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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,""
Translation: Lawyers get rich, users/licensees get worthless vouchers.
Oh come on, really, can you really say that just because their OS costs more than most pieces of hardware predatory?
Microsoft is anti-competetive. But this raises the question: ;)
Is the market really free if the state of California tries to regulate it?
I say this is a good thing, but im not that much of a free market lover
And to quote Nelson: "HAHA!"
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
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.
Yeah. Its always good to have a couple of free, non-refundable, coupons for WinXP Home edition. :\
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
I'm european so I don't know much what's going on there in USA. The thing I noticed is that most interesting news about OSS, and anti-microsoft seem to originate from California.
So I ask you: is that statement in my subject, true?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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"This lawsuit appears to differ from earlier challenges to MicroSoft's marketplace dominance by entertaining the possibility of a Class-Action lawsuit." Um, RTFA? At least 16 other states have had similar lawsuits, including the recent settlement here in Minnesota.
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!
Linux is free to anyone who wants it. All the apps are free. How can anyone claim Microsoft is a monopoly that unfairly prices its products? This argument doesn't work anymore. It's a free market. Don't like MS? There's a free alternative. Stop whining.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
> 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
Same thing over and over again. State sues MS. MS challenges. MS Looses (the judges work for the state, right?)
MS "pays" restitution in free liscences. MS is even more entretched.
It's a dance called the:
"The PR Microsoft Litigation CircleJerk shuffle".
At the end of the dance the stains are a bit hard to get out, but the public gets it up the ass everytime.
it denies consumers, and in this case taxpayers
Since when are we not all taxpayers? A consumer is almost always inherently a taxpayer in the U.S. A notable exception would be certain untaxed items in some locales, big ones being food and clothing. You also need to get the money somehow so that you can "consume" and that is usually taxed. I hate how we allow ourselves to be called taxpayers because what that means is that we are seen by the politicians as nothing more than those people who give them money. Call me a citizen or constituent, but not just some dumb taxpayer. Shit, I'd rather be called a "voter" than a taxpayer, because if there was only one activity associated with me that one would be better.
I am feeling fat and sassy
"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.
"In fact," she said, "we've built our business on delivering innovative software at low prices, and have been the market leader in reducing prices while increasing the value contained in software."
Since when is $100-$200 for an OS a 'low price'?
I wonder if this will have any impact on the proceedings? "Independent auditors" recommend Open Source, suggesting that California could save $32 billion.
Can't Microsoft point to reports like this and say, "Hey, look! There's competition!" These reports this might end up serving Microsoft, rather than OSS, in the end!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
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 strategy is just to drag out court proceedings until a regime change in whatever entity is suing them. Pump money into the opposing campaign and -poof!- suddenly lawsuits lose their teeth and disappear.
-Electrawn
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.
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.
(MS Product->Who they stole or bought it from)
MS PowerPoint->Forethought Presenter
MS FrontPage->VTI FrontPage
MS Visio->Visio
MS SQL Server->Sybase SQL Server
MS Internet Explorer->Spyglass Mosaic
MS DOS->SCS QDOS
MS Visual Foxpro->Fox S/W FoxPro
MS Windows NT->Digital Equipment Corporation
MS DoubleSpace->STAC
Any other examples of the "Great Innovator"?
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
It will result in the state settling for some relatively rediculously paltry sum, 50% of which will go to lawyers, and which will only reach consumers in the form of a $50 off coupon on any future Microsoft product they purchase.
Seriously, is there any way whatsoever this case could end in anything resembling a victory for consumers?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"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,"
What exactly does the free market place have to do with taxpayers? Are people who cheat on their taxes not entiteled to a competitivly priced OS?
And since when is innovation a "right"? If so when will iMacs be subsidized by the gov't?
MS,as scuzzy as they are, have the right to charge anything they want. It is their product! I personaly don't want it written down in the great history books of geekdom that Linux won by default. It's one thing to press charges over threatening companies into unreasonable, exclusive contracts (through monopoly power). It's another matter entirely to sue for "the right to competative priceing". Go to a dollar store for criminie's sake!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
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
From "AmosWEB:Gloss*arama":
I don't know how they can sue based on simple capitalistic economics. I mean go ahead, just don't get hyped up.
BTW, I hate MS's shit, it just seems silly at first glance. You can't sue until the price is right
Get your Unix fortune now!
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
Well, I'm running a nice free OS on my laptop (although in reality I did pay Mandrake), but I _also_ had to pay Microsoft for an OS I had no intention of using and have never booted.
It's predatory because there is no way for me to buy a laptop within 100 miles of my house which does not include Windows. Either I pay MS and use their OS, or I pay MS and install another OS, but either way, I pay MS.
You forgot MS Windows->IBM.
MS does innovate...but they have to buy time and a base product to do it. MS identifies a space which it has no market and sizes it up. It will then buy a struggling competitor with marginal share in that space and release that product as MS product. MS marketing then goes into hyperdrive to push that product everywhere.
MS adds something to these products, but it takes the third or fourth version for them to be better than or comparable to other products in the same space. By this time they usually have lead market share or a significant portion.
MS, "The Great Marketer..." (to pointy haired types.)
-Electrawn
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 seems to me that anything to deal with anti-trust and Microsoft is just a calculated facade designed to maintain the status quo.
Bob Cringely wrote an interesting article (covered in Slashdot)explaining the economics of these anti-trust suits and how Micro$oft actually benefits.
