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West Virginia Joins Massachusetts in MS Appeal Bid
diwolf writes "West Virginia is seeking to join Massachusetts in appealing a U.S. District Court decision that rejected a tough antitrust remedy sought by nine states in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case. This is also being reported at CNN and ZDNet."
While I'm not that sure how much good it is going to do, it is good to see them at least continuing the fight. If more states continue to join in on the appeal, it may gain some weight.
West Virginia and the other non-settling states had argued that Microsoft should be required to sell versions of Windows without a Web browser, music player and other software to make room for competing products.
On the other hand though, how hard would it be for Microsoft to just give the option upon install of not installing these components? Would it be worth MS's time and money (in terms of legal costs, etc) to give this option? Though I'm sure they're more than willing to spend the money to keep their products on as many PC's as possible
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
.A president should have nothing to do with the wheels of justice.
Wrong. Executives across the country are empowered with discharging mercy where due--a breakup is a death sentence for a corporation, and Bush would be in his right to give MS a pardon to avert their breakup if he felt it was good for the country. That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
Justice should also be a lot swifter than this. That Microsoft case should have been over in at least 6 months.
Yes, it should have. Jackson should have mentioned future versions in his original consent decree way back when, he should have kept his mouth shut so his original antitrust ruling could stand, and President Bush should have left the extant prosecution stay on to finish the re-trial.
This guy offers a very helpful hint to the [paid] editors of a news site which is now partnered with Forbes.com! He offers a helpful suggestion and you moderate him down when it is clearly on-topic! I have been reading this newbie's posts and you jerks did this once before and I reprimanded you then! Look, I may not be the biggest fan of French Canadians but you guys are way too mod-happy.
Remember when a decent PC cost at least $4000 (US)? Then came the clones and we were able to get a PC for about $2000. After the clones came into their own, the prices just started free-falling. The reason was that IBM couldn't keep their own monopoly on PCs and charge whatever THEY wanted too - and you can bet that they wanted too! Look at Apple. They had control of everything to do with their machines and they insisted on gouging their customers. It wasn't until recently that they decided to price their machines in line with the rest of their (PC) market. Yes, they have a superior design, blah, blah, blah,... But when it comes down to it, their design wasn't worth the premium that they used to charge - sorry Mac folks.
MS turned the PC market into a commodity market. Since MS wanted to grow/keep their monopoly, they charged pretty damned cheap in my book.
What I'm trying to say is ... here it comes ... that if it weren't for MS, we would still be paying an arm and a leg for PCs.
For the record, I'm a Linux Luver
There is no spoon or sig.
"This has got to stop. The anti-Microsoft propaganda and complete disregard for any kind of SOCIAL regularity is pissing me off."
Parent poster has a point. Slashdot's turning into an Anti-MS tabloid. Though this story is legit, some of the recent stories like "Apple Users Hate Microsoft" illustrate how ridiculously low this site can reach.
Remember the good old days when Slashdot was about posting cool geek stuff? I can't believe a site that's so pro-Linux can't help but watch MS's every move.
So far, the only things to have received a Presidental pardon since the Supreme Court selected G.W. Bush as Emperor, er, I mean President, has been two Thanksgiving turkeys. It would both ironic and illuminating if Microsoft were the first humans to get one from him!
Mercy for the Rich! Mercy for the Rich!
God Bless the Almight Dollar and the Empire for which it stands!
Antitrust rulings are not about punishing the company.
Antitrust rulings are not about restoring competition to an industry.
The only concern is to help consumers. It is not illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to abuse a monopoly.
Just look at how quickly AT&T went out of business after it was broken up...
Do you have any evidence to support this opinion? Certainly Micro$oft applications would be more successful if they weren't forbidden from supporting other platforms in order to prop up the Windows monopoly. In my opinion, a breakup would be good for for innovation, shareholders, for employees, and for customers. The only thing it would be bad for is Bill's ego. What proof can you show me that the combined revenues of the separate companies wouldn't be greater than Micro$oft's current revenues?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
So many say "Why bother? M$ is above the law." What a crock of shit. Even if my tax dollars are going toward a battle which may be lost, I would be more pissed off if there were no appeals, much as I was pissed off about the states who signed the settlement. It is obvious that Bill & Co. think that they are above the law, or rich enough to buy it, so why should we throw our hands up when there is still more that can be done to fight the ruling?
