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Storm Brewing over Microsoft on the Horizon?
SexyFingers writes "Robert X. Cringely, of I, Cringely discusses one of the last anti-trust lawsuit beleaguering Microsoft. It seems like Microsoft is looking bad on these bouts... words like, lie, dissemble, ignores were applied to Microsoft."
They'll worm their way out of it somehow, and after any publicity this generates dies down, they'll go right back to viciously fucking competitors, customers and business partners alike.
The kid is as smart as his mother and twice as smart as me.
He just admitted that his wife is twice as smart as he is. She must read his column.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Maybe Microsoft's mail servers were just having a bad day that day.
With so many law suits,I think bill Gates will be suffering from Headaches and others problems....
You think he is enjoying that pile of cash?
Why does yahoo do this
Wouldn't normally evidence that suggests that MS is doing naughty things (manipulation of evidence, etc.) invite a DoJ probe or something to see what exactly they're up to?
Or are actions like that limited to smaller companies that don't have the money to move to make problems "go away"?
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
Not for the first time, and not for the last time. It's all about exchanging. They're rich enough to be sued over and over.
lol they should have fought every attempt of others to get money off them.
This is what happens when u have management who want to do the easiest thing all the time.
I'm sure that Mr. Ashcroft will haul Mr. Ballmers ass in at once and the commander in chief will withdraw 10000 troups from Iraq, for the sole purpose of surrounding the Microsof campus and arrest everybody in sight!
All property including cash assets will be seized and distributed to education and social security, since Mr. Cheeney finally sees the wrongs of his fiduciary irresponsibilities quite drastically and sees the light.
Mr. Ashcroft will set all steps in motion right after finishing his doobie in a white house crapper stall.
Just wait and see; it oughta be mighty entertaining.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the way this article describes the actions taken by Microsoft in court were true.
If Microsoft really 'plain lied' to the DoJ in the antitrust case, they might be 'really' convicted after all.
sig not found
"words like, lie, dissemble, ignores were applied to Microsoft."
so what?
those words have been applied to any other major corporation in the world.
in fact, those words are almost an synonym for corporate america.
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
Main Entry: 1gay
Pronunciation: 'gA
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French gai
1 a : happily excited : MERRY b : keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits
2 a : BRIGHT, LIVELY b : brilliant in color
... the guilty survives.
This is the way of business. The act itself is politically correct, what is not correct is getting caught. I know it is not what we teach our kids but this is reality!!
Until the DoJ really makes more than a grunt effort for justice, it will continue. The evidence and the law is there, but no will exists to prosecute Microsoft for extortion, bribery, lie/cheat/steal or anti-trust.
Take the billion dollar war fund against Linux, this is anti-trust. The price of Windows should be the same if you are black, white, oriental, Linux or Windows shop.
I hate the evil empire I really do, but I've got work to do here. Really, people are getting much too excited about this, Microsoft will eventually die, but not yet anyway. It just depends on how much Longhorn sucks.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Even if its proven they lied/committed perjury.. I don't think its going to really matter much.
The government already has proven they aren't interested in doing the job that was needed, and gave Microsoft a 'pass'.
Sure they might pull out some token fine to make the people feel better, but it wont amount to anything more then a blip on the books...
Unlike ATT, when they were attacked, Microsoft has managed to take control of the situation and will in the end, win, regardless of the outcome.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If the evidence is as damaging as Cringely claims, then the owners of Burst will get a huge out of court settlement from Micrsoft. It the evidence isn't, then there is no story.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"As you may recall from earlier columns, Burst, a two-person dot-com survivor from Santa Rosa, Calif., where I used to live, has been suing Microsoft for two years for anti-trust, breach of contract, restraint of trade, and patent infringement."
Well they will get convicted on two of the four. Remember we at Slashdot don't believe in patents, or Eulas.
So he is right about Microsoft. I don't understand the love the editors have for his crap writting. His ideas tend to not be new and his background as someone in the field that should be given a voice has never been established well enough for me to want to listen to his mind blowing waste.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I contract for a branch of the military and they have a policy NOT to keep emails after a certain period of time.
