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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."
that Microsoft doesn't have them bought. The wheels of justice are too slow and corrupt. I have heard (no proof, just rumour - you guys might know where this was) that GWB specifically ordered the Justice Dept to not seek splitting the company up. If this is true it shows that GWB was bought (he is bad anyways) and that he has far too much power. A president should have nothing to do with the wheels of justice. Justice should also be a lot swifter than this. That Microsoft case should have been over in at least 6 months.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
You underestimate the testing cost of doing this. (Surprise, surprise) Microsoft has to test every configuration it supports before it can ship the product. Adding a series of options multiplies the test matrix several times.
You'd think that Virginia would want a piece of them too...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I have to ask: who would actually be interested in pursuing this case?
It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement, so any interested parties (mostly Microsoft's competitors) don't have anything to gain. It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer. So who is the winner of this case (other than the army of lawyers)?
The answer is that a bunch of people (e.g. the attorney generals of these states) gain some free press and cheap popularity from the ongoing coverage of the case. The important thing to notice is that the case itself is absolutely irrelevant, these people would attach themselves to any other high-profile case just as quickly.
So don't ever think this is about "freedom" or any other nice ideas, it's only about buying votes and personal agendas.
When men used to be men
While that is true, my point was simply would it be cheaper overall to just implement these options than face the court and legal fees, or would they be willing to keep paying the legal fees (if it is more expensive) in order to keep the components in place.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Of Course, they have confused Free (as is speech) Software with free (as in beer) software, and didn't always realise that Linux is not the only free software out there.
and note: they didn't save the sale for Microsoft.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Except that it's more than likely that they have some number of lawyers on payroll as well as expected court costs, so it's an already budgeted cost, where as any unexpected testing and engineering is probably not. Not that I have any clue how it actually works in the real world... I've got 2 dollars and a coupon for applesauce in my wallet right now.
What if the People rose up and filed their own Pro Se suits against Micro$oft? Crash the Courts! Has somebody a website for this yet? Just a thought.
I'm from MA as well and I have heard that part of the reason we are pursuing the case is that we have already incurred most of the legal costs of the case in the initial stages (according Tom O'Reilly, our attorney general for non massholes). I suppose that makes some sense if you consider how much preparation must go into a case like this; I can see how the research and paperwork might be the most expensive part.
remember, no matter where you go, there you are
Why give up? This is exactly what they want - keep battering for long enough, and cracks will show. A Law Firm here in New Zealand went as far as to lodge a complaint with the Commerce Commission regarding Microsoft's new licensing regime. Although the complaint was rejected, the new scheme has so incensed one of the partners, Craig Horrocks, that he has set up a site here which has a copy of the complaint, an open letter to MS users, and assorted news articles. You can be assured that this law firm is not about to take it lying down, as this site shows.
The Mothership
1. M$ is scared shitless of Linux. They have no real strategy to deal with something that even they know is more stable and secure, and know they can't compete on price.
2. Win XP and M$'s licensing went over with customers even worse than what you read - even here. M$ kept a tight lid on how badly Win XP cratered in the corporate world.
3. M$ rank-and-file are a bunch of arrogant asswipes who think big corporations and gov't have no choice but to buy M$
Massachusetts is considered a high tech haven, West Virginia a low tech backwater. I wonder what local politics led to these decisions.
If I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that if the state of the economy were better, most, if not all, of the other seven states would join. Nearly every state is broke and have other things that are of a higher priority at this time. I'm sure that the economy is hurting M$ but they can just downsize. Government never finds it easy to downsize so M$ probably has the advantage.
1. The manufacture of software is much more than just pressing a CD. Programmers aren't cheap and, thanks to ongoing support and development, keeping a piece of software up-to-date remains expensive.
On the hardware side, once you've designed, say, a USB 2.0 chipset, you can license it and build millions of them at, incrementally, a very low cost, and the design might not change substantially for years. They're two separate businesses, and it's not really rational to say that, since hardware is getting cheaper, software should be too.
2. Sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. Maybe OS X and RedHat are priced that way because that's the price the market will bear for an OS. MS doesn't *make* anyone sell competing products for the same amount (or more).
My point about OS X was that there are no full *licenses*. What I'm getting at is that OS X only runs on Macs. If you've bought a Mac, you've bought a copy of OS 8/9/X. Therefore, the only thing you can install is an upgrade -- the only use for a so-called "full" version would be on a machine on which you don't already have a copy of OS 8/9/X which is, thanks to the Mac's closed architecture, not possible.
3. Not sure what you're getting at here. All I'm saying is that the cost of an OEM product is often substantially less than the cost of a retail product.