I believe that these states should be congratulated for not stopping. That is what the court of appeals is for. And I hope the other seven decide not to back down either.
Compare WinXP with Win 3.1.
Now compare the progress in price and performance that hard drives, RAM, monitors, CPUs, database software, browsers, word processors (until M$ effectively killed WordPerfect), spreadsheets (until M$ killed Lotus 1-2-3) have made in the same 10 years.
And yet, in the face of all the progress made in the computer industry in those areas with vibrant competition when compared to the absolute stagnation in both price and performance that the arenas monopolized by M$ have shown, we still have fucking morons who think M$ has been good for the computer industry.
West Virginia has a long history of their population getting dispossessed and sold up the river broke-and-naked by rich out-of-state corporations so this warn't that big a surprise. Microsoft is just like any big coal company looking to take buttloads of money out of West Virginia except Microsoft hasn't started having their opponents murdered... yet. That we know of, anyways.
Shut the fuck up, and stop with the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Because I, and I suspect most of the others who frequent this forum, are just about fucking tired of it.
What do you mean, "this forum"? Slashdot is a news service, with many individual forums on many individual topics. If you don't like article posts about Microsoft and it's illegal business practices (and that's not speculation BTW, CKK's ruling found that Microsoft HAD practiced business illegally) then don't fucking read them!
PCs didn't really get cheap until the internet boom of the mid-90's. Considering the hottest browser at the time was Netscape, shouldn't they be credited with bringing PCs to the masses and the masses credited with lowering prices through demand?
Just about any OS can run a browser, so what did MS do? I mean other than bundle a free browser with their OS. PCs may be 1/4 the price but Microsoft's software sure isn't.
I like your website, but you are completely wrong here. We would all be serfs owned by a Rockefeller if it weren't for antitrust. MS dominated the desktop based on superior marketing. It used its dominance to move into servers. Anybody seriously think MS had a technical advantage over Novell or any of the Unixes? Only a wintroll would say as much. But a half-assed windows tech can manage a windows server about as well as a desktop machine. So it grew. Maybe I'm a luddite, but I don't think a server needs (or should have) a GUI, let alone multimedia. MS used its dominance of the desktop to kill off a shift to web-based computing. Now instead of using the web to free users from pc's, MS was able to pervert and invert the move and the web is now harnessed to pc's. It's as if internal combustion engines have been installed on wagons.
I think you confuse economies of scale (which drive down unit cost, to a point) with network effect. There was an astroturf economist who, based on astroturf product reviews, claimed that MS products were better than their competitors at the time they took over the market. Never mind that the reviews were generally atrocious journalism, the reason Office took over was because of clever bundling. The reason IE took over was because you couldn't get a machine without it, but had to do something extra to get Netscape. Once you start to lose momentum vs. MS, the rest of the world smells blood and the downturn accelerates. If everyone else uses it, you sort of have to as well.
Once you have the power to own everything that can generate the power to own things, it's over. Markets are great. Monopolies are not markets. Libertarians take note! And MS wasn't just a Baby Huey, good-naturedly and inadvertantly squashing competitors. It wasn't just big, it was evil. MS is a sleazy, sociopathic entity. It cheats, it lies, it extorts, it bullies, it bribes.
Yes but a fight is still a fight no matter the size. Remember what they say about business... 1 good thing may result in a couple people knowing... but 1 bad thing could result in 12 people knowing...Any kind of information about anti-trust that is brought to the press is a step in the right direction. We don't have to "win"... All we have to do is use the media to let the end users out there know what is going on... People (over all) are not stupid...They know when they are being scammed or not... If uncle Jim down the street keeps seeing news about Microsoft and security issues...or learns that Microsoft just changed some licence agreements around and he may have to pay an extra $100.00 (an example only) for his next upgrade...He will think twice... It all works in our (open source community) favor one way or another... I guess its just a matter of how you look at it...
