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Microsoft's Long-Playing Business Record
khendron writes "The Globe and Mail has an article which tells it like it is. Microsoft is looking at it constant court costs and anti-trust fines as simply 'the cost of doing business,' and has no intention of changing. A telling quote 'Losing or settling case after case, Microsoft has tested the bounds of antitrust and patent infringement law, with little evidence that its power has waned or that its behaviour has been substantially changed. Rivals and many legal experts say antitrust law itself has come out the worse for the skirmishes, while Microsoft appears to have built the ongoing scrutiny, fines and remedies into a strategy showing scant sign of reform.'"
In Europe there's a country... I think it's Finland, they base fines on your income. The fine for driving over the limit is a product of the severity and a percentage of your income , for example. I think that's a better way to handle it.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
As others have said elsewhere, around 60 Billion in cash = deep pockets to bring out some seriously nitpicking lawyers.
They have the resources to just drawwwwwwwwwwwwww any legal experience out beyond viability for anyone other than a decent sized business (personally that's why i think that class suite from the US states pretty much folded in their favour anyway).
"You want to sue us? fine, stand there while we smack you about the head with a 2x4 a while first please"
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
More than 30 years ago, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan described U.S. antitrust laws as a "jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance." This article from the Cato Institute by Robert Levy makes a strong case to repeal them entirely.
To me, the people whining and complaining about Microsoft were mostly those on the outside looking in, the competitors that couldn't cut it and now want Uncle Sam or Mario Monti to step in and save them from themselves.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
The rich have ways round paying income tax, so surely they can get round paying speeding fines?
In a 1997 e-mail to investor Warren Buffett, senior Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes summarized the company's strategy in simple terms. . .
"If we own the key 'franchises' built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the 'moat' that protects the operating system business," Mr. Raikes wrote. "If I owned the most successful daily newspaper in Buffalo, I wouldn't want to leave it to my competitor to own the Sunday edition."
Ironic, because Buffalo has had only one newspaper since the Buffalo Courier-Express folded in 1982. The only one that is left is the Buffalo News.
There is no competitor to leave the sunday edition to.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Similar: Many companies ignore environmental regulations because it's much more expensive and difficult to fix the problem than to just pay the fines.
It may not be the prevailing opinion around here, but I don't think Microsoft is in the wrong for many of these things. A media player? An Internet browser? Who would want to buy an OS that didn't have many of these features? They might not be the best, and they might not be worth using at all... but having them should not be a crime. If you buy Windows, or Mac, or any other OS, you should expect (no, you should want) to get as much as you can with it.
Every Linux distro I've used came with quite a bit of software that saved me the time to download, install, etc.
This isn't to say it's OK for them to "hijack" your OS by making it impossible to remove (IE) or to force you to use it over competitor programs, but simply bundling it is a good thing - not a crime.
This is a perfect analogy to the social situation in our country. We can see that the way that our laws deal with rich companies and poorer companies is the same way that our laws deal with rich people and poorer people. Its always the little guy that gets hit.
-Yo
I never understood why this wasn't done here in the states. $50 is not the same to Joe Average as it is to Joe Billionaire.
If it was 5% (I know, a high percentgage, just using it for an example) of their gross yearly income, then we're all on equal ground.
Taxes should be the same way. No more brackets, we all pay 28% or something.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
Has anyone seen (or made) a complete list or timeline that Microsoft has crushed this way? I know Apple, Netscape(/AOL), and Real have all "settled" with Microsoft in the past. And recently, Sun, InterTrust, and Lindows.
Who can you add?
"It just allows the rich companies to continue to abuse the system and break rules that other smaller companies have to follow. Once you're in power, it's much easier to stay in power."
Actually, Microsoft is only "breaking rules" that no other company software company on the planet has to follow. The rules were made specifically for MS. For example, every other OS on the planet can ship with a web browser and media player without any govt. scrutiny.
Vote for Pedro
" The rich have ways round paying income tax, so surely they can get round paying speeding fines?"
Only the very rich who can buy off senators. The best most rich people can do is donate to charity to avoid giving the money to the govt. and knock themselves into a lower tax bracket.
If you don't think fines are the solution, then what do you suggest? Gaol sentances? Might work, but who do you put in gaol?
;)
Here's a novel solution.
Fine Microsoft, sure, but instead of making that fine payable to some country's department of justice, make it payable to a competing company.
Microsoft may not miss $100 million too terribly... but it might not be thrilled about having to fork $100 million over to, say, Red Hat. In other words, replace criminal sanctions with something more closely resembling civil liability.