Why? The Freedom of Information Act. People are always filing them (damn you! Damn your FOIA rights!) and they use that time limit as more of a defense for themselves because in the words of legal, sometimes you don't want this stuff coming up.
Given who they are, you'll understand.
the horizon storms you!
lol they should have fought every attempt of others to get money off them. This is what happens when u have management who want to do the easiest thing all the time.
No, this is what happens when you have management that is deathly afraid of the plaintiff being able to prove their claims in front of a jury. It's better for them to take the monetary hit and sign an agreement that says the payment is not an admission of guilt/liability.
~Philly
That's what you get for not installing all the Exhange service packs.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
so go get your updates!
/open source supporter
If this were Joe nobody, they would come and take the relevant hardware from him. If this were Small Business Nobody... they would still take their equipment away from them.
However, because they are mega-huge corp... they ask for the information.
It's silly to think they are going to make it easy to screw themselves.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Do Not archive your email, Said Jim Allchen, in the pdf that was mentioned in the email. Heh. Don't be foolish, Don't get us in trouble, must be what they were thinking. Now what amazes me is that if this were say, a kiddy porn ring, or a AlQueda cell, I bet that they could dig out the big guns, like a nice scanning microscope, and sift through the erased 1's and 0's till they made sense of all of it. But no. This is Microsoft, and they just ask. They frikkin' ask nicely, and expect everyone to play by the rules here. Jeez luiz, Microsoft, in an ANTI-""trust"" case. Hmmm. trust. Sounds like expecting to be able to trust a company to do what you are asking is the wrong route in a case about NOT being able to trust...
sig!wind down the juuice, let the tubes roar with the glow of alternative powers, not they that be." me, today...
In theory, being from the kind of technical background that I am, I ought to fawn over every column, but, to be honest, I find his usual statements to be a bit feeble, a gentle puff, with no real gusto. He does pull his punches.
Normally.
However, this one has broken that mould. There were no punches pulled, and he completely nailed his colours to the mast. Good on him.
However, I'd be tempted to say that he's even made himself a target of Microsoft lawyers, as he has made allegations which could be, if false, be taken as libelous (or otherwise defamatory). (Not that I believe they are false.)
Will the posse of lethal attack-lawyers be set on him for it? Or will MS just hope it gets forgotten about as quickly as possible?
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
In fact, those words can be applied to just about every single person in the world at one point of their lives or another.
Sure, we should all strive to be the best we can, but at the same time, we should all remember our own failings when condeming the failings of others.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Dude, they had this Linux mail server which just went and ate all that sensitive e-mail.
"However, because they are mega-huge corp... they ask for the information."
Do you know how much E-Mail an international company generates in a day, let alone a year, or multiyears?
Of course you ask. Especially if you don't have infinite resources.
Bill Gates and his goons are all thugs and liars just like the mafia.
Recall the video tape of how bad Windows was after most of the IE functionality had been disabled? It was submitted as an actual video tape of an actual experiment.
But somethings didn't seem right on the tape. Icons were changing between screenshots. But that's okay, because Microsoft just cut out some of the boring bits, but the tape is really a tape of an actual experiment.
But then it turns out that the machines are completely wrong. Well, Microsoft said it was only a dramatization of an actual experiment.
So the judge said Microsoft could do the experiment over, but that the DoJ could watch it.
Microsoft had problems re-doing the experiment because the Microsoft engineers could not get a reliable Internet connection from the hotel room.
So, the judge finds Microsoft guilty and a monopoly, appeals, etc, new administration, case dropped.
Microsoft? LIE? Say it isn't so? No, I don't believe it! Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are two of the most trust worthy people on the planet. When that security is their number one priority and I continually get attacked on a daily basis, I know it's because all those piles of money blocking the hallways in Bill's House was to blame. If only they coud figure out a way to put all that useless money to work solving their problems. Sigh.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
If Microsoft is artificially inflating the price of PC's by forcing eveyone to buy a copy of windows they can't be dumping. And if they're not dumping, they're offering something Apple isn't. I'll leave it to you to decide what that is.
The current admin is still paying off something. If nothing else, check out that DHS standardized on MS. Now, they are having to tell people to quit running MSIE, Outlook, Exchange, and IIS. They were the key reasons why they went to it.
