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Microsoft Case Proceeds
YeOldeCurmudgeon writes "This story just posted on Yahoo: Federal Judge Denies Microsoft Motion to Dismiss Antitrust Case. Microsoft's motion to dismiss the suit filed by the 9 dissenting states was denied. The judge agrees the states can sue." An article in the San Francisco Chronicle summarizes the case's current state and what's coming up next.
So there's still a chance of the OS and productivity software markets opening up to competition, instead of the Bush "settlement" (read: bribe payoff) which gives government protection to the Microsoft monopoly!
The idea of the antitrust suit was to enable competition. Here's a test of the result of the Bush "settlement" - has there been increased investment in companies competing with Microsoft in the OS and productivity software arenas?
Let's waste more taxpayer dollars, more time, and do absolutely nothing.
Screw suing MS, how about actually DOING something about it? Instead of suing them for 'monopoly practices', which will be next-to-impossible to prove in court, why not just STOP BUYING THEIR SOFTWARE.
Stupid yuppie government decision-making.
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You're right. Microsoft lost and was found guilty in federal court of monopolistic pratices, but they outlasted us and outlasted the administration that beat them and got the next one to give them exactly what they wanted, including a free pass to keep doing business as usual. Lets not let those few states still fighting them conflict with our short attention span. We might as well realize that no matter what the court says, Microsoft will do whatever Bill damn well pleases.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Since the mid 80's, the 'operating system' has been extremely important to Microsoft. Making sure everyone adopted Windows 95 and 98 was extremely important for the success of the company, as it locked them into the current architecture (2000/XP etc). This has meant that operating systems are VERY important to MS.
.NET, the operating system is not as important as it once was.. in the future, a proper .NET program will run on any system that has a .NET compatible VM and the correct class libraries!
.NET allows Microsoft's software to dominate on EVERY PLATFORM, and this is a great thing for them. A very clever move, and it may make all this antitrust case very irrelevant.
This may not be the case for much longer. With the advent of Linux, operating systems have been somewhat commoditized. With
Believe it or not, in 5 years, you could see Mac/Linux people buying, and running natively, stuff like Office and Visual Basic.NET, thanks to Microsoft embracing the concept of the virtual machine.
I think Microsoft is going to bank on the success of its virtual machine (.NET) and this whole new platform-independant architecture. Even if Microsoft was forced out of the OS game.. it's not a disaster for them. They still have the critical mass of users to sell software to (Office, etc), and a critical mass of developers used to developing for their platforms.
In essence,
mogorific carpentry experiments
This is not a comprimise. MS broke the law, they have to be punished, not slapped on the hand.
So I'm thinking then that M$ will suddenly start to look at thin clients in a whole new light.
.NET to leverage!
If the OS is commoditized, they still have to make their money elsewhere.
*wavy lines*
Office? No problem! Don't buy that expensive Dell workstation - buy the cheapo thin client for your drones, and a big old server running WinXX and use
Oh yeah, now we got you where we want you on per seat licensing, and even though you just realized it, what you gonna do? Eat the cost of those 400 thin clients? Or pay us our per-seat fee?
Good boy, sign here.
*/end wavy lines*
An interesting point, but one that is easily answered.
.NET. Okay, some things like 'Windows Forms' are a bit proprietary, but there's still tons of documentation for it. The Ximian guys are even going to be spinning their own compatible version.
.NET solution.
.NET framework on them. This means people can go out and buy Microsoft Office 2005, and it'll run on their PC, Mac, or Linux box. What has Microsoft lost here? Nothing really, infact, they're likely to gain market share.
.NET. Microsoft will lock coders into .NET with its own development systems.. and Microsoft won't care what operating system the resultant programs work on, as long as Microsoft is making money on a) the dev tools, b) sales of its own software across multiple platforms, c) sales of its server software across multiple platforms, and d) the 'faithful' who will stick with Microsoft's own OS.
Microsoft has totally opened up the specs to
But it doesn't matter if the users aren't running Microsoft's VM. Unlike in the old days, Microsoft is not going to get rich by selling its platform anymore. It's going to stay rich by providing the best
Let's jump ahead 3 years. Let's say that Linux and MacOS X have a perfect compatible
Look it in terms of the browser war. Microsoft gave away the browser, but locked developers into its solution with proprietary coding styles. Many pages only appear correctly in IE nowadays! The same will happen with
mogorific carpentry experiments
who had been given this case came to hate MS, in much the same way as the previous judge had. She hated them because they lied, they cheated and they were trying all kinds of tricks to sway her viewpoint.
Now imagine you were really set to hit them upside the head with a nasty verdict. What would be the smartest thing in the world to do. Right... keep quiet about it. Never give a hint or whiff that you felt that way, or you'd never get your chance to apply a verdict at all. You'd know the previous judge really f*cked up when he talked about the case, so you wont make the same mistake. In fact, it would be nearly impossible for anyone to guess what you were planning on doing.
This is clearly conjecture on my part, but god it would be nice if it was true.
It also really doesn't matter if users are running Windows or Wine.
Except for the fact that Microsoft invents new APIs faster than people can clone them, so the compatible solution never catches up. Ximian is a long way from NET 1.0, and my guess is that NET 2.0 ships before they get close.