Rather than distribute the fine among all Microsoft's competitors, which would render it worthless, I'd suggest picking one of its top twenty competitors out of a hat and giving them the whole chunk.
I wonder if that would solve the speeding problem, too... instead of fining you, they could just look up your religious or political affiliation, and force you to fork over $100 to the organization they suspect you would have the most distaste for
Yes, I see some obvious problems with this plan, but forcing Microsoft to pay Apple or Linux companies is still a fun idea to kick around.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Were you paying attention to the OJ thing?
You're spot on with the environmental regulations point, but it's as much the fault of the state/legal system for allowing this to happen.
When I first left school a number of years ago, I had a temp job for a few months in a local paper mill.
The mill sat on the banks of a local estuary where it pumped out tons of effluent every day. This was all perfectly legal as long as they kept the chemicals and impurities they discharged within certain limits.
I was amazed to find that they were never within the limits. They alway exceeded it by a long way and every month when the local water authority inspected the plant they were fined for this.
The authority had the rights to issue instant fines up to 10,000 per-incident, but never gave anything more than a 200 fine. The mill owners loved this as they reckoned that to upgrade the effluent treatment plant would cost over 50,000, so they could keep paying the fines for years and still make a profit!
All the while the estuary was a different colour each day from the dies and stank terribly at low tide, never mind any possible toxins seeping into the surrounding land/water.
Isn't capitalism wonderful?
When Bill Gates goes and gets a law passed just so he can import a special car for himself, you know there's no hope that laws are there "to protect those that could not easily protect themselves"
;-)
I don't have the URL but it was over a year ago that I read how Bill wanted a car imported and that it was sitting at the dock for months and months because he was not supposed to import the car. He hired a bunch of lawyers and they worked with their representative to have a law written up so Bill could get his car. The law was then tied in with some others that were sure to get passed and the whole bunch ended up going through.
Do you really think Bill and Steve care about the law? With Windows and Office, it's all about protecting the monopoly. The Bush administration pulled the rug out from under the last/best effort to even the field. As stated elsewhere, a breakup of Microsoft was the best answer. It'll probably take up to 10 years for Linux and OSS to bash them down to size. Even then, they'll surely start using their billions like the RIAA and start taking any and all OSS projects to court on IP issues.
Maybe it's time the OSS community started holding quartly Pro-Linux events. Ones where we run over boxes of Microsoft software with a steamroller driven by a penguin who's handing out free Linux/OSS CDs. Or maybe David Letterman will drop blocks of cement from a building on Microsoft CDs below...
Then again, offering to schools, free labor and support for switching from Windows to Linux might get better press. But it's not as fun.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Lawrence Lessig's new book talks about the perils of intelectual property law. In regard to the Sunny Bono Act in particular he was saying that the law only protects those with money.
In fact he went on to say that the ones with incredible amounts on money are the ones that are actually constructing law. Not exactly top secret information, but it still doesn't make me tingly when I hear it again. I don't know about you, but I can't think of anyone who has more money than Microsoft. It's a shame too. The only way to fix this situation, in my opinion is to have a complete reform in both congress and the house in how laws are made. Namely, get all that fucking special interest money out of the picture.
It kills me to think that these assholes that I vote for every year or so would rather take money and make laws to benefit the interests of companies like Microsoft and Disney than work for my interests.
Cringely also had a column on the subject of Microsoft.
My only question with all of this would be:
What happens when the costs of legal action exceeds sales for an extended period of time? Yeah, they have their cash flow, but that could only last so long. And the more of these law suits get settled out of court, the more of them there are going to be. So it seems logical to me to think that at some point, litigation may kill the beast. Although, it could probably go on for quite some time.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Indeed. In some places there are "three strikes" systems for people who continually commit certain crimes with no intention of reform. Wealthier people also often do the same with dangerous/reckless driving behaviour (in places without point systems), i.e. they keep speeding, and just pay the fines without worrying about it. For traffic offences more and more countries are switching to point systems, which is a good thing - continue to commit certain offences with no intention of reform, and you lose your license.
Likewise, a company that continues to break the same laws repeatedly, with no intention of reform, should have some sort of "three strikes and you're out" system, or a points-based system. A company that then habitually refuses to operate within the law should have it's license to do business revoked. Simple as that; if your business model is such that you can't succeed without continually breaking the law, you have a flawed business model and don't deserve to be doing business anyway.
Do product-tying laws apply to free (as in $) products? That doesn't make sense to me.
