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Final Arguments in MS vs. the States
Bistronaut writes "Reports are in today on the final arguments between the 9 State Attorneys General and Microsoft (articles from eWeek). CNN also has a summary. Spoiler: States say, "Here are our priorities for reforming MS." - MS says, "We don't need no stinkin' remedy.""
And nothing will happen to MS as they have probably paid off anyone who matters.
Of course they've done good. They've also been convicted of breaking the law. Should we look the other way when Microsoft abuses their monopoly power, just because they've made computers more widespread? Should we look the other way when the county sherrif steals money, just because he's helped protect our community? Should we look the other way when a priest molests a child, just because he's done so much good in the church?
Think about what you're saying, and quit trolling for Microsoft.
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"...but found their love of computers using Dos and Win3.1"
Funny, when I got into computers back in 1991 I started with DOS and only began the love affair when I discovered OS/2.
Where would we be without MS? Imagine a best of breed OS that evolved from the best aspects of OS/2, BeOS and Linux, all three of which would have had mainstream support and decent marketshares years ago if the OEMs weren't scared shiteless of retaliation from MS.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Quick exerpt...
---snip---
For their part, the non-settling states said additional disclosure of the source code that would allow rival software to work with the Windows operating system was their most important demand. "If you forced us to articulate the single highest priority -- that's it," states' attorney Steve Kuney told the judge.
---snip---
As far as Microsoft's priorities with respect to the proposed remedies are concerned, Sullivan said its top priority is to make sure the company is not forced to reveal more of its source code, insisting that doing so would substantially harm the company and give and unfair advantage to competitors, arguments that Gates and other Microsoft executives have made repeatedly in the past.
---snip---
Hello? Essentially, Microsoft says it's top priority is NOT doing what the states feel is the topmost remedy to the entire situation.
Again, DOJ and MS lock horns head on and it will come down to the Judge.
Dear god let us have a resolution already.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Where would we be without Microsoft's existance? Just an idea, perhaps they haven't done anything good, but I think that they have done some for us.
Running Netscape on OS/2 Warp? Running Mosaic on MacOS? Despite what they'd like you to believe, Microsoft has not contributed anything particularly vital to the ease of use of computers. The basic concepts can all be found elsewhere(and earlier). Windows at Xerox PARC and on MacOS. The mouse was invented well before Microsoft was founded. DOS was certainly nothing special, and Win95 didn't offer anything OS/2 wasn't doing well before. I fail to see any big favors they've done us.
Why?
I am really getting tired of Microsofts attitude towards this whole trial. Take your lumps and move on.
WalMart's promotion will not eat into M$'s revenue stream at all. People buy home computers to match what they are familiar with at work. Until businesses implement alternate desktop environments, the common person will be too ignorant and intimidated to purchase anything besides what they use at work.
In America we love our freedom but give it all away to Bill
Guess file compatibility's worth more to us than our free will
"Kick" - Irrational Exuberance
States: Gates is a Poo-Poo Head! And here are thousands of reasons why, though we have neglected to organize and present them a focused and useful manner. Also, Ballmer smells.
BillG + lawyers: Well, I'm rubber and you're glue, your thousands of reasons bounce off of me and stick to you!
States: Uh, uh, uh, wait, that doesn't mean anything! I read in some law book that you actually have to refute our reasons and stuff!
BillG + lawyers: Too late! We already said it! And look, here's our press release declaring that you smell your own farts! Nyah-nyah!
States: Rats! We'd better focus our remaining arguments on declaring that we're not fart-smellers!
Ballmer: Hey! I don't smell my own farts! (dances like a sweaty monkey)
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Seriously, does anyone expect anything genuinely more informative than that from their arguments? the DOJ let MS dictate many of the terms of the debate, and wasted too much effort fighting MS on their own semantic turf, focusing insanely on the conceptually murky(-able) browser issues rather than looking at the "smoking gun" issues (such as OEM licensing and dual-booting, DR-DOS "incompatibility", even Apple and MS-Office). The states haven't done much of anything to expand on the DOJs well-supported, but poorly-executed arguments.