The only reason why that happened is due to political payoffs.
Bill Gates: "Steve, the toilet doesn't work anymore!" /. friends can hear it too now, they even have a title: 'Storm brewing over Microsoft on the horizon?' on their front page!"
Steve Ballmer: "Yeah, I will fix it next week"
Bill Gates: "Hurry up, my cool
Steve Ballmer: "Shall I do my monkey dance once again?"
Evil great and small can happen because people turn their back because it is to inconvenient to deal with it right now.
But microsoft is an easy evil. You are not going to be shot for going after ms or any other cooperation that has gotten out of control. Yet.
But leave it like this and the common american Sci-Fi theme of evil cooperations controlling the world, odd that in capatalist america hollywood movies often have cooperations as the evil enemy, will become true.
Your strategie seems to be that Longhorn will suck. I got news for you. Every fucking windows release ever has sucked. Note that all the MS apologists are saying stuff like "Well this new release is less crap then the old one" but mostly are pointing out how good the next one will be and that all your current troubles are your fault anyway.
So go right ahead and keep supporting MS with your computer tax and blind obedience. Others are fighting by not giving MS a penny and supporting those who help break out, (Have you bought your copy of Doom3 and Opera yet?)
For those objecting to the nazis being brought in to this discussion lets not forget that they and their kind (what is the difference between "gein juden" and "whites only") were in power and doing their petty hatred and corrupting long before the famous "final solution" was put into effect. All those years people cried out in protest and people like the above poster silenced them by saying they shouldn't make a fuss and let people get on with their jobs and that it all would work out okay.
I am not saying that MS will be rounding up people or anything similar. I do foresee a future were cooperations like MS but also like media have such a huge amount of control that being critical about them becomes impossible. Already controversial movies are being boycotted and tv series cancelled because the powers that be don't like them.
MS will not be the evil but may easily be an instrument. Just as radio tv and the newspapers have become controlled by a tiny handfull of rightwingers (the same families that gave contributions to the nazis) we might loose the net as the last bastion of free expression that can be heard.
Why else should MS be pushing to make DRM into every piece of media made? Exactly why should my home movies have DRM? To protect my interests or to make sure a protest movie can be easily traced?
Tin foil hat time or not but MS was caught recording what DVD's people watched. MS said it was a mistake when people found out and asked questions. It was a mistake alright. People never should have found out or am I just paranoid?
But that is the weird thing about paranoia isn't it. Your only paranoid if your wrong. Like those people who warned of the nazis and the many other horrors before until it is to late people like you have the majority. Afterwards you cry out, why did nobody do nothing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...actually including any third party alternatives with a windows install? Are they including firefox, open office, various security tools that are freeware, when they could? I really don't know, but I hope so.
Are any of the big vendors shipping a factory installed dual boot system for joe home and business desktop? Now THAT would be interesting! Side by side stock comparison for folks, in a semi no brainer format for them, as the vendors have control of the hardware, so you know it will all work when you get it home or to the office and plug it in.
Do you think Bill Gates even cares about the litigation? It is simply a -minor- cost outflow for their business practices.
The uber-rich think differently, htey see the world differently, they llok at the idea of another human being differently. Honestly I doubt we can understand how BG thinks. But it ain't like Howard Hughes that's for sure... more like J.P. Morgan or the slavers who built pyramids.
Humans are like the loose change in your pocket.
Federal court cases are like parking tickets.
Homeless people are like the lint on your rug.
I've been in porximity with several of those people (mega billionaires).
No matter how altruistic they try to act, on a personal level their conceptualization of "the other guy" is sickening and depressing.
to regress and to be fair... enjoy and cash are not even symbolically linked in his head... potential for manipulation of the world, to make whatever he wants to make no matter what the expense of others, and securing that ability to control his environment... those primitive wants, those seem to resurface at the basest level.
The uber rich are fookin freaky.
Actually, if they've been lying as accused, the company is largely finished. People will go to jail and Microsoft will be ripped to shreds. Arthur Anderson's corporate sins weren't as big as this and they're toast.