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Someone mod this guy back up to at least 1 if he's not back there already by the time I finish writing this....
If I had modpoints today, I'd undamage this one, currently at 0. Whether I agree with the comment or not, it's a valid sentiment for someone to express (that going against the flow, against both the government and a very successful corporation, takes guts) and didn't deserve to be modded down.
On another note, KI, last I heard all the other states had signed on... WV was the last of the "uncommitted" to be choosing a side. So I doubt there will be a "#3".
--
* Helen *
A loss doesn't look good; the attorneys general that are pursuing this case wouldn't waste time on if if they thought they didn't have a chance to win it.
The real question is why the other states aren't pursuing it further. I suspect that's because of heavy lobbying and "campaign donations" by Microsoft, convincing politicians that what's good for Microsoft is good for the country.
" We have law makers introducing anti-terorism laws [e.g. patriot act et al.] You have law makers introducing new adjustments to miranda, you have law makers trying to break up a computer firm in a tough economic time."
The above is false. The miranda case currently in review is in regards to a police officer who shot and blinded/crippled a mexican immigrant for no particular reason and is now trying to justify a false confession from him while riding in the ambulance to the hospital with him and harrassing a confession out of him. The case is bogus background noise to try and save the officer from going to jail.
"Suppose they manage to shut down MS [or severely disrupt it]. What comes of that? 1000s of people lose their jobs."
No one is trying to shut down MS. They are trying to find justice for the companies MS has destroyed.
"By making MSFT illegal and leaving linux as the only option you'd actually be hurting the industry, not helping it."
There are many options, Apple, Linux, FreeBSD, Sun. The list would be much larger if it wasn't for MS shutting down companies such as Be Inc. and destroying OS/2's chances of making it. If MS got out of the way today, there would be 20 companies inline tomorrow to pick up the slack. It's called a free market and is the only proven method for economic stability and growth.
"When linux distros actually compete with Windows [e.g. in a meaningful sense, having 1500 packages on 3 CD's is not "competition" when installing a GFX driver can kill the install] then we'll see the beginning of the demise of Windows."
Agaian, no one is wishing for the demise of windows. It has it's place just like Linux does. Linux will never be as userfriendly as Windows or MacOS. Linux developers don't care about that nether do most Linux users. It's only when a "company" is held accountable for it's products due to bad sales/no sales that the product advances. Linux for this reason will always be playing catchup until some company picks it up and actually does something with it. However they cant do something with it because they have to make it freely available and like my mom says "If you're going to give it away, no one is going to pay you for it". It's just as simple as that.
For example, there was never really a decisive victory against IBM, but the decade of ongoing legal scrutiny caused IBM to change their business practices greatly, in many areas. As a specific example, the fact that the PC is a fairly open architecture is a result of such legal efforts: IBM only outsourced the PC operating system to Microsoft because they were afraid that bundling hardware and software would get them dragged into court again.
While this created another monopoly in the form of Microsoft, the overall outcome was still better than the alternative, a closed, all-IBM solution. The fact that the PC software was separate from IBM hardware allowed a third party hardware market to flourish and indirectly made software like Linux possible.
So, nibbling away legally at monopolists like IBM and Microsoft does produce long-term benefits, even if such efforts fail to produce groundbreaking short-term victories. The efforts against IBM opened up the PC hardware/software platform, and similar long-term efforts against Microsoft may kill the Microsoft monopoly as well.
And there are indications that Microsoft is changing subtly under this pressure already. But the point is: the longer the legal pressure is on them, the more they will change. This is not the time to lean back and say "oh, we'll just stick with this little settlement". It is on-going lawsuits, not some signature under a settlement, that ultimately keeps companies like Microsoft in check.
Microsoft could offer a selective install option like, say, Apple does, but it doesn't want to. I refuse to believe there are serious technical obstacles -- even if they can't extirpate all of, say, the browser code, all they have to do it sabotage access to it. Why would anyone do this is they didn't at least save disk space? Well, they wouldn't, but Microsoft doesn't wan to give up even this much control, and worried what vendors who preinstall the OS might do.
