be modified in such a way that the BeOS bootloader couldn't be displayed until after Windows was running, and even then it was buried in a menu in the programs folder of the start menu. Now considering that most users don't even know how to get to the calculator, this is pretty much a death knell. The deal fell apart a couple months later.
Now I'm not an insider to either company, but I've been around the industry and I've had enough exposure to make an educated guess about what happened. It probably went something like this.
1. Be makes press release announcing deal and is queitly nearing deals with at least one major US Vendor, probably Gateway or Compaq.
2. MS low level staffer tasked with watching the press wire sees the announcement and shuffles it into the channel for 'handling'
3. Hitachi and Be spend a month or so working out the technical details and prepare the machine for shipping.
4. The press release finally gets to the upper management at MS and the marketing and account relations machine goes into action. Considering Hitachi's size and volume in the the Pacific Rim, Steve Ballmer gets on a the phone with Hitachi's president and explains the 'hidden' costs of this preload deal. Namely no more discounts on MS Office, and discounted price of Windows just tripled. And oh yeah, if you reread your contract the we signed with you, Windows boot process cannot be alter in these methods. You are going to have to do it our way.
5. Hitachi cannot fight this in a market that is operating on increasingly tight margins.
6. MS sends out a private reminder of the preload agreement's fine print regarding bootloaders and dual booting non Windows Operating Systems. This effectively closes the US Vendor deals and seals Be's fate.
7. Be begins the 'Focus Shift', attempting to invade the only market left open to them.
8. Be discovers that the market that appeared open to them has a couple of entrenched players, and one entering the market that has assets and marketing to kill them.
9. Be runs low on cash and begins the liquidation process.
10. Part of the exit strategy is to liquidate all assets and IP, then using the entity, sue the snot out of MS.
11. This would pave the way for Palm or whomever to then invade the x86 market once again.
On a side note, as brilliant as Apple's Mac OS X is, all the furor about bringing to x86 presents the exact same stumbling blocks, and make it therefore a 'Bad Idea' (tm).
Andy Satori
dru@druware.com
MS has ALWAYS had a monopoly on the OS for x86 machines. Everyone else that tried to compete was crushed save Linux which can't be crushed due to the lack of a company behind it. I don't believe the court set a particular date that MS became a monopoly, and since they have always been one on the x86 platform, I suppose that any company could file a suit if they do so within the legal time limits.
As Linux, the BSDs and other free operating systems must be similarily affected, why can't a few of the major distributions or the FSF join together and risk suing. Perhaps this time Be's Gassée would be willing to speak up in trial.
Why would Palm Care ???c -00030613.htm.
Read their response to the Antitrust findings at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms_tuncom/major/mt
In it you will find some interesting items, like a little quote directly from Bill Gates
Microsoft's "PDA will connect to Office in a better way than other PDAs even if that means changing how we do flexible schema in Outlook and how we tie some of our audio and video advanced work to only run on our PDAs." Granted this is kind of OffTopic, but you asked.
There are two companies sharing the same place. The first one on the one side of the store sells only Windows computers, while the second one on the other side of the store doesn't sell Windows at all and installs Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, SuSE, Mandrake, Corel OS, Caldera, Red Hat, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, BeOS, etc.
From the perspective of the customer, you just enter the store, play with different computers and buy one, while being exposed to BeOS and other non-MS solutions. This is exactly the same effect which would be without Microsoft OEM licensing at all.
So, what is the problem with that solution? Would it be to expensive to split the company? Would it be against MS licenses to have your store near the store selling computers with other operating systems? Any other problems with such solution? I hope someone has already thought about it.
What would be the advantage? Your store would be known as the store with lots of totally new technolgy (from the MS-only consumer standpoint). People could be interested in playing with BeOS or Linux and even when most of them chose Windows, you could still have more customers thanks to your interesting offer, thus making more money.
Have anyone done anything like this before?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Ironically, they are now trying to use a real monopoly - the DoJ - to beat up Microsoft: something they failed to do in the marketplace.
Be is claiming that the OEM contracts are at fault. However, Windows is Microsoft's product and they have the right to offer it at whatever terms they like. If some OEM manufacturer is not content with the terms they are free not to buy the product, or negotiate for better terms. Note that no use of force is involved. Hence the alleged "monopoly" is entirely fictive. Microsoft's large marketshare is just an indication that their customers think that this is where they get the best value for their money.
Be's strategy was flawed. Compare this to SGI. They initially created a media-centric platform (just like Be) with high-end graphics and sound and successfully grew their company. How? By targeting a niche market - movie production - and serving that market relentlessly. It worked, they grew big and branched into the visualisation, workstation and high-end server market.
SGI did not win by whining at the DoJ. They did it by solving real-world problems to the benefit of their customers.
