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Microsoft-Antitrust.gov Opens for Public

Posted by michael on from the for-all-your-antitrust-needs dept.

prostoalex writes "The Attorney General of the State of California has opened up a Web site, dedicated to Microsoft antitrust violations. In 2002 Microsoft received 2 court judgements, one from California and 7 other states, another one from New York and nine other states. If you believe the company has violated the conditions stipulated in either of the statements, visit Microsoft-Antitrust.gov Web site. Notice that the site collects only the complaints related to two final judgements mentioned above."

6 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Oh the irony. by BWJones · · Score: 4, Interesting


    Well, looking at the site.....it appears it's running on.....wait for it......Windows 2000! Yeaaaaay. Oh, wait......

    Seriously though, what does that say about your position when you are adopting and running the product of which you are complaining about? Although, I suppose that might only back up their case.

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    1. Re:Oh the irony. by qoncept · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So you're saying they chose which product to use based on the product rather than the morals of the company behind it? So that's why slashdotters make so many bad decisions..

      --
      Whale
  2. I wonder... by delirium28 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    how long it will take before the site experiences a Slashdot effect.

    Seriously though, this is all well and good, but what's to stop users from logging onto the site and reporting violations out of spite? Do they really expect people to believe that they will examine every alleged violation, or is this simply a way for the government to pacify those that believe the judgement was too lienient?

    --
    Who is John Galt?
  3. Complaint form's final (upload) field... by rklrkl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Yes, not only is the site running IIS on W2K, but the final (upload) field on the complaint form is most amusing.

    Whilst the prior three fields give you 8K of plain text which to fill in, the final field only lets you upload in one of two proprietary closed-source word processor document formats (one of which is ironically Microsoft's) - nope, you're not allowed to upload SXW format (Open Office), plain text or even PDF files ! Also note that you're allowed a 1000K upload too, thanks to the bloatedness of the two formats they do allow...

  4. Left them a comment... by rongage · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you go to http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/contactus.asp you will find that they have a nice little web form for commentary to them.

    For example, my comment to them...

    It's pretty darned ironic that your department has chosen to host a website on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Internet Information Services. Was this a deliberate choice on your part to help demonstrate the monopoly power of Microsoft, or did you genuinely no know that you had several no-cost (acquisition wise) choices available to you?
    --
    Ron Gage - Westland, MI
  5. End of life issues by jwjcmw · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My company develops windows applications, and one thing we are running into is the end of life issues.

    Right now NT4 has reached the end of its support, and will be end-of-life next June. There are still many corporate environments where NT4 is the norm, and many of them aren't going to be changing anytime soon. This makes it hard for a developer who wants to create a product that works on NT4 through XP, as there is little or no support for adding or changing the NT4 platform at MS. However, it is not a problem for MS, since if they have any problems with an application (Word, Excel, IE, etc) not working on NT4, they have the ability to ship a change to the operating system with the update to the application(probably even after the "end-of-life"). This makes it hard for developers who have to say, yes you can use our product, but you have to upgrade to a later version of Windows, where MS can just say go ahead and buy this product now...you can upgrade the operating system when you are ready. This drives more of the application use on these older systems to only using MS products.

    I wonder if that aspect has ever been discussed in any of the anti-trust proceedings.