"
But you have to remember the context of the article; they way I read it, everything mentioned is in the 35 brief from Burst and the unsealed documents. He's just summarizing what's in those documents.
AC comments get piped to
It does not depend at all on how much Longhorn sucks. You are a moron. Take an economics class someday. Or a history class. The world's monopolies are NEVER destroyed by consumers choosing to abandon them due to poor products. NEVER.
/.er imaginations) of slowing.
/.ers who claim that M$ will die naturally tell me the name of the richest person on Earth? Now? Not a few years ago---Now? Can anyone tell me offhand how much cash (not revenue, not profit) M$ adds to its "warchest" on a monthly basis? What kind of moronic shithead would think that they are not getting stronger every day??
Try to understand that you are talking about an illegal monopoly. The only way it goes away is if regulatory bodies become less corrupt and more powerful, or its monopoly becomes irrelevant (which doesn't EVER happen when somebody comes out with a better product in the same market segment).
Competitors to Windows are IRRELEVANT to the success or failure of Microsoft. Longhorn is IRRELEVANT to the success or failure of Microsoft.
What is relevant? There are only two possible futures that matter here. The United States Government (sorry, but the EU can't do it yet, maybe in 10-15 years, but not in the next five) would have to regulate Microsoft vigorously. Currently this will only happen if Microsoft comes out in favor of abortion or gay marriage. I.e., it ain't going to happen.
The other possible future that would matter would be that no one needs to use Windows, Word, Powerpoint, or Excel to communicate with other people using Windows, Word, Powerpoint, or Excel. If something other than regulation forced interoperability between these standards and the marketplace, it would be all over for the monopoly. This is why you see tantalizing promises that this may happen voluntarily as Microsoft "embraces" open source. Once you check carefully, you will find that these are worms on hooks dangled in front of your eager mouth. It will never happen voluntarily, and NO competitor in the same market segment can make it happen.
Another way that this possible future could happen would be if it were no longer useful to interoperate with Windows, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The biggest danger here is the Web, since it would please many people to conduct business via the web rather than on specific desktop computers, and to have web-based applications take over from their desktop-bound counterparts. This scenario can be prevented if Microsoft takes control of the Web, replaces it, or makes it unsafe. For instance, remaining lax about virii is in M$'s interests. "Trusted computing" is in M$'s interests. Replacing Office with "Weboffice," i.e., defeating the Office monopoly themselves, with something even harder to defeat, is in M$'s interests. Note that neither quality nor user satisfaction matters. What matters is finding the model that best maintains the illegal monopoly. End users are just an annoyance.
Of course, the last computing monopoly was IBM, and they lost it by MAKING A MISTAKE. It sucks that a mistake is my best hope for a more interesting information technology market, free of the illegal monopoly that shows NO signs (except in
By the way, could any of the
This is such a longwinded post that you are probably not the "moron" nor "shithead" I have been complaining about. You probably already know all this stuff. The person I was trying to reach is long gone. Oh, well.
"And if their business partners are being fucked, then they should stop being partners with Microsoft."
PR guy: "Sun is an experienced player in IT and runs no risk in cooperation with Microsoft."
Scott McNealy: "Yes, Mr. Gates, sir, how far should I bend over?"
Maybe the president will decide to get tough and go it alone to invade Redmond. The whole world might be safer with a certain dictator out of power.
Vote Bush '04!
--I've gotten a few grannies and grandpas (my baby boomer age demographic) to switch, just from talking to them online and hearing them comment on the MS bug du juor and unusability of IE, so I dropped links to moz and open office, etc. It CAN happen if folks try to be constructive about it. Switching all the way to linux though is a harder sell, I will admit. Too hard to do over the internet hand holding and installation. This won't happen, any big universal switch, until anyone can just as easily get a linux install as a MS install at most any shop they walk into. People run the OS that comes on their machines, that's about it. About the only reason-well, two reasons, I ever even tried linux myself is from being a geek and having spare junker machines. If I only owned one machine I doubt I would have experimented with it, the idea there is "better the devil you know".
Hahaha. What, you thought Microsoft would ever die?
No comment.
