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Allchin Admits MSFT Violated the Law
An Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN is running what amounts to a two part article about the nine states who are continuing their case against Microsoft in which Jim Allchins admits Microsoft violated the law.
The first part of the article deals with Jim Allchins assertion that there is no way for Microsoft to remove Internet Explorer from Windows without crippling the OS. However, he admits that the demonstration in court which showed this crippling was in fact rigged and that they have not done studies to se if it would be possible to produce an OS without the browser imbedded in it.
The second part of the story involves Allchin admitting that Microsoft has violated the law but refused to specify the violations. 'I don't think that I can summarize those,' Allchin said. 'I'm not an attorney.'"
"Somebody could say, 'Look, I want to make Microsoft's life miserable; so I'll tell
you what, I'll pay you $10 million a year to torture Microsoft."'
I'll do it for $5 million a year!
'I don't think that I can summarize those,' Allchin said. 'I'm not an attorney.'"
;)
So?
'Nuff said.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
How many others have rigged as a rule? Enron had an entire Energy Securities Trade Center occupying a floor of an office building in Houston. They rigged that demo for the gov't.... The gov't rigged its missle tests (and those still failed!).
No need to mod or flame. I just think its interesting/sad that companies stoop to this level. Now excuse me as I go rig my code so my boss will sign off on it before the deadline...
How can Microsoft state that they cannot create an OS without an imbedded browser, when Solaris, BSD, and Linux are all perfectly viable, and usable operating systems, that do not have the browser imbedded in them. Someone please enlighten me.
Build?
Something wrong with just licensing the one that Sun already provides for free? That provides cross-platform portability (more or less) right out of the box?
Oh wait, sorry, I forgot I was talking about Microsoft.
So after a federal judge and court of appeals said that they violated a law and after half a year of haggling someone in Microsoft finally admits it. Well, what a headline. :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Gee does he? I must have missed where in the article he actually said that.
Plus the big claim that Allchin is admitting some big thing is overblown (admittedly the linked-to article makes the same mistake). If you wade through Allchin's 250+ page deposition, the exchange is (p. 27):
Q. Well, you understand, do you not, that Microsoft was found to have done certain things that violated the law?
A. Yes.
This is just a statement of fact...Microsoft was indeed found guilty. It doesn't imply he thinks Microsoft *should* have been found guilty.
- adam
Regardless of what Microsoft says, anyone who works in IT knows that you can essentially achieve anything you can dream if given enough time and money. They *can* remove IE from their operating system should they decide to do it. Would it cost them alot of money? Would it cost them more than they earned by driving competition from the marketplace?
Seems to me like this suit is something they foresaw so they built themselves a defense by integrating their browser into the OS just in case this argument was needed...
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
With Products like IEradicator from 98lite which removes IE from all the Windows OS versions right up to Win2K and still keeps OS usable, would anyone in their right minds ever believe when Jim says "Forget about any business thing. Technically I just couldn't do it." ?
- Jalil
The actual exchange was:
Q: "What practices do you understand Microsoft was found guilty of?"
A: "I believe that we were found that we tried to maintain a monopoly in the PC operating system space."
Q:"And is it your understanding that Microsoft did that by engaging in certain practices that the courts have held to be unlawful?"
A: "Yes,"
This is like asking someone if they understand the charges against them, or asking them what the court verdict was. If they followed up with the question "do you believe the court's verdict was correct?" and he answered "yes", then it would be an admission.
It's perfectly possible to know whether or not something is possible (meaning "realistic", since given unlimited time/resources anything is possible) without performing a study to find out.
Given the direction that Microsoft is gone, it probably ISN'T possible to remove IE without rewriting massive parts of the OS. With the amount of in-depth knowledge Allchin has, he can probably state that with 100% certainty - and he doesn't need to do a study to know it for certain.
The question is not whether they can provide an OS without a browser embedded - it's whether it is reasonable to modify their current OS's to that end.