(What you're referring to is "product-tying" and certainly wasn't invented by MS. If you have a monopoly, you can use product-tying to effectively 'force' people to buy other products too. So say you're the only guy in town who can sell pens (say, by making special deals and cutbacks for local stationary retailers). People need pens, and now they need to buy them from you. So now you introduce a "special offer" where every time someone buys a pen, they get a pencil bundled with it too. Only catch is, they have to buy it with the pencil, they can no longer buy the pen by itself. So effectively if they want a pen, they have to buy the pencil too. Then you go argue that this is "good for customers" because your research shows that "94.3% of people who use pens also use pencils".)
It's all fine and well though if competition is possible in the market, because then another competitor will come in and sell just pens, for cheaper. But Microsoft strong-armed OEMs, forcing them to sell only Windows, and to sell it with every PC they sold. It's all in the findings.
Had a friend who did consulting work for the legitimate part of the dude's business. The guy just said figure out how much doing this or that will cost me and don't worry about the legality of it. So he would come up with the proposals etc, and suddenly the local govt would make it legal in that case for the plan to be carried out. You just knew the dude was getting the plan and bribing the local govt to allow it. Same with M$. They figure out waht they want, how to do it, and then make it legal or at least pay the fines to get away with it.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
It looks like an interesting article about a stick-up-the-butt Federal bureacracy saying 'you can't have that car, you'd better spend a bunch of money getting your papers in order.'
So, I fault Bill Gates and Paul Allen for giving the bureaucrats the satisfaction of playing their game. And it looks like a bunch of people now get to drive cool cars that were formerlly verboten by the gummint.
How's that a bad thing? Your whole attitude seems to be based in envy, nothing more.
resigned
As with all questions: it depends. In this universe, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto are all bundled with the OS. They are not tied to the OS. I can take iPhoto, and drag it to the Trash, and be done with it. No more iPhoto.
Since Apple is not a monopoly, they gain nothing by tying the apps to the OS, and even if they did tie them, they would not be in violation of the laws governing monopolies.
In this Apple-monopoly alternate universe of which you speak, it is entirely possible that Steve Jobs would have similar strategies as Gates and Ballmer. The iLife apps in this universe might be tied to OS X, in which case, they are a monopoly involved in anticompetitive behavior.
So, to wrap up:
- current behavior + alternate universe = no lawsuit
- monopolistic behavior + this universe = no lawsuit
- monopolistic behavior + alternate universe = lawsuit
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
"Funny, that. A democratically elected body, but one that the revolutionaries felt did not represent them. A series of laws designed to increase the wealth of the already wealthy. Intrusions by the government into private life. Does this sound like ANY government you've heard of recently?"
Re-read your history. Parliament offered the colonies representation in the British parliament; colonial leaders sympathetic to the radical (dare we say, terrorist?) Sons of Liberty "organization" refused to accept the offer of parliamentry seats. Thus Parliament stuck with the "virtual representation" for the entire Empire. Parliament had to come up with ways to pay off the imperial debt which was mainly incurred by trying to evict the French from North America (Canada) which the British North American colonists bitched about for over a century but were unable to accomplish. It took the power of the British Army and the Royal Navy to beat the French into submission in the 7 Years War (French & Indian War) which ran up the debt. The colonials prospered by removing such a large threat but refused to "pay their fair share." Ever heard that phrase before? Yeah, that was a common phrase used by leprotards like Senator Barbara Boxer in the 1990s running on platforms to "make Japan and Europe pay for their defense" that went nowhere. The people in the Empire that were being overtaxed to pay for the American colonies' defense were the English, the Welsh, the Scottish, and the Irish. The American colonies, even with the dreaded *tea tax* were paying around 1% of their incomes in terms of imperial taxation. Compare that to the end of the American Revolution where the "States" on average raised taxes 15 times what they were in the pre-Revolutionary period. And the British "gave" to the independent United States of America what the colonials bitched about for years; freedom to trade with the rest of the world without British administrative interference. What was the result? Depression. The British Empire turned around and locked the U.S. out of the imperial trade system. The economic consequences of this led to Shay's Rebellion, which is noteworthy because it ushered in the Federal System as a crackdown on such counter-revolutionary activities.
