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Doing the Math in the Microsoft Anti-Trust Cases
coupland writes "Bob Cringely has posted this week's column and has made some interesting comments. He says that regardless of what happens in the EU, DOJ, and class-action proceedings, Microsoft can't lose. Why? Because they make more money by paying lip-service to the law and accepting the occasional fine than by complying. He even does some simple math to prove his point. Fascinating stuff."
The 411 on Bill Jankow
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
A plea for relief from Microsoft's escalating anti-competitive tactics.
"2K is barely usable and XP is a joke (IMHO :)"
Those of us that use XP and 2k would not agree with you. They are both a hell of a lot more stable than Win95/98/SE/ME. 2K in particular is very popular with 3D artists who couldn't bear to lose a render to a crash.
"Derp de derp."
I'd say anti-trust violations are a bit higher up on the old crime scale than a parking violation. For example, if I commit murder for the first time should I only be issued a parking ticket? Then depending on however many people I kill after that the penalty should only incrementally go up?
a * b * c = x
"Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Maybe it's me, but that article was waay too long winded to state the obvious: As long as Microsoft can turn a profit after any sort of penalities given them, they have no motovation to comply to any sort of antitrust regulation.
That, and that Pulpit guy likes Geometry.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
This is not insightful, Stern was dropped before the fines were raised.
Don't believe me? Look up the last slashbork story that quoted him on anything remotely technical and read through the comments, preferably at +3 or so. Yeah, that hurts.
Oh, but when he goes off in a bogus "M$ is teh suxx" rant, he gets airplay. I don't believe for a second he's got the scoop "from friends of friends" on what's going on with the compliance team in Redmond. Bullshit. Not that I don't doubt Microsoft is ignoring it, but that's not the point. But bring up a vague accusation using vague references to vague characters in vague positions and presto, you have a fact! Journalism at its best.
Once again we see Cringley stating the obvious but phrasing it a little differently. The EPA fines many polluters each year but quite often the fines are much less than what the polluters make polluting. The gov't gets a little extra cash, the polluters continue to get rich and pollute and we breath foul air.
So maybe we should view M$ programs as a form of digital pollution and turn them into the EPA. I know my health would improve if they fixed a few of their bugs:)
Cringely makes sense, as usual. I was explaining this same line of reasoning to my dad last night when he asked me about the "huge" EU fine. I just laughed and told him this will only make microsoft stronger.
.. another FINE!
Microsoft, like any large company, is not a person, even though it is treated like one by the law.
Microsoft doesn't care about the moral or ethical point of view. They just care about dollars.
And the government can't punish microsoft by putting it in jail, that's not even possible. They can't do anything to microsoft except fine it, basically. The government can say, "you gotta do this and that", but at the end of the day, the only thing compelling MS to comply is
So Microsoft is just playing the numbers. As long as the fines are less than the payout, they'll do whatever the hell they feel like. Stretch it out, make money. Pay the fine, make money. Settle with the government, make money. They just can't lose. As an added bonus, they know the EU probably won't slap any huge fines for a long time after this.
Here's an analogy.. like some of you who are self-employed, I pay estimated taxes every quarter. Sometimes I have a good year and I under-pay. The IRS charges a "penalty" for this, basically charging you daily interest at 8-9% annual rate, or something like that.
You might think at first, like I did, wow, the IRS is punishing me. I'm a bad person if I underpay. No, it's just numbers. There's no moral component. There's no mark left on my record, there's no reason for me to feel guilty.
Just run the numbers, and if you think you can do better than 9% with the money you didn't give to the IRS, go ahead, don't pay them during the year.
The point of the analogy is, microsoft just looks at the numbers and makes the best business decision.
Companies as large and powerful as microsoft simply don't have to comply with every law. That's the sad truth.
I don't know about lawsuits, but a number of European car makers (BMW, Porsche, etc.) regularly pay fines for failing to comply with the CAFE standards because it would cost them a lot more to increase their cars' gas mileage than it does to just pay the fine.
