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Microsoft Not Out Of Anti-Trust Hot Water
tickticker writes "EWeek is reporting on the Anti-Trust follow up, and of course it sounds like a victory for Justice: 'The judges 'were encouraging in the sense that they went to the heart of the case,' Robert Bork, who represented the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the Software and Information Industry Association, said following the court arguments. Bork formerly was a judge on the appeals court.' Microsoft comments included the 'abundance of choice' defence. Which to me means that Microsoft wants the last of the hold-outs to choose Microsoft."
What will happen?
Wrist slap, a million in free software to schools, lawyers get money, MS expends monopoly even further, profit.
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After sifting and sorting through the myriad of posts pointing out that this site is running IIS 5 and how the govt. is so hypocritical for doing so, I've come to the conclusion that some if not most slashdotter's are too riled by minor details. It conveys a serious lack of intelligence on our part. But I digress...
While going through some of the PDF docs on the site, mostly pertaining to court judgements, I noticed that many of these documents reference the Sherman Anti-trust Act.
2 Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 2
Monopolizing trade a felony; penalty
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court
For those that don't know, this is Section 2 of the Sherman act, which Microsoft was found in violation of. I see the fine of $10,000,000 as a maximum to be completely impotent against a company with a financial foundation such as microsoft's. There should be some sort of percentage of profits reaped from the anti-competitive behavior that should be taken away. $10,000,000 is a drop in the bucket for microsoft. The penalty should be stiffer.
I'd be interested in filing a complaint regarding their procedures regarding the computer sales market, how pretty much all PCs come with their product and their "tax" regardless of whether or not you want it. THAT is a complaint worth filing. I am being FORCED to pay for a PRODUCT that I NEVER asked for nor implied that I wanted.
and of course it sounds like a victory for Justice
Justice for whom?
Microsoft's competitors, who were the people who lobbied the government with huge donations to bring the case in the first place?
Netscape? A failed company who tried to create their own monopoly, but failed when Microsoft gave away their browser for free -- something that every single other browser manufacturer before Netscape was doing already?
Sun Microsystems? A company who created a virtual machine designed to best work on Sparc systems, who suddenly started to get cold feet when Microsoft managed to come up with a virtual machine that worked faster than anything they expected could be created? A company who also completely failed to sue Netscape for creating their own non-compliant Java libraries?
So I ask again... Justice for whom? Anti-microsoft zealots?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Since I'm sitting here typing this on my Linux machine, my response is no.
If there is a viable alternative to a product, then how can said product have a monopoly? Some people need Windows to run certain critical applications, in fact almost all corporations do, but the alternative is there.
Microsoft is a powerful mega-giant corporation that has a bunch of power, but why don't we focus our attention on developing alternatives?
It is my strong belief that if we the people can stop Microsoft by tying our need to their products, then we won't need to resort to getting Washington to do it.
Corporations are starting to get royally pissed at Microsoft. They're using their corprorate dollars to fund alternatives and migrate away from Windows at least in the server room. Come on, folks, let's take care of this the American way.
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I think "mildly warm water" would be more appropriate here. I don't recall this Anti-Trust thing being anything more then laughable and a symbolic victory, at best, anyways.
Hate me!
all the people "in the know", the people who comment at slashdot, already know that linux is our new master. why don't they?
But if you want a PC, even to run an non-Microsoft OS, you generally have to pay for Windows - even if you choose not to use it.
Also, there was more to this case than just "Microsoft is big". Microsoft has engaged in practices since the 80s to use their monopoly on the OS to crush people in other markets. A saying at MS in the 80s and early 90s was "DOS isn't done until Lotus 1-2-3 won't run." Now, Excel is a major part of Office and Microsoft rakes it in every quarter based on sales of Office alone. Is that fair to Lotus?
Is it fair to Apple when Microsoft purposely breaks QuickTime?
Is it fair to the OpenSource community when they "embrace and extend" open standards and twist them into Microsoft owned technologies?