And since these companies don't pay taxes or get tax breaks from Republicans, these suits are a sort of different way for the people in Washinton to get paid. Except this time, the trial lawyers get paid too!
So, the lawyer$ sue Micro$oft so that they can take a huge cut of the money they are going to hand over to the politician$. With class-action lawsuits, they have private lawyers (read expensive lawyers) representing individual claimants, most of whom don't care if they ever get the $20 rebate good toward more Microsoft products (because that's probably all they'll get.) This is a calculated public payoff to those in power (lawyers and politicians) by Microsoft to maintain they're monopoly.
Government: Freeze Microsoft!
Microsoft: What do you want? We're busy screwing the marketplace and raping consumers!
Government: This is a shakedown! Give us what we want and we'll let you go about your business.
Microsoft: Here take it! Now get it out here!
So, why doesn't Microsoft just roll over that easy? Cause they're just trying to talk down the car dealer. It's the same reason parents shouldn't get their kids everything they want, because then they'll just become spoiled and want more and more. They guys just fight over how much to they agree to be extorted for, throw in some free software for schools and libraries (cause that's a good campaign story) allowing the violator of the law to further entrench himself on his gang-land turf.
You said it man. Nobody f#%ks with the Jesus.
While I'm not formally educated in economics - why not? Isn't the whole idea of outsourcing that it saves money (ideally) for the business? If the business saves money isn't it more profitable and capitalistic?
The core of your statement is correct. Just don't blame Republicans only. The sad fact is that M$, just like all major corporations dontes to both sides so that whoever wins will owe them. They buy leverage with every election cycle.
The fairest tax would be a flat tax with no loopholes. Everyone pays the same percentage, individuals & all businesses of any size. Then the expense of enforcing a bloated and unreadable code could be cut by 80%. The only people hurt would be the tax accountants and tax lawyers who would have to find "honest work".
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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
Just out of idle curiosity, since the primary competitor(s) to Microsoft these days are in the OSS world, how does selling your work for a given price compete unfairly with selling your product for 'free'?
I believe he means in relation to a captialistic system where investors are important as well to a nation. While outsourcing may help companies, not having employees (who use their money to reinvest in the system) will eventually hurt those same companies. Of course, this is as long as those outsourced employees don't feel like investing (which they may not be able to do, depending on how cheap the labor is).
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Is Linux ever going to get sued for predatory pricing? How are you going to compete with free!
TODO: come up with a clever sig
Although I wasn't clear, I certainly don't blame just Republicans. Trial lawyers have come out whole heartedly for Kerry/Edwards. And as we should all know by now, Edwards gained his notoriety by suing companies. (discussing the merits of which would simply be off-topic).
It does seem to me, though, that the Justice department's policy toward M$ shifted from the Clinton to the Bush administration. The Bush administration settled with M$ on bozo terms. I'm not saying the Clinton administration wouldn't have done the same thing. But the rhetoric was stronger when the Democrats ruled PA avenue and John Ashcroft was too busy stealing civil liberties from the consumers that Micro$oft rapes.
You said it man. Nobody f#%ks with the Jesus.
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
Yeah, I'm sure billg will personally walk up to the judge and pay it out of his pocket change. MS won't notice the fine and everyone involved will probably get something like $3 each except for the lawyers.
Do these class action lawsuits ever serve anyone _but_the lawyers?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Secondly, the argument that there's no alternative is also bullshit. There are numerous vendors that offer to install GNU/Linux, and there are individuals who'll do that for money. E.g., RayServers. Furthermore, contracts between OEMs and MS to only sell their computers with MS Windows installed are voluntary private contracts that violate the rights of no-one. OEMs have the right to sell their PC's however they like to. No-one has the right to prevent them from only putting MS software on their PC's, or force them to put anythign on there that they don't want to. Doing such -- first and foremost -- is a violation of their property rights, which is also a violation of freedom of association (which really boils down to property rights).
Thirdly, anti-trust laws are nonsense. See The Case Against All Antitrust Legislation and The Truth About Sherman by Thomas DiLorenzo:
I would also suggest Monopoly and Competition from Murray Rothbard's treatise on economics, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market .
Regarding "predatory pricing" in particular, it is the most ridiculous and idiotic idea that anyone's ever come up with. To make a law protecting us from "predatory pricing" is really no different than making a law protecting us against "unicorns" or "witches" -- things that simply don't exist. Of course, that doesn't stop the witch-hunt.
What price-cutting refers to is cutting prices below the level of any competitors to drive them out of business, and then afterwards raising prices to extremely high levels. This, of course, is total humbug. If any of you think this is a good idea, try suggesting it to an executive at your company. You'll be laughed out of the company. Any company that tried doing such a thing would go bankrupt, because companies cannot operate on a loss for a sustained period of time (and it would take a sustained period of time to drive competitors out of business). Furthermore, the second part -- that they can then just raise prices to be very high -- is flatly wrong, since that would encourage competitors to enter the field, thus forcing them to lower their prices or go out of business. In reality, such a scheme has never been implemented in the real world, and never will, because it is impossible. See Monopoly and Competition.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
...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
I just recently bought a DELL laptop and had no option to buy the machine without Windows, and DELL isn't the only company. Gateway and HP (except for the nx5000) told me the same thing. I want to run Linux, my flavour of Linux, why do I need to pay for a Windows licence when all I'm going to do is re-build the machine with Fedora Core ? - Also what if I already had a Windows Licence from a previous computer that I'm trashing. Why can that not be transfered over to this new machine ?