Fine MS?
If microsoft were to lose the case, they would LOVE a fine. Think about it.
Let's pick a rediculously high number for a fine. Say 20 BILLION. It would never be that high but let's say it is.
Microsoft has 40 BILLION in cash. Microsoft could pay the fine and keep right on doing what they are doing now. They would view it as the cost of business. And worth every penny.
For example. Say 20 years someone offered you a deal. We'll give you 95% market dominance, no real competitors, 40 BILLION in cash, a personal fortune worth 57 BILLION, and BILLIONS of profits every year. the only catch is that after you achieve all of this, were gonna take 20 BILLION away. And the resulting settlement will protect you to keep doing what got you here in the first place.
Every single person would take that deal.
If microsoft were only to be fined, that is simply the cost of them doing business.
the ruling needs to do three things:
Split microsoft into 3 companies; Apps, OS, Internet
Force microsft to use a competitors languages to develop their applications.
Lay bare EVERY single API call in all versions of Windows.
And don't say that would create 3 monopolies rather than 1. Think it through.
I've said it time and time again that that this is not a trivial issue at all. To YOU it is obvious because of your clear bias against MS. Personally, myself (and many others) do not believe that what was done with IE was anti-competitive in any way. This is America, and everyone has a right to a fair trial and to voice their side of an argument. MS has been found guilty, but what they are guilty of is not trivial either. Personally, I believe in pro-customer solutions not anti-MS punishments. Remember, the point of antitrust is to restore competition not to punish the corporation. For example, I think that MS's strongarmed OEM licensing agreements should be regulated or banned altogether. But that's just me. There are many other people who's full time job is to think about all of these issues, so while we have our opinions, none of us really see the depth of the issues at hand.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
8 years!?! first of all, that's close to disolution of charter as others have mentioned. this isn't quite the internet boom age anymore, but there are still demands for software advancement.
secondly, have you used KDE, mozilla, open office lately? these products are currently shaking up the M$ camp. if all M$ developers, engineers, etc. were sent on leave for one year (keep a core nimbda resolution team around), they would be playing catch-up for the next few years (possibly some of those workers would contribute to the os projects as well).
Tempting, but what about the injured party? Suppose your neighbor wrecks your house, and the government takes 10% of his net worth but doesn't restore your house. The solution makes no attempt to repair the damage, which (seems to me as a non lawyer) to be an important part of civil litigation. If the litigation were criminal then I think deterrence or rehabilitation oriented sentencing makes sense, but isn't this a civil case?
Every piece of MS software I've used has been lightyears ahead of most other competing SW -- free or not, with the exception of Vis InterDev, Media Player, and VJ++ (ugh -- use JBuilder :-).
The REAL problem is that the reason they can develop such powerful software by paying for research/large dev teams and backing it is because they are already a juggernaut monopoly that needs to be checked. Because of that they shove it down everyones throats by patenting "intellectual property" as a reason to keep their formats closed while using things like undocumented APIs to gain tighter intergration.
I still say split MS into a SW and OS companies.
why run from Vincenzo?
My favorites:
...
1) Forced full and free release of all fileformats they created and will create in the last+next 10 years
2) Held liable for security flaws (this is one for another trial
3) Forced standards compilance for html
4) Some huge powerfull comittie above their head, that needs to approve the defaults and quality of all releases. Install ms haters in it
5) Absolute forbidden to arrange per-oem deals, one price policy, clear and open
6) Full refunds for all ever-bundled software!
...
1 and 5 seem to be the most feasible...
Of course, there is still bill-torture, per crash refunds,
Similar threats were made to OEMs who used products competing with MS Office. In the process, Microsoft totally destroyed the market share of Lotus 1-2-3, Quattro Pro, Paradox, Wordperfect and a few others whose names escape me. They very nearly killed Borland as a company, and did kill Wordperfect (who were bought out by Corel). I'm don't recall how Lotus fared (bought out by IBM?).
Those four products, at least, were _all_ respected market leaders. Many people still talk about Wordperfect as some hallowed "golden age" of word processing. Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro BUILT the spreadsheet market, and Excel was the poor cousin for years, until MS strongarmed it onto half the world's desktops. There is certainly a case for the argument "Netscape would have died anyway" (I used 4.61 - crash central), but not all four of these. In short, MS abused its windows monopoly to totally obliterate its competitors in a very lucrative market.
Microsoft is guilty as hell of abusing its monopoly, and IE vs Netscape is only a sideshow. Even the Findings Of Fact make it clear that Netscape was just "in the way", and MS's real target for their IE behaviour was Java.
There are many who say that the DOJ case was run badly. I think I agree with that in many ways - they went chasing after side issues all the time, and the whole Netscape-Java-Windows-OS-Competitor chain is too tenuous for many people to even follow (never mind the "Java would never have threatened windows anyway" argument). MS Office would have made a much easier target.
I'd be interested to know how giving away a product that costs money to make for free, deliberately, in order to "cut off their air supply" (I think that was the phrase MS execs used, right?) is not anti-competitive. Please enlighten me.