MS (correctly) perceives that it is doomed if it does not branch out into newer and different industries from its stalwart OS. It is not enough to keep its OS's on as many machines as possible, because its monopoly will not hold forever, and when it breaks so will their profit margins. The Web caught it off-guard; now it thinks it can conquer it. The easiest and most familiar way to do so is to bootstrap via the OS advantage. Hence its aggressive efforts to slot IE into everyone's desktop including Apple's (which seems to have gone away now).
Also, MS has for years now used a scorched earth policy towards any competitor. It viewed the government as just another opponent. Its recent recent experience appears to be making it less arrogant and more political. There was even an NYT magazine article on the kinder, gentler Steve Ballmer.
The root of the problem is the line between applications and operating system is blurred. If you can't say what is and isn't part of an operating system, you can't prevent MS from unfairly bundling its own applications with Windows.
Until somebody comes up with a definitive answer as to what constitutes an operating system, Microsoft will be able to do as it pleases.
I doubt that any such strict boundries can be determined, such is the nature of software. The reality is that Microsoft will continue to steal any financially viable idea and put the originator out of business, until they own the entire industry.
When that day comes they will be forced to open their codebase and MS will be no more. In short, Microsoft will eat itself to death.
It didn't , but AT&T is a shadow of its former self. The almighty Broadband unit, the one that was going to return the company to its old glory, is being spun off after hemmorhaging money for a long time - after the @Home debacle. The wireless unit likely will be sold to T-Mobile or Cingular. That leaves, what, long distance? Hah! There's a money-maker, what with long-distance rates a tenth or so of what they were "back in the day."
And why did all of this happen? Simple - AT&T had to compete when it wasn't "Ma Bell" anymore. It couldn't charge confiscatory rates for awful service (you think it's bad now? Imagine how it was when AT&T was the only game in town anywhere.) Hell, even the much-ballyhooed Lucent was still hawking copper switches as its main product as late as 2000!
I have no reason to believe that a broken-up M$ would not meet with the same fate. First off, the desktop OS unit is keeping it afloat. The server OS doesn't comparatively make them a whole lot, and they're bleeding money on the disaster that is the xBox. M$, like AT&T, had become used to competing on a field where its the only player. M$, like AT&T, is hardly a nimble startup. It is, and has been for a long time, a big company, with all its negative connotations. Just like IBM couldn't, M$ will not be able to turn its ship fast enough when the right competitor comes along. I believe that day to not be very far off.
I hate Microsoft, but WV is a state owned by the trial lawyers. Highest workman's comp claims, high malpractice insurance premiums forcing doctors to leave in droves, etc.
And you sound like the typical hillbilly... it's those big bad corporations fault! The coal industry ruined our state! Yeah... no West Virginian never got rich.
Now... no corporation wants anything to do w/ the backward state. But, there is hope. Once the Eastern Panhandle becomes the most populace area - the politics of the past will be gone.
...a judge who agrees with you is a judge who "sees the sense in all of it", right?
Good grief. How many lynch mobs have behaved in precisely the same dull-witted, imbecilic, zombie-like manner? Not knowing, not caring about the "facts," a lynch mob doesn't rest until the noose snaps tight. After that, it takes the time to consider its actions.
Your idea that "nearly the entire computing industry hates Microsoft," is truly one of the most egregiously ridiculous statements I've ever heard. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of software and hardware companies world wide which owe their existence--their entire success--to the market Microsoft built with Windows. In fact, Microsoft could never in a million years have built such a market without the aid of all of these companies consciously working to build a market. The idea that Microsoft did it alone is sheer nonsense *chuckle*--the Dells, Gateways, Microns, HPs and all the rest in this world have contributed just as much if not more to the Windows market as Microsoft has.
The kind of thinking which places Microsoft in its current position and forgets all of the other corporations sharing in and assisting in Microsoft's market illustrates the most extreme kind of ignorance.
Frankly, I'm sick of the self-righteousness of deluded people who think the courts, the companies--and anybody else who stands in their way--is wrong. It's really looking like a pathetic viewpoint these days.