The "quartering of soldiers" is a lie. It did not happen except for Loyalist families who volunteered. Quartering referred to the practice of housing British Army soldiers in the local inns (which the inn keepers loved because it was steady income) and the colonial legislatures were forced to pay the bills since it was a defensive cost. Alarmist colonial leaders objected to keeping a standing army in the colonies since they felt it was counter to English history and their rights as Englishmen, although the British were the ones well aware that the French were itching for revenge and it was only a matter of time until the next colonial war happened.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I didn[t sday they didn't get young people to sign up, they do, they don'tknow much better and the government has destroyed jobs all over. You'll find most of the kids signing up are coming from areas with depressed economies, they see three hoits and a cot and this vague promise of a college education, that's why they sign up for the most part. what I DID say was the reservists and guardsmen are quitting, a much higher rates than before. And you can go personally argue with the first wars and now this was sick vets. I have two personal friends from bushgulf war 1 plenty sick, the dust and the pills and shots combos. Here's an URL for you, the gulfwarvets.com website, you can argue with those guys direct if you follow some links around over there.
http://gulfwarvets.com/du.htm
And so far just from this war we have thousands sick, not getting much press though.
As to me being a liberal, I started my political activism both working conservation and civil rights issues, and ALSO as a barry goldwater volunteer. I'm consistent, I don't see any conflict between having clean water, clean food or a clean government. to me that's real conservatism,, from the root word, to "conserve", to nurture, save, protect, husband, guard.
I am FAR from being a liberal. I consider george bush the current occupant to be a feudalistic minded globalist, when he's not just a tin pot semi-literate dictator and chronic serial liar. He's not q conservative, and neither is the current top level leadershipof the R party conservative. Frauds, globalists, world government wishers with them in the dictartors seats, but they ain't conservatives. that part of the R party about disappeared by 68 or so. There's some remenants left, but most of them? Nope.
DU There's a big difference handling pressed hard DU warheads, and then breathing in microsocopic dust particles from them after they are expended in the field, and doing it for hours, days, weeks, months and in the cases of the civvie populations over there and in the balkans, forever. Plenty of evidence out there that breathing radioactive dust is "not cool". It's highly PROFITABLE to take radioactive waste product that would normally cost money and be required to be disposed ofproperly like any other radioactive waste, and turn it into an expensive "product", it's a nice coincidence that DU is extremely dense and has a kinetic weapon potential to it, but it is disingenous to assert that these radioactive particles are "safe" all spread out in high concentrations into the environment of a battlefield where they blow around and get absorbed by the humans and aniimals in the area, soldiers or civilians.
I'll also remind you of the *fact* that for years and years uncle sugar and his tame scientists told the viet nam vets that agent orange was "harmless". maybe you don't remember that, but I remember hearing that live on TV and reading about it in the news periodicals current in those days, numerous times, because it was "questioined" by people-like me in fact. I did it back then.
The government released any number of scientific sounding papers "proving" this fact of harmlessness, and put a never ending stream of stuffed shirt paid off academecians in front of the public to spread their FUD. EVENTUALLY the truth came out, what did it take, 30 something years for them to admit it? I have even more friends from that conflict who are sick from that stuff. And it's only been in the past two years that we have official record that the whole war was based on an outright lie of the gulf of tonkin "attacks". Although many knew of it at the time, and fighting a war undeclared was still illegal.
I DO get my facts straight before I post. Do you think I LIKE that this bad shit happens, that I gain something from it? It's not ME profiteering from screwing over vets, or heisting the economy, or getting us into highly questionable wars and getting all sorts of people killed. It wasn't ME who had business ties to both saddam hussein AND the bin lade
who the hell donates money to politicians
No kidding. Right after the primaries were over, I read an article that John Kerry has to play catchup. He ONLY had raised about $100 million for his campaign, and was trailing Bush's $150 million.
That's insane. The dollar amount alone is ludicrous. There are plenty of better ways this country could spend 1/4 billion dollars.
But what's worse is that the "news" media implies that Kerry's big fat wad isn't enough. Sure media companies will be raking in the dough selling TV spots to the Presidential Pissing Match, but isn't there still some speck of journalistic integrity? The presidency isn't supposed to be about bling-bling.
This isn't E! reporting about B-Fleck blowing $20-mill on a ring for his spoiled-brat ex-fiancee. This is the two people applying for the most important job in our country demonstrating that they have no fiscal responsibility.
At least Ben was blinded by love. What's these guy's excuse?
blog
I read an interesting book called The Culture of Make Believe that advanced the idea that one way to de-link political power from wealth would be to make the value of every vote inversely proportional to the amount of money the voter has. Which is to say that the more money a person has, the less his vote counts (just a clarifier, since I often wind up inverting the intended meaning of "inversely proportional").
IANAPSG (I am not a political-science guy), and I'm sure it could never be workable, and it doesn't address campaign contributions, and it's blatantly discriminatory, and it's patently ridiculous, and so on, but the idea's got a nice ring to it, anyway.
Especially at 3 am.
The Dalai LLama
...think I'm a Lefty? This guy makes me look like Ashcroft...
My sig could be your sig!