Not that MS has come up with any non-philosphical arguments themselves - most of their objections are based on the idea that the law shouldn't apply in their "special case", which is based on "software is different/MS is too economically vital to mess with/Gates is a lovey-sweetums and everyone should just love him back".
For crying out loud, the debates about post-modernism I attended in art school never achieved the bull-headed, pseudo-articulate, self-important levels of idiocy that this trial has.
And now I've added to it..
Blech.
I've proposed several remedies for the problems, none of which have a chance of getting adopted :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Microsoft lead attorney John Warden told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that the states' proposed remedy was punitive...
Yeah, imagine that. Being convicted of a crime and then actually being punished. What a crazy world we live in, huh?
Cheap humor aside, can anyone explain (and IANAL, so I'm asking honestly here) why a company that lost an antitrust suit gets to make arguments about what the punishment should be? If a private citizen is successfully sued, does s/he get to go through another round of hearings arguing that s/he shouldn't be penalized?
Frood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
I am not really trying to Troll here, but I am just thinking of what Microsoft does for me on a day to day basis. Yes, I can see from other posts here, that other OSes would have probably taken the place of Windows if Microsoft had dissapeared in the 90's. I do know that after Win95, alot more people were starting to buy computers, but for some reason the release of OS/2 didn't fly as well, even though it had a few months up on Win95.
What does Windows do for me?
Compatability- let's face it, even all of our beloved OSes like *nix and OS2 dont' support everything that we want. Microsoft is generally up to date a good bit of stuff. If I want a Paralell scanner that I have to work, its easy. Linux, I look online, sorry that's not supported, it needs to be SCSI or USB. OS2, I don't know, but IBM isn't really pushing its updating now are they... Other things also fall into this pit. Alot of hardware is Windows only, while this isn't Microsoft's fault, its certainly nice to have an OS that's 'standard' on most desktops, no it's not the only OS I use, I have 3 linux boxes and 5 windows boxes around the house, all different flavors on all.
Simplcity- While Mac OS offers this as well, which I am grateful for. I know Windows well. I know linux well too. However, there are too few 'standards' around for linux setups and configs. Its hard to troubleshoot. Perhaps thats just me, but it still needs maturing for standard setups, etc...
There are a few other ways that Windows helps me, but I am outta time....
Anyway, sorry if you guys thought I was trolling, but I just didn't see the 'antitrust' suits as being really a big deal, Microsoft didn't ever stop me from using a 3rd party utility or 'confuse' me about their options to install software. I can put Opera, or Mozilla, or Netscape, or AOL, or Realplayer on my system as easy as anything else. It's not stopping me from doing what I need to do. Anyway, there goes my Karma...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Remember when railroad companies used different sized track to eliminate competition? They also eliminated any semblance of travel convenience for the consumer.
The commercial software establishment is largely like these now non-existant railroad franchises. People have discovered that it's just software, and they are happier to enjoy a level of compatibility accross a variety of systems.
Of course, once the railroad industries agreed on standards it became possible for mass production of standards-based railway hardware. This eliminated much of the guesswork, tracks were wide enough to support trains of various sizes and shapes. Without these standards, the golden age of travel would have been unachievable.
Software needs to adopt standards, and the open source community has been vital to that process.
Given Microsoft's track record in this area, I think the best outcome now is for the judge to force MS to abide by standards for all present and future networking protocols. If a networked feature of MS software does not employ a documented RFC, W3C recommendation, etc. it must be fixed.
And there should be a federal committee responsible for reviewing and enforcing this. It is not acceptable that standards can be implemented along with a proprietary MS protocol (eg: MS Exchange).
Ultimately, all commercial software should be made to follow these rules, only the open source community will be allowed to innovate networking protocols. Most of the significant protocols came from open source / public domain anyway, let's mandate that tradition and stop companies like Microsoft from meddling with a good thing.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Never underestimate the twistiness of a lawyer- and judges are uber-lawyers.
