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Sun To Continue To Go After Microsoft
Raiford writes "Sun Microsystem's has vowed to continue their pursuit of seeking damages from Microsoft in spite of the current ruling. A Reuters feature describes yesterday's ruling a setback for Sun and upholding light punishment on Microsoft. The current decision has not deterred Sun from pursuing a billion dollar suit maintaining a position of claiming significant harm from what they feel is clear monopoly"
here's a decent interview with Scott McNealy from Linux Magazine, check it out at http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-08/mcnealy_01.html
C|N>K
Nope! Having a monopoly is perfectly fine except that it entails that you play nice. Monopolies are bound to a stringent set of rules about how they can (or cannot, mostly) leverage their monopoly in their business practices.
Using your monopoly in one area (operating systems) to obtain a monopoly in another (web browsers) is, for example, illegal. *cough*
Wah!
Microsoft's capitalization is such a big part of the stock market that economic anxiety probably had a lot to do with this plutocrats-whores Administration deciding to back off on the Antitrust case.
See the following analysis of Microsoft's financial pyramid for enlightenment:
Microsoft Fraud Facts
I remember the ecache issue quite well. I don't know if I'd call it underhanded on Sun's part, though maybe for IBM.
See, IBM sold Sun the cache for their CPU's, and never bothered to inform them that there was a rather high failure rate. And with Sun throwing 8 megs of cache on their chips, you're bound to run into that sooner rather than later.
BTW: this problem got fixed when they started the SAMBRA process (effectivly, 16 megs of cache, 8 megs, mirrored, any byte goes bad, and it's flagged, and the mirror is used only), and was wacked totally when they started using (Toshiba?) instead of IBM for cache.
Now, if you're refering to how they didn't exactly publicise the fact that there wre significant problems... you might have a point there. However, I can see how they only wanted to fix those who 1) Sun they had the supply for (it takes a while to ramp up a new design for the same processor) and 2) customers who had the most need of the new chips. If it hasn't failed yet, why change it?
My company was rather high on the list and Sun replaced every system board, and every stick of ram, and every CPU in both of our e10k's.
For free.
All we had to do was schedule the downtime.
Zapman
"Remember that the last DOJ probe into Microsoft was derailed by the change from Clinton to Bush"
Actually no. It was derailed by the Appeals court overturning Judge Jackson's conclusions of law.
Clinton/Bush wouldn't have mattered... the case brought by the DOJ was fundamentally flawed(They should never have focused on Netscape), and Jackson didn't help matters with his obvious ineptitude and bias.
The problem there was the way Netscape went about things. They tried to out code Microsoft by adding features. Huge mistake.
I kept trying to tell Marc the parable of the tiger, you walk away from the tiger because as long as you walk he walks and you both walk at the same pace. As soon as you start to run he runs and since he runs twice as fast you are soon caught. Instead Marc went off and told Microsoft that he was going to reduce them to a baddly debugged set of device drivers.
Netscape was not run by the visionaries they billed themselves as. Marc chose engineering talent by avoiding anyone who might rivial his own claims to greatness. Since Mosaic was actually written by Eric Binna using a library from CERN there was much less greatness there than Marc's pr flacks claimed.
Incidentally Netscape made the browser effectively free with the objective of running Spyglass out of the market. The idea was to be a 'server' company the browser was the give away.
What really sunk Netscape was Apache. Apache ate into the Netscape server market which was the intended revenue stream.
Of course nonone ever complained about Aache being given away for free or about IIS being integrated with Windows.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
While it's true that if stock options were accounted for as expenditure, Microsoft would have posted a paper loss in some previous years, it's also true that when the stock fell, the same computation would have left them posting a phenomincal profit for precisely the same reason. These fluctuations are exactly why accounting stock options as expenses year-on-year doesn't make sense, and why it is not generally accepted accounting practice.
The undeniable fact is that somehow Microsoft has accumulated over $40 billion in liquid asset reserves. How did that happen if they took a loss every year? The contrast with Enron could not be more stark.
PS. I thought the reference to The Economist was particularly cute, since the article referred to concluded nothing like the taken out-of-context quote implied.
Not really. They actually have closer to $40 Billion in the bank now and they're accumulating at the rate of about $1 Billion a month.
Hold it. They're not accumulating wealth at the rate of $1B per month.
$1B per month is their income . From that, they must pay expenses.
They're still ridiculously rich and apparantly getting richer, but not THAT fast.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll