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Microsoft faces Monopoly Lawsuit (again)
james_in_denver writes "Forbes magazine is reporting
that Microsoft will be sued in California for predatory pricing. This lawsuit appears to differ from earlier challenges to MicroSoft's marketplace dominance by entertaining the possibility of a Class-Action lawsuit. This would allow individual users/licensee's to participate in the lawsuit. A notable quote from the full text states: "It's anticompetitive, it's predatory, and it denies consumers, and in this case taxpayers, the benefits of innovation that a free marketplace should provide,""
Some people like to say that the USA is the home of pure capitalism. However, that's an oversimplification of how our system really functions. I'd rather call it capitalism with gutters on either side of the bowling lane so that when something starts to go off course in a bad way, the law kicks in and makes sure that the bad shot both fails to score, and also cannot go further off course so that it impacts the scores on other lanes.
Microsoft has been on the edge of falling into the gutter for quite awhile, and there's been a lot of people who so far have come close to pushing them in. This is yet another tale in a continuing series of stories about projects that have the potential to just do it this time.
Microsoft has brought some amazing things into the world of computing, but they are far from perfect and in no way deserve to have all of the business power they have successfully amassed. We have to depend on our justice system to take some of that power back from Microsoft and return it into the available pool for everybody else to draw from in order to adjust the situation in a way that corrects for effects of misdeeds done in the past.
I wish them luck... it's about the time market forces delivered us working and cool IT products again.
1. Microsoft gets sued, rather nastily, by a whole lot of disgruntled customers. Fear not, peons - Longhorn cometh, with so much added value that you'll be *begging* us to raise the price!
Unless you want WinFS. Or a pre-2006 ship date. Or an OS sans virii.
2. Microsoft's lawyers make a buck, so do everyone else's. Life goes on.
3. Millions of 31337 h4xx0rs stab at Microsoft, PA-Style
4. The YRO section grows ever larger...
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
> non-refundable, coupons for WinXP Home edition. :\
Ha! My old company* had a bunch of WinXp Home packages sitting round doing nothing because the way the purchased hardware before I arrived meant that every machine they ordered turned up with XP Home on it, which was then replaced with a volume-licenced copy of XP Pro.
not a sensible use of their money, I felt, so I found a supplier which would give us naked PCs, and dropped volume XP Pro straight on.
Anyway, I digressed but I was going to make a point about the difference between refundable and rebatable - you can get rebates if you don't use a bundled copy of the OS - so a free coupon wouldn't be such a bad thing. Or something. It's getting late here
* disclaimer: I don't work for them any more. I work for them if you see what I mean.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
"Predatory pricing" is traditionally a term that refers to when a merchant tries to sell a product at a price that is vastly less than what the competitors are selling their product for.
In this regard, if one wants to go after so-called predators (and I'm not one of them) then the government should go after Red Hat and Suse and Mandrake, as they sell far more product in a box and at a far less price than Microsoft.
Once you go down the slope of the madness that is government interfence in the economy, all things are possible, mostly bad.
True free markets exist in textbooks. Not in reality.
Of all the states, I'm least surprised by Cal taking a (?another) shot at the Redmond giant. A number of Californian businesses (some of them quite big... most of them in Silicon Valley) have suffered at MS's hands.
-- james
I see your posts.. it seems like that you want to whore karma so I am not surprised, but really..
Some people like to say that the USA is the home of pure capitalism
Who? When? The USA has never had anything resembling "pure capitalism" for a long long time. I would like to see the basis for your statement here because it makes no sense and has absolutely no bearing in history.
The US has not been pure capitalist for a long time. Think of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Even before that, it would not be fair to say the US was pure capitalist, so I do not know where you came up with that silly notion.
California has courts that are friendlier to lawsuits. The lawyers know very well how to use public opinion to get what would otherwise be frivolous lawsuits to work.
Essentially Ms was successfully portrayed as using their marketshare to "thwart" the will of the people. Since no one has taken Microsoft's place as number 1 in PC software Microsoft is automatically guilty AGAIN.
In other words,
Lawyers need new duds. The people get nothing more than a voucher if they are lucky, and everyone who buys a Microsoft product or does buisness with someone who does now pays a "lawyer" tax.
It is the same as the smoking lawsuits. Done under the guise of the "public good", where the public recieves some good and the states and lawyers receive the cash. Call it an embedded tax.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I dont recall anyone ever saying that government has no place in a free market economy. Without government there would be anarchy, and that seems to be bad for business ;).
Government does many things including provide for enforcement of contracts (legal system), provide pure public goods, ontop of busting up monopolies.
Microsoft creates more jobs in one month than you linux fags will do in a life time. Thank god our legal system is rational, microsoft will probably just have to pay a fine.
Why does the opposite of Microsoft have to be Free software? A fair market situation would be if e.g. at least 3 different OSes for PC were sold and would have an equal market share.
The fact that only a free os can compete with Windows proves how ill the software market is. A monoculture is always bad. Even for jobs. If there were real competitors to Microsoft, there would be more people employed. Have you ever questioned how many people lost their job because Microsoft ruined/bought their company?
This is one lame signature, please read the message above instead.
I never understand why someone would want to defend a known, convicted monopolist in *any* terms - unless they have shares in MS.
Yes, the basic software of Linux is free, but there are competing distros & support services that you pay for (most blindingly obvious being IBM & Redhat), and it is the likes of those companies that MS is competing with. Not to mention the non-Linux companies like Apple!
So before you throw accusations of "whining" about, get your facts straight - otherwise you look like the apologist you are.
This is a very interesting language issue because so many conservative interests like to use the terms interchangeably in defense of Capitalism while they're really quite distinct and even incompatible.
In fact, free market ideas are dangerous to Capitalism. While the US is a good example of an economy that relies heavily on Capitalism, capitalist economies existed long before the US and are considered to have started in 15th Century Venice. Capitalism, as I'm referring to it, is a system where equity markets such as a stock, bond and commodities exchanges where inverstors use their capital to invest in shares play a central role in the economy. Clearly, such equities markets are very important to the US economy, so it is fair to say the US economy is heavily reliant on Capitalism.
But examples of a free market include ideas like international outsourcing. While globalization is clearly a good thing from a free market perspective, it is not necessarily a good thing for shareholders of American corporations or even for those corporations themselves. Taken to its logical conclusion, outsourcing could quickly gut a capitalist economy. So, what's good for free markets in general is not necessarily good for any particular instances of Capitalism such as the Dow or the NASDAQ.
Let's look at another example of a free market activity that hurts rather than helps Capitalist enterprises --second-hand sales. Again it is easy to see that second-hand sales are clearly free market activities, but if it becomes too popular, it begins to erode sales of new items. So, the general idea of free markets and the rather specific instances of Capitalism are often at odds rather than being interchangeable synonyms.
Microsoft isn't putting any $$$ in my pocket, so why should I put any in theirs?
They benefit from product lock-ins?
Well, then I benefit from product lock-out - specifically their products being locked out of anything I touch ...
So, please explain how that is not the essence of capitalism.
http://asia.cnet.com/news/software/0,39037051,3918 9680,00.htm Microsoft creates a special cut down version of Xp for developing countries, then sells it for $36 USD making it the cheapest windows version available. While selling copies here with a few more features for $200 to $300 USD kind of ironic.
Sure, /. loves to hate MS. But isn't this at some level an inevitable problem? Network effects make dominance of a particular OS inevitable at some level.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Your average computer user isn't smart enough to know that linux even exists, let alone be able to figure it out.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
But those vouchers you get aren't worthless. The lawsuit says that you paid too much money for your Microsoft software because Bill Gates is mean, nasty, ugly, greedy, and the only source for the stuff that you want, so if you're in the class of people who were allegedly "harmed", it's because you "needed" Microsoft software, so giving you _more_ of it must be a Good Thing.
If the vouchers were _worthless_ that would mean that Microsoft software wasn't something you really needed, so there'd be no more reason for an anti-trust suit against Microsoft than for an anti-trust suit against Britney Spears's record label which is the only source of _her_ products.
Besides, if you're the kind of greedy person who wants to sue Microsoft for being so mean as to _sell_ you their products, you deserve to be given more Microsoft products good and hard.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Silicon Valley area in Northern California does have a lot of Open Source interest - it's a very dynamic technical culture, and lots of people moved here because of the computer and Internet boom of the late 1990s. (The Internet means that you can do your work from anywhere in the world, so everybody moved to the same city....) Many of the projects people wanted to develop needed some kind of Unix platform, and Linux and BSD and other open-source projects gave them that platform, and open source was a good model for developing many of the tools they needed to develop their real applications.
One particular timing issue is that in the Internet business crash of the last 3-4 years, lots of computer people were unemployed, and they wanted to keep their technical skills strong, have fun, do something that got their name well-known, keep in touch with their friends, and maybe create a new business or new job, so writing open-source software was a popular thing to do. Also, for many people, they learned a lot of interesting technology during the boom, but were too busy with their jobs to have fun experimenting with it, but once they were unemployed, they had time to work on the projects they'd been thinking about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Meanwhile, Microsoft's "business power" comes from giving people things they want in return for money, and using the money to develop more things that people want (or do more advertising so more people want the things they make.) There's entirely nothing wrong with that, and if you don't like it, you can buy a Macintosh instead, or buy QNX or WindRiver or Symbian or PalmOS or SCO, or use free Linux or BSD software, or write your own software. The justice system's job isn't to get you a refund on products you decided were worth paying for when you bought them, or to tell Microsoft to deliver products you like better than the ones you bought - it's to make sure that nobody assassinates Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs or RMS. And if you can't get the software you want on a the cheap PC hardware you want to pay for, don't blame Bill Gates, blame Steve Jobs.
Market Forces are less, not more, likely to deliver working and cool IT products if every time they're successful at it, some bunch of thugs comes and steals it through anti-trust laws. The Federal Government's anti-trust suits against Microsoft were one of the three main causes of the software industry crash of 2000: sure, the "sell dogfood on line and don't worry about profits" business model had had enough time for its weaknesses to become apparent, and Alan Greenspan jacking interest rates six times in month or so to cool down the economy in time for Bush to get elected had a major impact on a capital-funding-intensive industry, but one of the major business models of the Internet Boom was "make something cool, and if it's successful, sell out to Microsoft if it's software or Cisco if it's hardware." By threatening break Microsoft into little pieces and take all their money, the anti-trust thugs guaranteed that Microsoft wasn't going to be buying lots of interesting startup companies (so they were no longer as attractive to VCs who'd previously been funding them), and the demise of the dogfood-on-line hype was already making IPOs less attractive as a VC exit strategy, so the funding dried up very fast.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's a free market
No, it's not. To be pedantic we have entire libraries full of books which contain rules which regulate our supposedly "free market". Let us, however, zoom in on the point of Microsoft's monopoly.
This is not a world in which the consumer influence carries any real weight. The majority influence is the corporate influence. Corporations, by and large, do not switch to Linux for several reasons:
1) Top level execs favor MS because MS is a huge player in the stock market.
2) Security firms cannot use open source products because the guidelines and standards for a certified secure desktop system are written almost entirely with Windows as the template.
3) The Microsoft monopoly extends beyond its software. Training institutes are cranking out MS monkeys by the thousands while there are very few programs which focus on administration in a *NIX environment. In terms of a corporate viewpoint it's easier for HR to staff and support a Windows workplace than a Linux workplace.
I'm not saying that certifications actually mean knowledge or ability. However, reality is 99% perception and the HR goons are impressed by certifications and letters after a name.
Microsoft holds a monopoly in many ways far beyond the simple installation of the software. Until the world divests itself of this delusion in appearances and faces reality it will always be an uphill battle against the entrenched giant. To be perfectly honest, Microsoft and its empire generate PROFIT for people who don't need to know anything about the actual products. FSF, GNU, and F/OSS philosophies would actually make people like Alan Greenspan get a real job.
That's really what we're fighting against.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Some define capitalism as free markets period. Others as a system whereby capital means are primarily owned by non-state entities. And then there's Marx.
Stock markets are just a by product, and don't actually contribute much to raising capital except for IPOs and additional offerings (in which a company sells its own stock, rather than day-to-day trades).
Commodity markets aren't about capital at all, they trade commodities.
Outsourcing in general should be good for the economy - wealth of nations, and all. However, that doesn't take into account the fact that there's no level playing field at the moment (e.g. agricultural subsidies, freedom of movement, etc.). Globalization is catching so much flack at the moment precisely because the "free trade" aspect is being implemented in such a way as to benefit multi-national corporations (and their shareholders), whilst giving the shaft to developing nations and out-sourced tech support people.
Second hand sales don't hurt Capitalism at all! In fact, they promote the efficient allocation of capital means, which is surely a good thing. After all, that's what the "Invisible Hand" is supposed to do!
You seem to have fallen for the the stock market myth of the need for ever-growing profits, an ever growing economy etc. There's really no need for all of that. Many small companies simply make a stable profit each year and don't feel the need to expand. In fact, a large chunk of the economy is chugging along happily, neither experiencing explosive growth or busts. That's because an ever-expanding economy is either unsustainable (both from an economic, as from an ecological perspective - yeah, I said ecological, very un-Capitalistic, but hey, oil will peak) or, more simply, a myth (i.e. you make more money, but you spend more too, and in the end you don't get any additional tangible thing in return.. That doesn't just include inflation, but cost-of-living/doing-business as well - lawyers will always have a rising income because there are always additional laws being made, rather than less - but they don't add value to your products.)
I liked the "second hand sales hurt Capitalism" bit though. Very RIAA-esque. If we don't expand copyright to stamp out second hand and public domain sales, then the world will come to an end because anything that's free has no value. Indeed, freedom has no value! Only (monopoly-)"rights" do.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
And it's not just Microsoft doing it.
How about a class action lawsuit on those grounds? I've never heard of one on EULAs, and most need to be taken down a notch or two.
When I buy software, it's MINE and I'll do what I please with it, including reselling it for a profit, if I want to.
And yeah, copying and selling is clearly wrong - I'm not talking about that.
If I had a real
>Seriously, is there any way whatsoever this case
>could end in anything resembling a victory for
>consumers?
It is a victory for consumers every single time Microsoft appears in court, regardless of the outcome of the individual case. Why? Because it makes progress towards a number of goals the completion of which will be necessary to eventually destroy the company.
1) It continues to expose Microsoft's business ethics (or complete lack thereof) which reinforces to everyone watching the level of disregard Microsoft has for its own customers, or for anyone for that matter who is not merely blindly interested in the company's survival. This sends a very powerful and necessary message to all concerned to avoid doing business with Microsoft at any point in the future.
2) Even if individual settlements are only a small amount per case, it serves to continue to bleed the company economically. As Microsoft's public image and reputation gets worse, their revenue streams will continue to dwindle from declining Windows sales and upgrades, which will force them into an increasingly desperate situation. The non-Microsoft world cannot hope to destroy the company itself...As Cringely said, the only ones capable of that are MS themselves. But it is vital for us to force them into a state of increasingly desperate panic, because once they are in that state, they will commit more and more heinous and unethical acts in order to attempt to regain their control, which will cause the entire chain reaction (the unethical business practices in order to maintain control, which lands them in court, which causes bad PR for them and bleeds them economically, which in turn causes them to engage in even more predatory behaviour to attempt to regain control) to move more quickly, thus accelerating their demise.
It is of vital importance that Microsoft are taken to the courts and held there. Besides the PR bruising it means for them and and the economic loss from settlements, the other advantage is that it takes their focus away from devising such wonderful things as Palladium and other similarly Orwellian technologies which they can then attempt to use to regain/reinforce monopoly control.
Do you have any evidence to back up your assertions or have you subscribed to group think?
There hasn't been a market for "at least 3 different OSes" for PCs for years now. PC software developers in the 90s didn't want their market fractured. They wanted to develop for one platform and reach the greatest number of people. Windows has been that dominant operating system for years because open standards and interoperability didn't exist because software technology was not sufficiently advanced.
The fact that a free operating system is competing with Microsoft now is somewhat irrelevant. Linux is the Johnny on the Spot that IBM and co have picked up as a way to reclaim some of the market share that Microsoft gained by winning the first battle of the OS war. Now as hardware and software evolve to the point where an API implementation is no longer a key to a monopoly, the OS is becoming a point of competition again.
This talk about "market sickness" and anticompetitive behavior never addresses the technological cause of Microsoft's monopoly. Typical group think.
...vouchers for free copies of competing FOSS products?
Done right, that could be an excellent publicity gimmick.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What would be interesting is asking MS to define a competitor, and then if they lose the lawsuit, they have to pay restitution in their *competitor's* software.
Let's see... that's how many Linux installs at zero dollars per install?
Oh well, they can just keep supplying them until the bill is paid.