Is this storm brewing on the horizon, or over Microsoft? I'm confused.
slashdot broke my sig
Doesn't Apple have a pending patent on "beleaguered"? Go get 'em Steve!
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Sure, your're right. What I meant was that money can simply buy you any settlement with court/government/whoever if your "sins" are not a regular crimes, but are so disputable as accusation of "monopoly practices". I have read about Arthur Anderser only once - that they screwed and they are gone. On the other hand, I keep reading about Microsoft being sued (and sometimes even convicted with a huge fine) but they are still alive.
They will weasel their way out of it again. After all they have so much smearing cream ($$$$) in their pockets that law is a non issue for them.
equal a large jury verdict against MS and possibly support a punitive damages award too. A large verdict could represent a tipping point in any number of tactical efforts by MS, for example the ongoing war over consumer desktop space. . . . Okay I just like the idea of a significant verdict coming from a suit which is basically called, "Burst Microsoft."
I'm laughing at clouds.
Isn't it great when you know everything there is to know, without having to learn any of it. People like you are so smart.
And this is what American Justice (and ethics) has come to.
There are two ways of addressing this issue:
1) Just pass some "feel good" laws and campaign for re-election.
2) Make it in the individuals' (not just a company, but the individual people running the operations) best interest not to do shit like this.
---
So, the problem is whether or not it's in your own best interest to nuke that site from orbit. If we nuke MSFT, how does that affect America? Not just Corporate America, but individual Americans who are swimming the Rio Grande each day to work and to send money back home.
Personally, I'd rather get some deterrance in on this issue, and deal with the ramifications and possibly, a entirely new business structure. I'd like to see "Lying for Dollars", and the lawyers have to climb ropes above killer dogs while trying to convince a jury not to pee on you. After a couple of generations, by God, all lawyers would be in-shape.
I vote to just start killing lawyers, and let Allah sort it out. We've got plenty of lawyers to burn...
Unless, that is, Burst has enough evidence to win.
and crack dealers had to go through the one Microsoft goes through..
Didn't Dave Chapelle already cover this issue?
yes.. laughs..
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Yes, but usually not with evidence and in a Court of Law
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
How far does it shoot? How did you make it?
Another anti-trust lawsuit? Say it ain't so! After the devestating changes the company had to endure after the first U.S. anti-trust trial, another one would surely destroy them!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Assuming all the code is killed they may actually improve by finally doing it right. [That ranks with believing the W when he said he intended to rebuild Iraq and leave.]
Assuming too their marketing departments are not populated by robots. By marketing alone they could recover fully while they awaited new and better software.
<b><i>They will be bigger and better than ever!</i></b>
"Oh, and someone will now say how the competitors remark meant that MS is anticompetitive, using their monopoly to blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda."
And you think this is not true??
The fact that Microsofts OS is being run on over 90% of the home computer's in the world does afford the company some bit of leverage that it DOES ABUSE.
The sad FACT is that hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and IBM still have a hard time selling PCs that do not come with a Microsoft OS. This is not what I or most reasonable people are gripping about. This is not illegal. What is illegal is to use this fact in a way that protects their monopoly by disrupting normal market forces that would allow better products to gain market share.
Example: With the fierce competition, the margin of profit is very low on new PCs. Just a few dollars can make the difference of a vendor succeeding or being driven out of business. In comes Microsoft. It sees a vendor selling hardware and giving their customers a choice of either Windows or Linux.
"A choice!!" Screams Microsoft. "We can't have that!"
So they tell the vendor that unless they stop giving the customer the option of buying their computer's with Linux the company will have to pay Microsoft more for the right to sell the computers with a Microsoft OS. The difference would have to be passed on to the consumer and the difference is enough that the company would no longer be competitive.
Sure, the company has a choice but as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, if they make that choice the will go out of business. So to say that they have a viable choice is truly disingenuous.
So in comes the DOJ to save the day.
"You can't do that! You may add a charge onto the cost of companies offering another OS." They yell at Microsoft.
"Okay, we won't." says Microsoft. And soon afterwards they tell all vendors that the price of the OS has gone up but they'll give discounts to any vendor who only sells Microsoft Oses. Same effect, same anti-competitive practice but now they're not technically adding an extra charge to companies who support Linux.