As for myself? I was running Amiga in the eighties until I switched to Linux in 1992. Recently, I've started using Windows for a number of tasks - not because of any force of monopoly, but simply because its benefits exceed its cost. I tried Be and decided against it. In my opinion it was a solution looking for a problem.
Cold served revenge of course!
A valid and distinct point, but there is some evidence that MS's road to being a monopoly wasn't exactly a clean, legal trip either - but it's paved in small lawsuits that generally got taken out of the public eye because they were settled.
But that road is also surrounded by the mistakes of others - Commodore's poor business strategy, Apple mistakenly allowing them to steal technology, etc.
But how long have they maintained their control through these practices?
End result in either way: MS is where they are because they broke the law.
You more than anyone, since you followed the trial for two years, should realize that simply abusing it's monopoly, Microsoft has done enough damage to this industry to make how it got to be the "industry leader" moot. It's position now is based on those practices.
.Net was called something like COM++, etc. etc.
Two years is an eternity in the computing industry. Two years ago, there was no Win 2000, no XP,
And two years ago, Be might have had a chance.
But perhaps "earned" is the wrong word. Would maintain make you happier? Does it matter? Microsoft is where it is today by breaking the law. If they had played by the rules, the industry would be a different place.
inkly
said Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler. "The industry is at its best when it's developing new products and focusing on innovation."
Notice how MSSpeak uses "innovation" whenever they're challenged? How does this lawsuit challenge their right to "innovate"? What, the lawyers are too busy with the courts to go code Microsoft Word?
inky
Did you even read the excellent article by Scot Hacker?
Be was offering its OS for FREE to manufacturers. Having BeOS as well as Windows on the computers you sell clearly would have added value to your product, because everyone who spent time getting to know BeOS loved it. Clearly, the reason manufacturers didn't take Be up on their offer to preinstall the OS for free is pressure from Micro$oft.
Good luck with the lawsuit, Be!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
only without the apps!
Well yes, there is Apple. But I wonder how many new customers they have as opposed to True Believers who adopted the Mac long ago and aren't about to give it up? I strongly suspect, with no data worth mentioning to back it up, that the number of new computer users who choose the Mac is mighty insignificant compared to the number who choose a Wintel machine.
And the brethren went away edified.
Nothing except the licensing scheme that said they had to pay a full license fee for Windows for every system that /could/ run Windows . . . MS' approach to defeating piracy: charge people for the OS even if they don't use it . . . . .
This may have been removed recently, but for a long time it was impossible to buy a clean box from an OEM manufacturer without paying for a Windows license anyway. This licensing scheme was accepted because the OEMs had no other option - they'd pay up, or lose the right to sell /any/ windows based machines.
MS really did have the OEMs by the balls with this - an OEM that couldn't sell windows, or had to pay significantly more for windows (ie, retail prices, rather than the OEM deals that other companies were getting), basically went out of business. They /had/ to accede to MS' demands. And that's why MS is screwed now that they've been judged to be a monopoly - suddenly, all those licensing schemes/scams are illegal, and people are actually piping up and saying "No, I'm not going to bend over for you". Be's suit is an example of this.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
The BIG LIE.
Opposition is left speechless.
(Sure they've always been able to (but just let them try it)).
The brackets indicate that the contents of said brackets are seperate from the rest of the sentence - an addition, but not part of it. So the sentence actually reads: "You cannot include an additional operating system unless you have a seperate legal agreement with Microsoft."
That's unambiguous in my book, and I'd imagine the court would think so, too.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Actually, Sony WAS a monopoloy, during the 70's and 80's, when they came up with the "BETA" format of video tape.
Because of Sony's monopoly, they get to dictate what their Beta tapes can be used for, and what can't.
Sony, as a "moral corporate citizen", decided that their Beta tapes were NOT to be used for PORN, and since there was another video tape format available - VHS - everyone, including the PORN industry, decided to opt for VHS.
And the rest is history.
About the "IS" - Sony "IS" a monopoly, in it's PlayStation and it's "robot-dog" setup.
Sony is using DCMA, to sue people, for extending the PlayStation and the robotic-dog.
In that sense, Sony is acting much like MicroSoft, since Sony _IS_ the monopoly in the above two categories.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
An online version of the "Bootloader" column appears in:
4 s0 001/0827_hacker.html
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt2001082
And indeed, it does raise one vital question:
How come even though there are some 80 different x86 compatible OS's, nobody is making one that dual boots commercially.
And here is one of the more interesting tidbits:
"Gassée says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, preinstallation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS preinstalled, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.
Be was forced to post detailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled. "
Someone please tell me how this is a "fair" and "competitive" marketplace.
There are also interesting comments on the DoJ in general...
good post,
inkly
Does MS own all operating systems in existence? Why else would you need a legal agreement from MS to install Linux? :-)
Jason