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"

Comments

Re: Sun to go after Microsoft

[Voytek]

Yeah, ya gotta give him credit for being a complete imbecile, willing to sacrifice his company (not really his anyway, as it's publicly traded) for a personal vendetta.

I hate microsoft as much as the next guy, but McNealy and Ellison are just whiny little bitches - it's just that Ellison can still (sort of) afford to whine; whereas McNealy is taking Sun down the shitter.

Different things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a monopoly that you have got by illegal business-practices and having a monopoly that you have got by doing good products are not the same thing.

Microsoft has been conducting some illegal business-practices but what have SUN have that would have been able to compete?

Have SUN at any time made a desktop that has been really viable and sellable. Honest. Don't think so.

hoping for a change in administrations?

[call -151]

Remember that the last DOJ probe into Microsoft was derailed by the change from Clinton to Bush (things were looking promising, but right before the elections there was a go-slow/wait-and-see pause) that resulted in a much more `business-friendly' administration that did not pursue the settlement very agressively.

With this in mind, maybe if Sun starts something now they are hoping that in two years there may be another administration that might think that monopoly power abuse is actually a bad thing and will pick up the ball then... It can't hurt to start something now with that hope...

Re:Fly going after the elephant

[Dan Ost]

And when Bill's stock dips because of all the
negative publicity, that cash pile will have to
be used to prop up the stock price or else
Bill will have to actually start paying his
employees rather than just offer them stock
options.

This could get interesting.

Has anyone written up the implication for
MicroSoft if their stock loses value? Would
be an interesting read.

Sun is playing the wrong game

[Snork Asaurus]

I'll bet that in their collective minds MS feels vindicated - the fact that they were found guilty of anti-trust violations is years-old news and really isn't important to them anyway. What is important to them is that they got away with it, probably thanks in no small part to Asscroft and Bush and some well-spent campaign contributions. The media is helping MS to appear vindicated by shouting "Microsoft Won!" and then whispering "at getting away with it". I expect that MS will behave like a petulant child that only received a scolding and a wink for setting fire to the school house and truly exploit their apparent omnipotence from now on.

So, unfortunately, in today's screwed-up world, maybe the lesson that Sun needs to learn from this is to play outside the rules and fight like hell when caught. To the victor of that game go the spoils.

IBM/Linux a greater threat

[TTL0]

I think that Sun has lost more sales this year to IBM/Linux solutions, than to Microsoft.

Re:Open Source Java == heavy marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

> The point being: if Sun gets 90% of all sites
> running its dog food (J2EE, JSP, etc etc) yet
> doesn't make any money off it because its all
> stadnards based open-source GPL'd/LGPL'd stuff,
> well then, all they've done is advance teh state
> of computing - not run a successful business. MS
> could continue its whole .NET thing with even
> that 10% of the market because they are making
> money from each site that uses its dogfood.

They key thing is, Sun will get money from Java if they adopt the adopt the Troll Tech model of licensing Java (GPL for open source, proprietary for closed source).

As it stands now, Sun is in risk of losing it's control of Java.
* JBoss and OpenEJB exist and are gaining market share.
* IBM's Eclipse is gaining market share from Sun's Netbeans. It's faster, more extensible, and it uses native widget sets without sacrificing portability.
* GNU Classpath is becoming a solid platform for Java. The only thing GNU Classpath really needs is good AWT and Swing support. Fortunately, IBM's SWT already exists and can be used with GCJ and GNU Classpath. Once someone is able to compile Eclipse with GNU Classpath, the Eclipse development environment (and it's SWT widget set) will be a part of all major Linux distributions. AWT and Swing will become ignored by open source developers.
* Apache's Jakarta is starting to become the place where defacto standards like Struts and AXIS are created. Sun has no control over any of this and doesn't directly make any money from it either.
* About the only thing they do control and get money from is the Java Community Process.

Right now, Sun has a chance to extend its leadership through adopting openess. If they don't, Sun may end up losing control of Java to open source and IBM.

Don't blame Sun.

[small_dick]

Thanks to the criminality of Microsoft, and the ineptitude of (now) all three branches of the US government in dealing with that criminality, as well as the current "Welfare for Microsoft" campaign being levied by the US government ("Microsoft Everywhere"), all you can say is "I don't blame them a bit".

This was an extremely competent technology company, one that set many standards for innovation and openness.

Now they are a mere shadow of their former slf, primarily due to criminality of another company, one receiving aid and encouragement by a government that is supposed to foster the free market and competition for the good of it's citizens.

Shame on the US gov't for their toothless mediocrity. Go get 'em, Sun.

Re:Fly going after the elephant

[JordanH]

• And when Bill's stock dips because of all the negative publicity, that cash pile will have to be used to prop up the stock price or else Bill will have to actually start paying his employees rather than just offer them stock options.

  This could get interesting.

  Has anyone written up the implication for MicroSoft if their stock loses value? Would be an interesting read.

Follow the stock market much?

MSFT is down more than 50% since it's high in late 1999. That's never caused them to seriously dip into their cash reserves.

In any case, any bad publicity they might receive from various civil actions will be more than counter-balanced by the fact that the DOJ case is over now.

Re:Sun has jumped the shark

[vandan]

Bullshit.
You don't know about the antitrust suit do you?
Microsoft has been in court for the past few years over antitrust violations. This means they abused their monopoly position to force an inferior product down people's throats. The government is only interested in this because it HURTS CONSUMERS because the very 'let the best software win' method fails to work under monopoly conditions.
Get a clue.

Re:Sun has jumped the shark

[AstralSeeker]

Bullshit, I've (or my parents when I was a lot younger) been buying computers since the days of XTs and I never bought one with an MS OS installed. Go shop elsewhere than Dell and you'll see you're free to buy what you want.

The fact is every other thing that tried to compete on PC wasn't very useful, DR-DOS sucked and was very slow with some applications, Gem and pre-3.11 version of Windows were pratically useless it's no wonder they didn't worked. And Lotus and WP didn't fly on windows because they were really bad. I was a die hard WP user at the time and didn't want anything to do with Word, first time I saw Word 2.0 for Windows I switched and never went back, it was just so much better.