Competitors Cry Foul At Windows XP, 2K Service Packs

caudron writes "According to an article at ZDNet, a trade group partly funded, not surprisingly, by Microsoft's competitors is claiming that WinXP SP1 and Win2k SP3 contain 6 separate violations of both the letter and spirit of the proposed DOJ Settlement. Equally unsurprising, Microsoft disagrees with them. And so the Case-That-Wouldn't-Die drags ever onward."

Comments

Re:The -Proposed- Settlement

[d3xt3r]

Yes the settlement is not final yet, however, Microsoft claims that SP1 & SP3 comply with the terms of the proposed settlement. Therefore, it is important to point out MS is lying.

Hopefully this will make the DOJ wise up to the fact that MS will find a way around anything.

um. we're supposed to be surprised???

[LinuxWoman]

Microsoft for YEARS now has made a habit of misleading business practices and ignoring the concerns of consumers (and even industry groups). They're forced competitors out of the market, they try to make everyone adapt to their standards, and we're supposed to be SURPRISED that they're already violating the proposed settlement???

Reality time folks: either it's going to take a forcible settlement that makes MS a non-issue or we're going to just have to learn to live with them as they already are. They have way too many people who do nothing but sit around to find loopholes. Then they have a large number of marketing/PR types that make using those loopholes look like desireable features (or at least like they weren't INTENTIONAL slights of law or agreements...).

This is absolutely stupid

[gamorck]

The Washington, D.C.-based trade group, which is partially funded by Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems and other Microsoft competitors, argued that Microsoft's distribution mechanism for the service pack is the first violation of the pending settlement.

You've got to be kidding me. Everybody under the sun cries foul when some benchmark or study comes out of some firm which receives any funding from Microsoft - yet this shit is okay even though this group clearly isn't looking to have their funding cut off? Come on now - at least be consistent...

Aside from this... most of Procomp's complaints are complete and utter BS. They whine that Microsoft wants to charge you 10 bucks to get the service pack on the CD, yet they also want to whine about how long it takes to download the minimum install of 30 megs. Then they complain that Microsoft may potentially make tens of millions of dollars on the CD distribution yet neglect to mention that you can legally download it from their own site for FREE.

Nor do they mention how Apple or other MS competitors dont even allow you to download larger OS/APplication updates for free and require that you purchase a CD (for clarification Im reffering to OS 10.1 not 10.2). They also continue to whine about how links to the Middleware control panel are not included on the Start Menu and Desktop. This is beyond stupid. Control panels BELONG IN THE DAMN CONTROL PANEL!

I can't believe the lusers editing /. let this one slide through. It really does reek of baseless Anti MS sentiment like so much other material published on this site. There are plently of legitimate things to bash MS for yet the /. community seems to perfer focusing on the misunderstood and irrelevant bitches and moans rather than approaching things in a constructive manner.

Oh well whatever. Im guessing we will soon see an article lamenting RedHat's decision to make Mozilla the default browser in their upcoming Redhat 8.0 release. Yeah Redhat does linux but since they actually have a head on their shoulders and actually want to make money instead of going out of business - we are supposed to hate them right?

So so so stupid...

J

Re:Just installed the Service Pack...

[jmertic]

On Win 2000 SP3, it has the same setup, but I was suprised to see that Mozilla Mail was explictly listed as Mail Client option ( as opposed to being in the catagory "My current mail program" ) while Mozilla wasn't listed in the browser section. Oddly enough Outlook XP wasn't listed as an mail program either.

Even though I turned off using Media Player, it still popped up any time I inserted a Music CD. Once I installed Winamp 3, that stopped happening.

And it's great to see that if I use IE, many of the bookmarks launch Mozilla

Re:Service packs = bait and switch

[ites]

Service packs are special.
No operating system gets such big updates
with so little control by the user.
Try updating just part of Windows?
Impossible...
Windows is special.
No other operating system needs such frequent patches
because of security issues.
I can choose which new packages hit my Linux box.
With Windows it's take it or leave it.
And security issues mean I have to take it.

Re:Gee, what on earth will please these people?

[GooberToo]

.Net has no business being in a service pack anyway. It should of been a distinct download to start with. Maybe they should change the name from Service Pack to Install-anything-we-want-on-your-system-and-oh-ya- we-might-fix-a-couple-of-bugs-too Pack. Anything else is complete dribble on the topic.

Yet another example of how microsoft use's their bundling power and illegal monopoly to push THEIR software to users. Case in point, if they're bundling .NET, they should be bundling a recent Java (1.4) with the service pack as well.

This moves proves two things. One, the agreement is far too weak. Two, Microsoft will do anything to avoid having to compete. Clearly their intent is to maintain their illegal monopoly using any back door and cracked window they can find.

Ya, ya, ya...I'm well aware of the fact that the agreement is currently not binding. That doesn't change the fact that MS has stated they intend to comply with it. Clearly that's not true.

Chinks in armour.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well since the "subject" is MS abusing it's monopoly position, and the above story indicates that that hasn't changed over time. Then the only question should be "will any decision be sifficient to change that condition?". So the "subject of the decision" hasn't changed, but only how strong the action needed to bring back balance will need to be?. IMO, the "downfall" of MS will not rest solely on just the decision of the court case, but several factors.

1-The state of the economy.
2-The ill will generated by MS behavior.
3-The OSS movement and the pressure being brought to bear, local & international.
4-The house of MS is not as firm as people believe.[http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts. html]
5-Legal pressure not only from the US but abroad.
6-The fickle nature of people & the loss of confidence in MS.
7-The deviation from core competency (X-box)

My experiences with Win2K & Dell

[dcavanaugh]

We have a Dell Poweredge 2450 server including RAID 5 disks, running Win2K & SQL Server. We discovered mysterious anomolies (Control Panel not working and some other wacky stuff). Microsoft support recommends a full restore from tape. OK, we have tapes, let's go. We attempt to boot from CD and we know we need to supply a driver disk for the RAID card. Each time we attempt to boot, things look okay for a while and then BAM! cryptic register dump -- game over. This goes on for THREE DAYS of fumbing & bumbling. My sysadmin is a very knowledgable MCSE, not some newbie who uses the CD-ROM as a cupholder. Microsoft support was puzzled, so was Dell. Eventually, the Dell folks determine that we were given the wrong driver disk for our Dell RAID controller. Evidently our RAID controller had newer firmware than our driver disk (not that Win2K told us anything useful at boot time to suggest this). We download a new driver, and the restore eventually works. This series of events started out as a standard Microsoft response (reinstall the OS) to a standard Microsoft problem (anomolies with no useful clues in the event log). Dell gets some of the blame, but we expect the OS to either boot up or tell us why not.

By the time we had this little crisis under control, I gave the server in question the nickname "Atta" and wrote it on the paper label we stick on the server that shows name & IP address.

In my shop we have Microsoft and Linux boxes running side by side. I am the IT manager, so if some Microsoft salesman wants to talk about how their products can improve our uptime and reduce support costs, they will first have to listen to the story of how one of their products motivated us to name a Microsoft server after a middle east terrorist. Then they will have to explain how our costs will decline by paying for licenses/support/upgrades, and how our uptime will improve as we respond to mysterious anomolies by doing full restores on servers that can't even boot properly from CD/floppy.

Years ago, I worked at a DEC shop. Everything was damn expensive, but it was rock-solid. When things didn't work, we saw messages and error log entries that provided clues. DEC had tech. support that would investigate any crash dump and determine what happened. All of this was very pricey, and DEC got slaughtered by commoditized x86 hardware and Microsoft software. Sure, today's Wintel servers are cheaper and faster, but stability, recoverability, and support are worse now than 20 yrs. ago.

Re:An W2K SP3 experience.

[MoneyT]

Does windows have a reliable scripting language? I had to do a simmilar process for someone who had switched from AOL to another dial-up service on their mac. THe problem was easily solved by opening Apple Script and having it record the events nessesary to launch and activate the connection and browser. It was then a simple matter of setting the script to run when doubleclicked and replacing the script icon with the web browser icon. Deavtivation was another script except with a modfed icon (I love ResEdit). Is a simmilar feat possible under windows? If so where, I would love to have a scripting program on this sucker.