Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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
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
Allegedly Palm is using the Be technology as the basis for their next OS. The current Palm OS can't really do the type of things that, thanks to Microsoft et. al, everyone thinks a handheld device needs to do.
Also don't think that even if they get some money, they will return as a viable software company. More likely any money they get will go to their creditors.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
after settlement:
last employee "woohoo I'm rich"
knock-knock "Hi, where the VCs, give us the money"
last employee "D'oh I'm broke"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
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!
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!
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...
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.
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).
Be is one of the few companies that genuinely do have a case, me thinks. With browsers the situation is bit convoluted (no one ever made money selling browsers). With BeOS, Be had snowball's chance in hell getting h/w manufacturer's to pre-install the OS because of Microsoft's strong arm tactics. Consumers didn't get to choose... perhaps they wouldn't have wanted BeOS in any case, but MS didn't want to take a chance. Of course MS didn't just fight BeOS but all potential competitors... Be just happens to be the one that had closest match on intel hardware (for 'normal' consumers).
Oh and yes, these tactics were hardly "tiny little thing" that Microsoft "didn't even know it was doing"... the whole industry has known about this for years now... but big names (Dell, Gateway et al) have been too scared of Don Bill to publicly complain (and/or greedy and content with status quo... they just sell hardware, OS is just a tax they have to pay)
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
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.
There are three ways of getting a lawyer. Pro Bono, which is where they work for free because they think the cause is just and worth their time, or because they think they can make a big name for themselves and the "free" advertising is worth the time. Paying them outright (you might get a better price if they believe int he cause or want publicity though). Contingency, which is where they take a percentage of the winnings (if any), which is where they may or may not believe in the cause, may or may not think the PR is worth it, but sure do think they have decent odds of winning!
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 :)
The fact of the matter is, only a small percentage of people even want to use these fringe products. Why punish Microsoft for that?
This would be compelling if it were truthful.
The reality is that people would like alternatives to using Microsoft, but Microsoft has done everything it can to prevent Dell, HP, Compaq and others from presenting options to their customers.
The other OSes aren't getting to play on a level playing field. BeOS was a very slick OS, it had all the features that most users would want and was very user-friendly. And it never had a chance, because people weren't exposed to it. They didn't have the marketing dollars to promote it to the average computer user and they couldn't get it on PCs made by the big PC manufacturers because Microsoft did everything they could to prevent it.
I'm sure that there are people who would still buy Windows if Dell offered BeOS computers -- but the number of people who would have chosen BeOS would probably surprise you -- had they ever been offered and promoted.
If you're technically apt enough to build your own computer, you can go with an alternative OS. But the customers who want to buy a premade computer from a major manufacturer don't get a choice. Many PC manufacturers have shown interest in having a product line that doesn't include Windows -- and they've been slapped down with exclusive licensing agreements and price dis-incentives from M$ for trying to offer non M$ products.
That's why M$ should be punished. Harshly.
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.
I wish that were the case!!! I *have* to use MS products. The professional audio products I use won't work with any other OS. My employer requires that I use IE in Windows to access my email when I'm on call, else I have to drive into the office 1 1/2 hours away. People with whom I do business need the compatibility that comes with MS.
I love BeOS intensely. I still have it installed, and I use it, but I still have to have MS. Why is that? It's not because they make a better product, not because they have better marketing (though that helped...), but because they established an illegal monopoly. I'm stuck because they broke the law.
That's why they should be punished. I just wish I could sue them myself. But I'll settle for a painful lawsuit from Be.
...splitting Microsoft in two companies? Yeah, they could use a separate corporation of lawyers only!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For years, Microsoft wouldn't deal with hardware OEMs unless they agreed to a pricing scheme that required them to pay a fee to Microsoft for every PC sold, whether or not they actually loaded Windows on that PC.
This is a common misconception. Microsoft's licensing agreements with OEMs offered them a lower price for the OS if they agreed to the "per machine fee". This was actually easier on the OEMs -- less paperwork, less accounting, etc.
The OEMs always had the option to buy individual licenses at a higher rate.
The fact that the OEMs agreed to this makes them at least partially responsible IMHO.
KM
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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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 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.
Let me get this straight. You think the world (and the average consumer) would be better off if there was only one browser, and you had to pay $40 for it?
You think the fact that Microsoft intensified the browser wars, thereby dramatically increasing the quality of the available browsers, and reducing the price from $40 to $0 is a bad thing?
The only people who aren't better off because of MS's entry into the browser market is Netscape. Boo-hoo for them.
If I recall correctly, no. As I recall it, Gasse' wanted to testify, and believed that the exclusive contracts with the OEMs would probably constitute a stronger case of monopoly abuse than the browser issue, but the the prosecutors didn't want to fight the war on two fronts.