Is it fair to Netscape that they can steal all their ideas and make IE "part of the OS"?
What if they made Microsoft Money part of the OS and tweaked things until they could break Quicken. (They tried!)
None of this is fair.
I did think that once Bush got in that would be the end the case. He ordered the justice department to settle on terms favorable to Microsoft. Big surprise - Microsoft contributed heavily to his campaign. This is like paying a boxer to take a dive in a fight.
Finally someone is standing up and saying "You can't take that dive." Let's hope it works.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
make changes to software using said money to ensure upgrade lock-in, more profit, antitrust, repeat process using gained money
Don't forget, Microsoft benefits the country because schools get to use MS software without paying. Seriously - should this kind of arrangement with schools be allowed? How are schools a 'charity' any more than the government? Yeah, people may pay a few pennies less on taxes due to almost free MS software, but the reduced competition costs much more. A monopoly, in time, reduces choice and raises cost. And people support this type of action because it saves schools money, which in reality is just saving a very small amount off of taxes. How is this different from donating to any government institution? The end result for the taxpayer is the same.
Reading through some of the articles, I get the impression that many of the judges are
Since the settlement, the software developers competing with Microsoft have heaved a collective sigh of relief, exclaiming to the world,
Competing products are springing up like weeds and resellers are completely ignoring MS by putting all kinds of cheap inexpensive software onto PCs!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
What planet have you been on for the last 15 years? Msft has a consistant proven track record of leveraging their existing base into other market areas, starting from the DOS cash cow on PC's in 1981 and forward. Remember the Msft slogan "DOS isn't done untill Lotus won't run", or the Win3 beta code that was proven to test for and exclude DR-DOS? The real solution was and still is the os / application breakup - that's what Gary Kildal envisioned for the pc world, a competitive environment where many players can compete, whereas the Gates vision was "I'll own everything" and that's what we have now. In effect they own the 'common carrier' for intel pc's and can control anything that runs on it, except for viruses and security holes.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Every time MS anti-trust news comes up anywhere, someone invariably voices the opinion that MS is not a monopoly. This is utter nonsense and should be roundly condemned. Monopoly is both a legal and economic concept. In legal terms, this is settled. They have been so found by the US Federal Courts. Both at trial and on appeal. You may know a lot about computers, but I think US Federal judges know more about the law. One can debate the relevancy of the legal definition, or the fairness of the process, but one cannot debate the fact of the matter. Microsoft is, legally, a monopoly.
The economic definition of monopoly is looser than the legal. Anyone with a dominant market position could qualify. Someone with a 90% market share, the ability to change price at will, and the means to move the overall market is a monopoly in every sense of the word. Simply to say that one needs a 100% market share to qualify is nonsense. All MS would need to do to avoid anti-trust problems would be to not entirely wipe out the competition. Throw a few crumbs. Like say investing $150 million in Apple and continuing to provide Office and IE for Mac.
Its nice that you use only Linux and avoid MS products. That is to be commended. But to extrapolate your experience market-wide is rank arrogance. Just because you personally haven't suffered because of their crimes is entirely irrelevant. If a bank gets robbed, but it wasn't your money, would you argue the robber should get off?
Microsoft is a monopoly, they broke the law in protecting and extending that monopoly. They are liable for punishment. These are facts, not opinion, and not open to debate.
Also, there are _countless_ alternatives to Windows, and several alternatives to every MS product that is supposedly a monopoly.
Oh, so when Joe User is unhappy with windows, which operating system can he choose and still run all his apps?
So the monopoly issue depends on what you define as the product - and if the product is defined as "a Microsoft Windows compatible operating system" Microsoft most definitely has a monopoly. And just in case somebody wants to point out that the definition is stupid, try a different one: "A Ford compatible car". Well, there are quite a few other cars that can drive on the same roads...