Imagine that you're Real Audio a couple of years ago. You've come up with a great product. However, Microsoft not only tries to make your product irrelevant (i.e. building Windows Media Player into Windows), but also uses their OS to crash your product (demonstrated during initial trial).
Actions against monopolies are to protect against one company using dominance in one area to corner other markets. I for one, as a CS undergrad, am for court action against MS. Why? 'cause what happens if 5~10 years from now I create a great app for windows. MS decides that they want to sell my app, so they build a clone. Not only that, after the latest "Service Pack," my app crashes constantly and their's becomes more stable. Protection against that scenario is the good that will come out of a ruling against MS. A fair ruling would protect developers and developers that want to build on top of Windows.
By the way, I was born and raised in West-By-God-Virginia
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
Eventually, we have to get a judge that either sees the sense in all of it, or cannot be bought, or (hopefully) both. How much more can will it take?
Just an interesting though: what if all the money that went in to this trial went into development of Free software instead? (We might be a lot farther along. There can be more than one way to make competition...) Anyone know how much has been spent??
Yes, and you know why MS got the opportunity to do this? Because IBM was subject to the same legal scrutiny as Microsoft is now. IBM outsourced the PC operating system to MS because IBM was afraid of more anti-trust action if they did both the PC hardware and software in-house. Note that influencing IBM in this area wasn't the result of an actual settlement, it was the consequence of on-going legal scrutiny and the threat of lawsuits.
Today, Microsoft is the monopoly that kills innovation and competitiveness. And we can apply the same strategy to Microsoft as we did to IBM decades ago: on-going legal scrutiny and on-going lawsuits. Discovery, legal proceedings, and the threat of legal judgements have the teeth that anti-trust settlements lack. This is what will keep Microsoft in check, just like it did IBM.
What if every government or private entity that disaproved of Micro$oft tactics simply stopped buying their products??? That would punish them far more than anything the courts are going to acheive, and would do much to promote alternatives such as Free/Open Source Software.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You've totally missed the point. Have you forgotten the browser "war" of the late 1990s already?
M$ wanted to control the browser because it represented a competitive threat - a browser could render the underlying OS irrelevant. They spent years and tens of millions to kill off Netscape. And you think they're going to voluntarily give back all of this territory they've already conquered? Are we talking about the same Napoleon Gates, the one bent on world domination? The same one who talks of "knifing the baby" and "cutting off their air supply"? I think not.
The media player represents a new frontier similar to the browser "war." With it, M$ controls how the content on the Internet is delivered, especially when they implement their DRM OS, which they own a patent on.
As a student of law myself, it's kind of a difficult situation for the states to be in. Knowing that taking on MS is really a somewhat losing battle as MS can continue to drag this out means that you have to allocate state funds to pursuing a law suit you are pretty unlikely to win. As against MS as I am, I can't say that at this point I could justify my state of IN to do something like this. I'd just rather see the money spent elsewhere. But what do I know? I'm just a voter.
Trying to get on with life is exactly what this is about. We want MS to stop restricting what we as consumers and competitors can do.
We want our vendors to have the right to sell us a linux or dual-boot box without losing their right to sell MS.
We want MS to tell the damned truth.
As of Win 3.1, BG was oblivious to the Net/WWW. He figured that the world's computers would all be connected by the MSNetwork, when *he* was ready to do it. 3.1 didn't even have a TCP/IP stack. Suddenly IE is a core component of the OS? Of course not, it was purely an embrace-and-extend tactic.
"It's soooo old."
Yeah, it's old, but not so old that we don't remember the exciting and competetive mini and micro days before the 800 pound gorilla sat on us all. The personal computer revolution was about to happen with or without the kid from Seattle. He jumped aboard the train as it was gaining steam and highjacked it.
Believe it or not, I'm not religiously anti-MS. I was very happy to have Bill's Basic available on many pre-PC machines. I was happy to be able to walk into the store buy a copy of DOS5.0 when I bought a used PC with the drive wiped clean.
What I'm vehemently against is their ability and willingness to stifle and/or steal the fruit of other people's ideas and hard work. If I were still a customer, I'd also be very upset at the way my data was being held hostage.
`` You underestimate the testing cost of doing this. (Surprise, surprise) Microsoft has to test every configuration it supports before it can ship the product. Adding a series of options multiplies the test matrix several times.''
If this is true, M$ have themselves to blame for it. If they had designed and built their software cleanly, they could test everything seperataly and be done with it. If instead, the whole of Windows, Internet Explorer, and whatever else they ship on the CD is a big interdependence nightmare (which apparently it is), then, indeed, they have to test all possible combinations.
A well-designed and well-implemented operating system works with a web browser, without a web browser, and with a broken web browser. Similarly for any other application. Seperation of system and applications, people!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.