It's been a long time since you could walk into a computer store and expect to have any options on a PC besides Microsoft ones. IANAL, so I have no strong opinion whether this is illegal abuse of monopoly power but it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that it was a result of exercise of monopoly power, and that it did the consumer no good. Hell, even IBM wouldn't preinstall OS/2 on their commodity boxes when it was still a live IBM product!
I hope Be's position that Microsoft is liable holds in court.
Meanwhile I'm just shaking my head in amazement than anyone finds it unlikely or surprising, as a matter of fact rather than of law, that Microsoft has used its dominance of the market in essentially the way Gasse' describes. What other explanation is conceivable for the disappearance of OS/2 from IBM's commodity PCs while it was still being developed and promoted?
mt
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."?
You must mean PalmOS 6. 5 won't have any of that. The big thing about PalmOS 5 is that it finally supports processors other than the Dragonball...so we'll see StrongARM Palms soon.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
*Were* so pedantile.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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
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..
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
Your example is meaningless. Sony is NOT a monopoly. Microsoft is. This makes ALL the difference. The abuse of that monopoly IS illegal under US law. Deal with it.
Abuse of monopoly power to crush potential competition is what we are talking about here, not Be's advertising ability. OS/2 was killed the same way Be was killed, and Linux is being hurt as well (Linux adoption would be MUCH faster if it was available to all as a dual boot option.)
Claiming that MS did nothing wrong is bullshit. This is a cut and dried case.
But if you think that microsoft strongarming PC manufacturers is some sort of evil, you should open your eyes.
So...your argument is because other companies are evil, it somehow lessens Microsoft's evil? Or is this the old "everyone is doing it" argument? The topic of discussion here is a suit filed against M$. I wasn't by any means implying that I didn't think that other corporations are equally evil by not explicitly holding forth on them, so I don't believe that I'm being inconsistent.
Those who sell a product or make a product have the right to dictate on what terms they'll manufacture or sell it.
Not entirely true. Microsoft is a monopoly, there are restrictions on what a company with a monopoly in a given market can do to hold on to or extend that monopoly. Having a monopoly is not illegal, but many things that Microsoft has done are.
Even companies that do not have monopolies have restrictions on their business practices.
For instance, it's illegal to tell a reseller what price they can charge for an item. If I produce product X, and I want to set the price for it at $19.95 (retail) I can't stop you from selling it at your price if you choose to do so. I can choose not to sell you the product, but I can't keep you from selling it at cost or even at a loss if you choose to. There are limits to the restrictions and such that a manufacturer can require. I do not know all of the boundaries and laws governing dealing with retailers, but I know it's not "anything goes."
Sears Roebuck often threatens contractors and manufacturers if their prices aren't majorly reduced for Sears.
And so does Wal-Mart and just about any other large retailer. Any retailer wants the best margin that they can get, and larger retailers have the muscle to get larger discounts. That's not illegal. Sears is not a monopoly. Neither is Sony. Best Buy could stop carrying Sony products and still offer TVs. Maytag could stop selling to Sears and not go out of business -- though it might hurt their bottom line. On the other hand, Microsoft jacking up Windows licenses for Dell if they choose to also sell BeOS PCs or Linux PCs could very realistically force Dell to either not sell those OSes or put Dell out of business because the margin is so thin for PCs. Since Microsoft does have a monopoly in that market, it is supposed to be illegal for them to do this sort of thing.
Whining about BeOS not having a chance because of exposure is bullshit. Exposure is not and should not be free.
No one said exposure should be free -- but Microsoft should not be allowed to use its monopoly to prevent manufacturers from developing non-M$ products. Nor should a manufacturer have to pay the M$ tax for every machine, regardless of whether it has Windows loaded.
Bottom line, the "free market" is not unregulated and it's not truly free either. It is mired down with laws to protect individuals, government incentives to help out businesses and all kinds of other legislation and practices that make the so-called "free market" anything but.
And the age-old adage applies here too: Your rights end where mine begin. When a company like Microsoft tramples the rights of other companies by abusing its monopoly position it has crossed a line and it should be punished. It amazes me that so many people actively defend a company whose practices are so repugnant to common decency. If a four-year-old child acted in the same manner as M$ its parents would smack it on its bottom and tell it to behave. Apparently the decency we expect from a child is too much to ask from a multi-billion dollar corporation led by adults.
PC Hardware is a cut throat business. There is NOT much margin, which is why so many hardware companies bit it even with a hot market for new hardware.
A couple of bucks per PC is a big thing. They can't afford getting on MS's bad side. Compaq very nearly lost the ability to bundle Windows a while back in a contract dispute which would have killed them.
Any lawsuit needs to be from an OS vendor that can prove they were hurt by MS's actions. Be can do that.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
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"
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
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
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.
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
Actually, didn't Be once make headlines by offering to give its operating system for free to any PC vendor who would sell BeOS preinstalled on its PC's? Either as the sole operating system on its PC's, or set up as a dual-boot with Windows?