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Your success and agressiveness have nothing to do with whether you abide by the law. Both rich, ambulance chasing lawyers and poor, homeless slackers have equal opportunity to either abide by the law or break it on a daily basis. The result of millions of people and corporations making that choice everyday give us either a society ... or chaos.
Capitalism itself is based upon the ability for buyers and sellers to aggressively compete in a marketplace governed by rules. Notice the caveat, "governed by rules." Microsoft is a convicted monopolist under the Federal government's antitrust laws. These laws are there to make a level playing field and are an underpinning of capitalism itself. Imagine a capitalistic world without rules. Why one could assassinate the executives of competing corporations, poison their workers or even bomb their factories. This is the situation in many banana republics today -- notice how few of them are bastions of capitalism.
So capitalism requires rules to work. Without everyone abiding by those rules, capitalism itself is threatened. Today Microsoft has grown to be one of the largest corporations in the world and, through its illegal anticompetitive business practices, is a bigger threat to capitalism and our way of life than either Osama bin Laden or Hussein.
Another area most people don't consider is public libraries. As an IT guy in a library, I can vouch for the fact that many are investigating going as far as transitioning staff desktops to Linux distros, especially considering the "security" that will be built into Longhorn. Then there's the Gates Foundation, which provides free computers for libraries to use for the public, provided they agree to MS' licensing terms. Free, yes, but some would say it's just another way to keep the library world saturated with Microsoft products.
"To restore competition, the settlement must go further than allowing OEMs to remove the Internet Explorer icon-it must require the separation of middleware code from the OS."
Also, IIRC, isn't Microsoft looking to eliminate IE altogether for Longhorn and build Internet browsing directly into the UI itself-similar to how you can type a URL into a Windows Explorer window and be taken from your local directory to a website? If that's not a violation of the antitrust settlement, I don't know what is. If this is true, then we're looking at the elimination of the web browser altogether as a stand-alone application. And if there's no necessity for a web browser, then nobody will think to use one other than Longhorn's integrated browsing.
Of course, I could be mistaken, or my source may have been incorrect, paranoid, or both, and if so I'm sorry, but I wouldn't necessarily put it past them to do something like that. You can already do the same thing with CD burning; it's just that 3rd-party CDRW software offers enough benefits over XP's built-in support that it's hardly anticompetitive to just offer the capability to write some assorted files to a CD.
In IE's case, though, one thing that intrigues me is that it's the least full-featured of browsers out there, yet it's still this popular? Without tabbed browsing, built-in popup control, and some of the other goodies offered by Opera, Mozilla, Safari, and Firebird, it almost seems to me like it's in the same vein as the CD-RW support-bare minimum offered. Perhaps the threat lies in the popularity of web browsing over CD burning?
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Yeah, he's a real free market advocate. Despite his conservative views, he probably hates microsoft, or any monopoly for that matter, more than you do. He's also a very effective attorney and considered extremely intelligent by other attorneys that don't share his political philosophy. These guys choose well; it never hurts to have a former federal appellate court judge argue your case before a federal court of appeals. Judges give former judges a lot of deference when they argue a case before them. Also, he's now a lawyer. Lawyers argue all kinds of cases that they personally don't believe in; it's there job. In fact it's your sworn obligation to zealously represent and argue your client's interests even if you personally don't agree with him.
Worse the companies and customers at the receiving end of this abuse have received little more than a few gift certificates. A just end to this affair would have been a leveling of the playing field. It would have forced things like:
I fear that all we'll get is another discussion about separating the OS from the browser and, smoke and mirrirs aside (like handing out MS vouchers to schools and adding a few more 'Justice Compliance (TM)' buttons to the install wizards), nothing will really change.
Its heartening to read about the various government initiatives (mainly outside the US) recommending, and in some cases mandating, the consideration of non-Microsoft alternatives when purchasing software. This will probably cause a larger behavior change than the anti-trust judgement and will do more good than the Justice Department has done so far. So perhaps there's hope.. but not from the US legal system.
Sigh.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.