Oh, and this is just one small example. Microsoft has loads of dirty tricks in its bag. It would take many, many pages to document them all!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Most people in corporate America are honest and decent. It's the exceptions that hit the headlines.
But I don't expect to convince you of that. You're obviously a cynic - someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
> "words like, lie, dissemble, ignores were applied to Microsoft."
there is like a funky mix of punctuation and verb
tense usage above that i can't begin to parse.
have a nice day.
I love the 80s. A time when Corporate Greed and Monoply were Good Things.
Gas stations still do the same thing. So do cable companies, at least here in Canada (you want cable? Buy from company X. Yes Company Y competes, if you want to use their service move to a neighborhood they sell to.
Microsoft went a little beyond pricing (if non-M$ program sleep), but they consistently out marketed superior products. Artificially low prices are nowhere near as critical as the CPU tax for M$ domination. If there were an incentive for stores to sell non-M$ products there might actually be competition.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Yeah all Microsoft is to do is to produce evidence to point that he was being leiblous... like emails from... oops. :-/
Probably what will happen is Microsoft will go to court, and say "We've had a bad deade, and we're sory, here's our hand, go on and slap it and we'll do better next time."
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Maybe things like "open file" and "paste" are very complicated to get right (god knows microsoft was unable to perform "save document" correctly for several years) but users expect these things to just work.
Ummm, yeah. This I can not deny. It is really great to be so smart. I only wish someone who knew enough to end an interrogative with a question mark would mention it, instead of just you!
By the way, in case you are not playing "Got You Last," you could google on some economists like Paul Krugman and historians like Studs Terkel and really learn about this stuff. Unfortunately, Terkel's most interesting book, Hard Times (1970), must be read offline AFAIK, but Krugman has a wealth of online information.
kthx.
And this is news???
Especially to nerds???
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How would you compete against Microsoft?
First of all, there are tons of companies building and selling products that run on top of Windows that MS would love to compete with. Take Adobe or Macromedia for example. Microsoft's doesn't have any relations with the hardcore artistic or graphic community - they would be foolish to try competing against Adobe and Macromedia.
Another good example is Firefox. It has gained tremendous support by beating IE in almost all areas. Apart from being alot more friendly to the developers, Firefox is beating Microsoft in an area where they don't compete: standards adoption. And even IF Microsoft would try to compete in that area (as they surely will) we would *still* be winning.
How do you parlay your great idea into a successful business before Microsoft copies your idea, gives it away free with Windows, and chokes off the cash coming into your company?
Assume that you have a new terrific idea for a product to run on top of Windows. By the time you are caught on Microsoft's radar you would probably have a fairly large market share. Assuming your product isn't trivial, MS would rather buy you out (if only to get your customers) than try to build an equal product from scratch. If this happens (as has happened before) , it doesn't matter how much money MS have because your company will have all the money of venture capitalists and banks behind you (and even if you *don't* get support by external funding you would *still* be winning because being bought up by MS would make you a rich man).
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
Is a terrible media player. Hogs system resources. Bad DVD player. Extensive options menu with custom hotkeys? Nope. swf, rm, 3gp, mov? Nope. List of every popular codec with direct links to downloads, descriptions, and instructions? Nope. Zoom Player. http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_download. shtml
At least his stuff is interesting and relevant, even if only mildly so. He's a fellow nerd reporting on nerds to other nerds.
When we have to endure Roland/Michael and other sleazy combos and backhanders almost daily here on Slashdot now, it's nice to see some genuine News For Nerds from guys like Cringely, instead of more self-serving self-promotion from the likes of Michael Sims.
If you do all of your thought in application space as web pages and server processes, or deamons and applications that talk to server processes, Like, for example LEAP paradigm, then you already know that the OS is irrelevant. Sure you need one, and it is important what it is. But if you design your applications with open architectures and stop looking for a big-brother operating system, then you will know that you can sleep and not worry. You will be able to do what you need to do. They can't stop you.
Tycoon falsely implies that he was actually good at it though.