Also, Allchin cannot either confirm or deny whether Microsoft broke the law. That determination is for the courts, and his statement, in either direction, does not make it so.
I use Opera and Netscape instead.
If you're running Windows 9.x-2000, I suggest you back up your machine completely and then give the MSIE install a try. You should get both satisfactory proof that Ballmer lied AND a better-running computer. Usual warning, your mileage may vary...
As for XP, while MS may have done a better job at kludging IE into the OS to make it harder to untangle this time, I'm sure a development contract to the people at 98lite plus access to the Windows API will result in a very fast and clean solution to the problem.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I hate to say it, but isnt this the same company that claims they ARE smart enough to securely handle ALL of our id's and financial information (ie Hailstorm)
And now this same company tells me it can not do something as simple as modularize source code. I don't feel very safe anymore.
Allchin isn't Bill Gates, and he isn't Steve Ballmer. Allchin admitting that Microsoft broke the law would be like if slashdot's janitor came out and said that moderation violates free speech.
/.), then I don't have the time of day for you.
Neither is Allchin Microsoft's janitor...he is, after all, a vice president of the company and the guy in charge of Windows. So no, it's not like he runs the company, but he does run the part that's relevant to the discussion. As such, admitting that a demonstration made for a judge was rigged is news to me. But I'm not a cynic like you, so who knows.
I won't even dive into the lame moderation analogy - if you're one of those guys who dilutes the public ability to challenge real violations of our First Amendment rights by whining endlessly over situations where the Amendment doesn't apply (say, a privately-owned website like
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Ok, if I spend a lot of cash and agree not to sell it in a real consumer PC, Microsoft will sell me a version of XP where I can mix and match parts. I think I can even remove the browser. This is their embedded version of XP (does it have product activation?).
But although they say it is too technically challenging to re-engineer windows XP so OEMs can do it, in their embedded section this is a selling point.
is like a fish without a bicycle.
With apologies to Gloria Steinem.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I seriously wonder what people (the nine states included) would do if MS stripped Windows down until it was just the OS itself. Bye-bye, calc, notepad, wordpad, solitaire, ftp, telnet, minesweeper, icons, windows, menus...
This could be a classic case of "be careful what you wish for."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Umm...corporations have social security numbers. In a painfully literal, legal sense, they're as "alive" as you or I.
(Well, as alive as I am, anyway; no offence, but I don't know you from a grad student's AI project.)
- adam
Apparently the reason is because Outlook uses OE for its newsreader. If you, from Outlook, try to view newsgroups, you're popped into a version of OE with the mail section stripped out.
Not that you were looking for an actual answer but there it is.
Microsoft didn't commit perjury. Microsoft, Inc., isn't a person and can't think, speak, or act. It's nothing more than a legal abstraction for an actual body of workers and equipment bound together in a commercial endeavor.
No, Microsoft didn't commit perjury. But folks who work for Microsoft did. Now, if *I* were to commit perjury in a court of law *I'd* go to jail. Why, then, are you protected from punishment when you commit felonies while working for a corporation?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"technically I just couldn't do it" can be parsed a number of ways.... Consider, for instance, the following possible interpretations
(my PC was turned off when I tried), so "technically....."--- emphasis on "technically"
(I haven't studied the nuances of the relevant programming language), so "technically I... " ---emphasis on "I"
(I signed a contract agreeing not to), so "technically I just couldn't..." ---emphasis on couldn't
Just call me paranoid...but they may still be out to get me
Imagine. If Tim Berners-Lee hadn't invented the World Wide Web, MSFT would have this huge component of their operating system hanging around with nothing to do, and there would be nothing they could do about it.
MS Guy #1: What's this program over here?
MS Guy #2: I call it "iexplore.exe"
#1: What's it do?
#2: Well, nothing yet. I mean, it sends requests
to servers, captures the results and
displays them, but there aren't any servers
it works with, so...