Still nobody took Be up on it. Even adding a free operating system to their PC's would have incurred so many penalties from Microsoft that no PC vendor wanted to take the hit.
Let me be the first to say that this is a pointless remark. Exposure, sure as h*ll can be free. More power to the companies that can make use of free exposure for their products.
But companies like Microsoft force feed it to you with rhetoric that causes the average consumer to become dizzy enough to buy their products for fear of the uncertain.
As a card carrying member of the 'John Q. Public Consumer Guild', I've wised up to the flashy and pushy advertisements for products. I've learned to look past all that and try to understand how the product really works. There will be more consumers like me in the near future. Pretty soon flashy advertising won't work anymore. Then Microsoft will have to stand on their own merits.
BeOS may have been a day late and dollar short, but they did set a precidence that all consumers may not be aware of now, but will be soon. Then you'll see future 'BeOS' getting a fair chance due to free exposure.
Maybe someday a new advertising concept of some sort will come out and will be licensed as GPL or BSD-like to offer the free chance these companies need on a fair playfield.
Seriously, MS has already been found guilty of being a monopoly.
I'm kind of nitpicking words here, but being a monopoly is not something you're found guilty of. Being a monopoly isn't a crime.
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.
I did hear something about this, but I didn't thing there were many, or that they were big companies. The reason computer companies would want to offer BeOS on their computers is to differentiate them from the competition. The downside of offering it is support costs. Don't underestimate how much supporting BeOS would cost a big name manufacturer. They contract out their support, and every call cuts into their low profit margins. Training a support staff enough to be useful on BeOS would be an expensive task, and the contractors are going to pass that price on to the computer companies.
BE never had a chance, and the OS from my point of view was incredible.
I never used BeOS, but it would have to be truely incredible to have even a slight chance. Most people with computers want the same OS that everyone else is using. That fact is the true barrier to entry for new OSs. I've heard from some people that BeOS definately shined in some areas, but even if Microsoft just ignored it, I doubt it stood a chance. Microsoft has a monopoly because they won the first round of the PC OS wars, and the nature of the OS business is that it works out easiest for everyone it they're all using the same one. Microsoft also doesn't sit still. They constantly work to make Windows better. They definately don't do that flawlessly, but they have definately done an exellent job on making their user interface easy to use, and they keep working on making it better.
Be may very well have a case. Microsoft may very well abused it's monopoly position out of paranoia. However, it's unlikely that the damages are in the billions if they are guilty. It's more likely that they crushed a niche OS that may have been able to make millions more. If they did that, they should be punished, and the damages trippled acording to law.
In the short run, a lot of economy professors will be making money as expert witnesses, and lawyers will get rich.
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 $$$
No offense, but comparing Be to SGI is pretty silly. SGI has been an established player for sometime with a strong niche market in the high-end graphics/animation field. Be was an up and coming OS trying a niche for hobbyists, much - as you said, like SGI.
The main difference between their strategy is *when*. When SGI did it, MS didn't have the strangehold they did when Be did.
Everyone keeps saying "It's Be's fault - they screwed up."
But this sounds like the guys who try and complain that an NFL coach made a bad call, but they don't know what a good call would have been.
What was Be's mistake? Where did they go wrong? What should they have done better?
Be tried *everything*. I think they tried every possibly marketing strategy out there for modern OS's - custom hardware, cross-platform, giving it away FREE.
What is it exactly they should have done better? What would you have done?
Be's problem is that there wasn't a market for them to enter. The cause, according to this lawsuit, is Microsoft. Considering the court findings, I'd say they have a case.
inky
My guess is both.
Why would they go for a no-monetary-gains trial? Money is what they'll use to prove damages. What exactly should Be be going for?
inkly
And I completely missed Opera... they hopefully have made (and do make) money, either by selling the browser or by selling ad space.
And like someone else commented, Microsoft has done same stunt to n+1 companies; it's not JUST BeOS that has a case. But I still maintain it has one of the best ones to make.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
IIRC part of this was ruled illegal, M$ changed the OEM license agreements so that they had to pay for a license for every machine produced by the OEM, whether or not an M$ operating system was even installed, and possibly (don't remember clearly) raising the OEM per-license cost when other OS's were offered. Meaning that the OEM paid for windows per machine in the overall contract even if another OS such as Linux, BSD, etc. is the only install.
So installing the alternate OS incurs an additional cost to the OEM which they are in practical terms not able to pass on in the purchase price of the machine because of M$'s tactics. Otherwise Dell, etc. could potentially use one Linux distro, or BSD disk, BEOS, etc. and not pay M$ a dime. This would make these systems quite a bit cheaper than the M$ equipped versions, and in one move have a chance to break the M$ monopoly for commodity systms, yes?
So I agree with the previous poster. Microsoft should be punished, and harshly.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
only without the apps!
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.