"The world's monopolies are NEVER destroyed by consumers choosing to abandon them due to poor products. NEVER."
"Competitors to Windows are IRRELEVANT to the success or failure of Microsoft. Longhorn is IRRELEVANT to the success or failure of Microsoft"
So by your logic MS could layoff all their programmers and technical support staff and just keep the people who stuff product into boxes and it would have no effect on their business.
In addition MS can't be losing market share to Linux because Linux is a MS competitor and you claim that competitors are irrelevant to the success or failure of MS and surely losing market share would be a relevant event.
I think you need to rethink your logic, kid.
Sure, we should all strive to be the best we can, but at the same time, we should all remember our own failings when condeming the failings of others.
Forgive me, Father Ballmer, for I have sinned. It has been two revisions since my last confession.
What are your sins, my son/daughter ?
I have doubted the dogma of the holy, mother Microsoft church and wondered if Linux and all its daemons might offer better TCO.
This is very worrisome. Continue, my son/daughter (please choose locale and personal information from the dialog).
I have thought that the true believers might have suffered from using the Holey^H^H^y Windows due to infestations of biblical proportions.
Is there anything else, my son/daughter?
Well, Father, I have looked at the, er, ahh, *blush* man pages in a different religion and have been interested.
My son/daughter, your penance is to immediately reinstall Windows and use Windows Update on an unprotected connection, no matter how many times it might take before beating those who would subvert the Way Out, until you have proven your devotion.
Yes, Father. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.
Krugman's book written in the 1970's has a wealth of information about how Microsoft runs their business today? Gee that's great. I'm in awe of your smartness.
Just interested.
... and modding down any who dare to rate their stories badly...
Interested because anything he has to say is way more interesting than the get-rich-quick-scheme-masquerading-as-news which Michael or Timothy might roll out (and which they do every damn day).
When they're not trying to cash in on suckers clicking ad-links, they are publicising their latest girlfriend/boyfriend du-jour
So even if Cringely's stuff is only mildly interesting at best, it's still better than anything from the likes of Michael Sims.
Yahoo's last financial profile for Burst.com (2002) had the company with two employees, and nine month revenues of $150,000 set against losses of $628,000. Profile: Burst.com
Burst.com has since raised enough capital to carry it through to trial. Message from the Chairman You could argue that buying stock in the company is simply buying a ticket in the lawsuit lottery. Burst.com has one product and a patent portfolio, neither of which seem to be setting the world on fire. burst.com Sales
To consider the lawsuit as a threat to Microsoft strikes me as just plain loopy. A bit of trivia: Richard Lang's last success was as the co-founder of Go-Video and co-inventor of the Go-Video dual deck VCR. Burst.com MS Q&A
From what I understand (IANAL), distruction of evidence is a felony. That is what Frank Quatrone went to jail for. Maybe BG et al will be joining them.
...when do the people responsible for all of this illegal lying and cheating go to jail? Oh wait, you're telling me they'll *never* go to jail because they get to hide beyond the skirts of a corporation? So if I incorporate does that mean I can lie to the government just like Microsoft and never fear that I'll see the inside of a cell?
Yeah, when pigs fly and shit smells like chocolate.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
These are things that I've seen MS-Word get wrong too, so no doughnut.
It's true that MS-Word does less of them, but it's also true that it will spontaneously corrupt documents from time to time (which OpenOffice will often fix), that MS-Word's HTML editing requires extensive therapy to come within hailing distance of standard, and that its autosave (in relative terms) sucks for reliability and intrusiveness.
The advantages cut both ways, which for the price - AUD$319 (RRP, basic OEM edition) vs AUD$0 - is wrong.
In fact, if you throw in a copy of XP Pro (AUD$279 RRP OEM) and a basic virus scanner (AUD$60), the cost of the software to do fundamental office work exceeds the cost (AUD$599 for Celeron 2.4, 256M, 40G) of the hardware to run it on. An increasing number of people have a problem with this.
It's also true that OpenOffice is steadily (in relative terms again) becoming more capable, and that the "headline" improvements (like PDF writing) are genuinely useful for mainstream and near-mainstream users. The next major release will also import PDFs.