I'd have done the same thing. It's way more effective than asking them, "Are you going to obey the outcome of this proceeding, or laugh at it and scorn it?" You don't ask them directly, 'are you going to obey the law'. You ask, 'how much of this is reasonable and just'. If they take it as an opportunity to grandstand, you know they're gonna ignore the ruling, because they don't believe in it, or in the law.
FWIW, I burst into incredulous, delighted laughter just seeing the news.com subhead about what Microsoft had done for a reply to the question. Forget foot-shooting: they've blown off their f**king leg here. Spectacularly bad judgement. And Judge Kollar-Kotelly is a smart lady :D
I say that if Microsoft didn't have a monopoly, then you would be able to get better driver support for other OSes. Microsoft establishes "standards" not for your benefit, nor for the benefit of hardware makers, but for their own benefit, and they break or "change" them when it suits their business goals. And they use access to these standards as reward or punishment.
As for 3rd party apps, you can expect an unchecked monopoly to stop you from using them in subtle ways. I'm not saying that everything they have done is bad for us, I'm saying that a person who says "there is nothing wrong here" is ignoring the facts. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is smarter than you or I, and he studied this issue for a very long time and heard the best arguements money could buy, and he came to the conclusion that there is something very wrong here, and that it is bad for you and I, and that drastic measures are warranted.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
I'm not sure that it is just a question of the public interest. As far as most members of the public (which slashdotters do not represent) they tend to think that integrated software is great. No need to go out and find a browser, media player, messenging tool etc. They don't want a modular O/S. The judge is there to serve the interest of competition. That interest is served (in my humble opinion) by exiting MS from the software market. That way they cannot act anti-competitively. I'm not talking about breaking them up, I mean forcing them to exit all non O/S based software by selling the rights to the highest bidder.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
Every other software vendor has had the same options and opportunities available to them
Really?
So you're saying that BeOS had the same options and opportunities available? They could have gone to the hardware companies and said "Look, if you give any indication that you're putting Windows on the same system, we're going to charge you double for the BeOS license" and not get laughed out of the office?
You're suggesting that Netscape had the opportunity to use the revenue from their massive monopoly on OEM OS sales to back them giving away their browser until it crushed the competition?
Possibly you're suggesting that Word Perfect or Lotus had the opportunity to leverage their intimate knowledge of propietary Windows APIs to make their software run as fast as any competitor, or that they could modify the underlying OS to cause problems with Microsoft Word or Excel?
Now, can you argue that other companies dropped the ball? Sure, some did. But don't be so quick to assume stupidity on the part of a public that was robbed of any choice from a company leveraging it's monopoly in one area (the OS) to eliminate competition in other areas.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Are you real? The only thing resembling logic in your post is the paragraph about Gary Kildall. But hey, even that can be argued. After all, the guy had a passion for life and flying. Had that fateful day been overcast, we would be in a very different world today.
Everything else you say is a contradiction to your assumptions. Yes, Microsoft did bully their way in every one of those examples.
Borland? Go ask Phil what he thinks about this. After getting hammered over and over by not having access to the same information Microsoft had for its own development tools. After being chronically late and behind Microsoft new operating systems because most of the stuff had to be reversed engineered (while Microsoft's own tools came ahead of these releases).
Visicalc? Lotus 123 came up with something for the 8086 faster (Visicalc was CP/M only for quite a while). That turned Lotus into a winner overnight. Overtime, Microsoft turned its dreadful Multiplan into Excel, forced it down the throat of every OEM and robbed the market share (as opposed to "winning" it). Not to mention it did everything it could to make Lotus 123 not to work with Microsoft products.
I can go on and on about this. Heck! I lived though all this and I am very intimate with all these scenarios as I was directly involved with many of them.
I get you point and it could be a valid one had you chosen very different examples. As is, it feels more like a paid Microsoft drone trolling around to create confusion.
You have completely missed the point!
/. story on this case, but I guess it's not redundant until people actually understand it...
There is at least one comment that explains why in every
Microsoft is NOT ON TRIAL for being a monopoly.
There is NOTHING WRONG with being a monopoly under US law.
Microsoft were ABUSING their monopoly, which there ARE laws against.
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