Rank Presidents by th
Where could you start, passing laws (or using existing ones) which do not support the monopoly or fostering corporate welfare
Declaring that that these products post a threat to national security due to lax security and undue load on government and public networks
Deeming that the supplier has berached US and international laws and is therefore may not validly apply for government contracts
Declaring that no government agency may pay continued licence fees to a company which has acted illegally
Declaring that in tha national interest the government must have access to it's own data by releasing to said government all proprietry file formats and API's necessary for conversion and interoperability
Pooling the saved licence fees and funding academic institutions to develop solutions for existing products for which there is no viable alternative MS Project, Access and perhaps Visio
Of course this could only be initiated in the US where they have the most robust legislation in place to support such arguments, any other nation which tried it would potentially face US trade restrictions.
Stopping myself...Abort (core dumped)
The Howard Stern Show is syndicated by Infinity Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Viacom. Clear Channel dropped the show from the six of their stations that carried it before any increase in the fine structure. It was done in an effort to suck up to the feds, as the Chairman(?) of Clear Channel was to appear before Congress the following day.
Harmtut Pilch of FFII provides a great Analysis on Montis decision.
Hartmut's document in short:
EU Boosts Microsoft's Monopoly
The European Commission's competition procedings against Microsoft have led to a verdict which gives a big boost to Microsoft's monopoly position in the OS market and helps Microsoft expand this position to other markets. While the Commission may have earned substantial revenues for itself by imposing a one-time fine of 1% of Microsoft's liquid cash reserves, the smallprint of the verdict gives Microsoft green light to kill its main competitors in the operating systems market. This smallprint was simultaneously reinforced through backroom deals in the Council's Patent Policy working party, of which copies have been leaked to FFII. Immediately after the announcments the stock value of MSFT rose by 3%.
The problem is that the ways the laws regulating monopolies are written don't criminalize executives who actually make the decisions for the corporation to engage in illegal behavior personally responsible. Of course they probably should -- but this is still a different class of crime altogether than the instances you cited.
And the brethren went away edified.
The driver -- drunk, with two priors and a suspended license -- was reported to have said to the judge at his previous court appearance, "What's the problem, your honor? I haven't killed anyone, have I?"
Well, no, not yet.
How many innocent pedestrians has MS picked off in its drunken careen through the anti-trust regulations?
Lee Kaiwen, Taiwan
IBM spent years (~10?) in court, but was never split up. The reason we have cheap IBM-compatible computers goes back to Compaq reverse-engineering an IBM PC to make the first clones. That's not the only reason we have cheap hw now, of course, but it was the start.
Not according to the Constitution:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8
[Congress shall have the power]
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
source
Notice that it does not just say Congress can create copyrights. It is very specific, not only in what they can do, but why: "to promote progress". Not "to give authors a method of income", to promote progress.
When you copyright something, you own it in every legal sense of the word.
No you don't. Not in any legal sense of the word.
From Title 17 of the United States Code,
source
Sections 107 through 122 are limitations on those rights. Nowhere does it say you own it.
but you can deprive them of the fruits of their imagination - and that's what copyright law is intended to prevent.
No you can't. If I have the recipe for a bundt cake and I give it to you, I still know how to make bundt cakes. There is nothing you can do to prevent me from knowing how to make bundt cakes. You can tell everyone in the world how to make bundt cakes and I will still know how. The only thing you can deprive someone of by using their idea is the benefit that copyright creates in the first place: the ability to profit from the sharing of the idea. Without copyright, those benefits don't exist, so saying that copyright was created to prevent deprivation of those benefits is ridiculous.
Nobody wants to steal ideas anyway.
You can't steal ideas. There's nothing to steal. You can only copy them. You can't own ideas either, because there's nothing to own. They are imaginary. They only exist in the mind. If you're going to sit there and tell me you can own something that is imaginary, you need to have your head checked.
It's what you can do with those ideas that is valuable,
Exactly. And that's why copyright was created: to encourage others to share their ideas so society may benefit from the use of the ideas. It was a compromise. We want to benefit from your ideas, but we realize there's little incentive for you to share them since they can be passed around for free. So we are going to delay the benefit to society and allow you to be the sole source of copies of your work, which we will protect, but it is going to belong to the public later.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Unfortunately, it seems that our government is in bed with so many corporations, and they don't want to threaten their corporate benefactors. Therefore, they'll never bring up such a thing, because of all the feathers that the subject would ruffle.
Personally, I think Microsoft's proved more than enough times that the corporate death penalty should be an available option when companies get that large - as Cringely pointed out, in a roundabout way, Microsoft has so much money on hand, financial "remedies" aren't, when the company in question can afford to just consider fines for non-compliance as a business expense.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"