#1: So.... why is it here?
#2: Well, I'll be damned if I know why, but the
operating system just kept crapping out until
I wrote the thing. So, I guess we're stuck
with it.
#1: Sounds good to me.
Gee...I wonder how Daimler-Chrysler offers so many versions of the PT Cruiser? Four models, nine colors, manual or automatic transmission, three choices for "security group", side airbags or not, deep tint windows or not, three choices of exterior accents, six more options one can choose or not....let's see, that comes to 165,888 possible variations on the PT Cruiser (and I'm leaving out the "woody" and gold exteriors, I think...). Mr. Ballmer, Henry "you can have a Model T in any color you want as long as it's black" Ford was a long time ago--why should computer users have fewer choices than car buyers?
"The modified measures should deflate Microsoft's overblown rhetoric and apocalyptic predictions about the proposed remedies," Blumenthal said.
This would require a smaller ego, would it not?
Yes, the Web Browser is the killer app for desktop operating systems. Yes it makes sense for MS to include one in their system.
What they did was use Monopoly power to kill a competitor. Netscape (with all its problems) was building a user interface system. A cross platform, internet aware system for running applications. Sincer it was crossplatform, you could write an application (albeit a simple, HTML one) and run it anywhere that the system was supported. Mac, Solaris, OS/2, Linux, BSD, Amiga...this was a real threat to Microsoft. By bundling the broswer with their OS, they used their monoply to kill Netscape. The court stepped in to tell them to stop, and they lied to the court. Perjury is a felony, up their with Rape and Homicide in the legal levle. Why is it such a highly prosecuted crime? Because it is the underpinning of our legal system that is at stake.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
This is simple.
First, note that IE was included in the OS to forclose the market for NS. This is itself illegal.
Second, by creating an artificial tie between the OS and the browser, they have made it impossible for an end user or anyone else to remove IE. Yes, I know about 98lite, but 98lite only restores the system to how it ought have been.
Third, by promoting IE as "the browser of choice" and by making it available only for Windows, it makes Windows the "OS of choice" for Internet access, and therefore protect their monopoly.
Fourthly, that Windows cannot change its shell and that functionality is affected is clearly not true. Consider:
- The default shell in Win 1.x and 2.x is msdos.exe, a "file open" dialog box.
- The default shell in Win 3.x was lifted from OS/2 1.3's desktop manager and file manager, even replicatng the bugs... Lining up the icons in a vertical list is straight out of OS/2's program manager.
- Windows 95 and NT4 sported a shell that did not have any internet or web based hooks.
- The shell in Windows 2000, 98 and Me can all be replaced, but XP and SP 2 onwards can not.
- All it needs is a "new-found desire" to move the shell into "new and exciting directions" to get MS to uncouple the shell from the browser.
But even removing the icons from the desktop does not remove the code. All it does is remove the icon. Ye might as well say that there is no registry editor, since there is no icon for it.The third largest market of Win3x software was programs to replace the default shell: Norton Desktop for Windows was pretty common that programs needed to be aware of it.
98lite pro, really DOES remove IE code. It also patches a number of files (including wordpad and notepad), so that the dependance is gone. There's about a dozen files it patches to make Windows work without IE.
Whether or not you can use the RTF tool if you're making a competing word processor has never been tested in court, as far as I know.
Microsoft are saying "They can't remove IE", because it is the comingling of code that they're in the courts for. They have not been accused of comingling DefectX code, or notepad, into the OS. Both of these are freely installable and uninstallable. Like browsers in every other OS.
Microsoft could charge you for using DefectX right now. DefectX basically allows you to play DefectX games. Offis plugins allow you to extend Offis, and you need that virus installed for the plugin to work. I mean, Netscape charged in the order of 25$ for their browser, and people brought it.
I mean, there is nothing wrong with charging for an engine, and then charging a different amount for games to play under that.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.