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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."
I was hoping someone else would have some balls. #3? Anyone?
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?
You'd think that Virginia would want a piece of them too...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
.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.
It is quite clear that there will be no noteworthy changes to the original settlement
No, it isn't. When both higher courts toss it out, THEN it'll be clear. Until then, its' worth pursuing.
It is also quite clear that the main loser is going to be the taxpayer.
The lawyers pursuing the case the government lawyers paid a salary, not hourly wages. The taxpayers don't pay much extra by pursuing this case... and since MS has to reimburse the legal expenses of the government at market rate, the taxpayers will, if anything, MAKE money.
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"
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
When PC's cost $4000 Windows cost $100. Now that comodity PC costs ~$800 Windows still costs $100.
If there was competition in software as there is in hardware Microsoft would have had to bring their price down. If Microsoft gets their long-dreamed-of 100% market share and no piracy, do you really thnk that they'll keep their price at $100?
Not likely.
Maybe they should spice it up for sweeps with some guest appearances in the courtroom...maybe Larry Lessig, Steve Jobs, and the perennial courtroom favorite, OJ! :-D
That's his call, and if we don't like it we can pick someone else in two years.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least.
The reality is that we're not going to get the option to elect a president who stands for rigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws, because such a candidate would have great difficulty raising money from business interests who aren't particularly fond of such laws.
Of course, probably the only reason we ever saw an anti-trust case brought against Microsoft to begin with was that Gates & co. hadn't wised up to the need to make generous campaign contributions. With $4.6 million in contributions in the 2000 cycle, I'd say they've now figured things out, and the DoJ's antitrust division can now go back to sleep.
Red All Over: Rambling Missives from an Aspiring Revolutionary
1. M$ 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$
Bush pardoning a death sentence? Well, that's something you don't see everyday.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
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.
LOL. There's a couple of hundred guys down in Texas you can ask about W's sense of mercy when it comes to death sentences. Oh wait... you can't ask them any more.
Well, at least he's found it in his heart to spare poor Microsoft. All is forgiven. Go forth and sin no more.
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.
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Microsoft dodges yet another possible bankrupting lawsuit by buying the entire state of Massachusetts...
Agreed.
It's not so much the application, iexplore.exe, that is the fundamental part of the OS, it's the MSHTML rendering engine that comes in the Internet Explorer backend DLLs.
Most applications, if they want to launch a web session or access HTML content, load an iexplore.exe inside of their own window, instead of rendering the page itself. Easier that way...
IE isn't just the program people use to browse the Internet; the API (seems) to involve quite a bit of talking to the application itself, not just the backend. Designed, no doubt, to make something like that easier -- for my database program to be able to show me the manufactuerer's web site, inside it's own window, while still correctly rendering all the scripts, etc.
(IANA Developer)
Last I heard, the states had $25 million to divvy up. California I believe had the largest share of expenses.
So Microsoft pays. It's a win-win, ha-ha. I doubt the states will be reimbursed more than actual costs. I also assume/hope the law has some safety valve against nonsense prolongation of the litigation, but this appeal sounds meritorious if doomed.
(And, it should be noted, an appeal costs peanuts compared to the $25 million -- tens of thousands, maybe. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't mind, they want to be sure this is done right.)
For example, there was never really a decisive victory against IBM, but the decade of ongoing legal scrutiny caused IBM to change their business practices greatly, in many areas. As a specific example, the fact that the PC is a fairly open architecture is a result of such legal efforts: IBM only outsourced the PC operating system to Microsoft because they were afraid that bundling hardware and software would get them dragged into court again.
While this created another monopoly in the form of Microsoft, the overall outcome was still better than the alternative, a closed, all-IBM solution. The fact that the PC software was separate from IBM hardware allowed a third party hardware market to flourish and indirectly made software like Linux possible.
So, nibbling away legally at monopolists like IBM and Microsoft does produce long-term benefits, even if such efforts fail to produce groundbreaking short-term victories. The efforts against IBM opened up the PC hardware/software platform, and similar long-term efforts against Microsoft may kill the Microsoft monopoly as well.
And there are indications that Microsoft is changing subtly under this pressure already. But the point is: the longer the legal pressure is on them, the more they will change. This is not the time to lean back and say "oh, we'll just stick with this little settlement". It is on-going lawsuits, not some signature under a settlement, that ultimately keeps companies like Microsoft in check.
What if every government or private entity that disaproved of Micro$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