Finally, MS-Word won't run on my system, at all, even under WINE.
PS, if you want to pick up all of the formatting from a web page, open the thing directly in your word processor. This works better for MS-Word, too, albeit it throws the resulting HTML into the bushes and jumps in after it no matter which way you import it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Two hunded posts, and hardly any are about the actual content of the article.
When someone talks to you, do you go off on your own tangent and completely ignore what the person said? perhaps that is why people say geeks have poor social skills.
If by "better", you mean an office suite which doesn't trash your work and does write HTML you're not exquisitely embarrassed about, then I'm afraid the answer to that is "Sun". The answer is still "Sun" if you want the full range of table manipulation or FrameMaker-like publishing features. KOffice is also at the stage of giving MS-Office a run for its money, and accelerating. If IBM pull their fingers out and GPL Lotus Office, within a year or two we'll have three competitors comparable with or clearly better than MS-Office.
If by "better" you mean a media player which doesn't 'phone home, doesn't require you to sign away your first-born on promise of compliance and doesn't require you to waste horsepower and real-estate with visualisations, I'd have to say MPlayer was much, much better. Many other media players are kicking around which will play the same things, and are creaking under the load of their bells and whistles.
As to the OS, the only things stopping most of my clients from switching to KDE on Linux today are things like banking sites wedded to MSIE and niche applications wedded to a poorly defined superset of win32s. They have no trouble with day-to-day activities like burning CDs, scanning, wordprocessing, spreadsheeting, web browsing and email.
The only issues have to do with lock-in and compatibility, not technical virtue or ease of use.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
> It seems like Microsoft is looking bad on these bouts... words like, lie, dissemble, ignores were applied to Microsoft."
Well, duh! Actions speak louder than words, and Microsoft's actions have shown MS to be a company that should be allowed to exist or distribute a product.
MS gives them price breaks if they don't bundle any competitors on any of the machines they sell. MS gives them even more price breaks if they don't even mention any competitors. MS wines and dines politicians, and even invokes US politicians to lean on them [en espanol], to get them to toe the MS party line. It's hard to get any closer to the Ground Zero of anti-competitiveness.
Have you got the idea now?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just watch how IE is loosing ground to Firefox so quickly, not because Microsoft made a mistake, but because normal dumb users are finding a better product. Sorry to say, but Linux is not a better product if you're the average dumb computer user. It often looks choppy, doesn't have games, difficult to install, etc etc. Until Linux is more idiot friendly, and cool looking out of the box, it won't take any significant piece of the market.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Sometimes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
With Anything But Microsoft software, it's generally possible to say why something odd happens, and fix just that one thing without shotgunning your whole system.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I notice nobody else's come up with a response to that worth posting (or otherwise) in the 3.5 hours they've had so far. Well done.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Cringely is only quoting publicly-released court documents. He is making opinion on factual information. It is not like Cringely found a blog somewhere, with some connect-the-dots conspiracy scenario, etc., or was up too late listening to "Cross Country AM"...
Besides, if he did approach Microsoft before posting this column, the 99.5% reply from MS would have been, "we cannot comment on this because of the legal process going on", because their comments on it could then be dragged into court by Burst.
Good luck on Microsoft going anywhere against Cringely on this one.
Well, I'm in awe of your stupidity. Seriously, do you believe that the laws of economics have changed so much?
You need to go back and read the message he posted, and understand that he said "monopolies" and then equated Microsoft with a monopoly. He then quite logically concluded that Microsoft, as a monopoly, will not fall because consumers will not abandon them solely due to poor products.
It actually makes sense, unlike your childish little rant. Grow up.
Fact every company has failed to compete against microsoft has choosen not to repond to microsoft competitive response
Remember the Network Computer, SUN's answer to the PC. When they announced they could save companies thousands in TCO costs. Companies who invested in them could save thousands in the first year alone.
Microsoft responded by creating the managed pc spec. Using a combination of system policies, log in scripts and SMS (system Management Servers) you were able to reduce the TCO to within $152 of the NC
Sun had a proposal to build a PCI card for PCs that had an embedded functionality of the Pico Java chip on it. You could have run Java Apps on your PC with the same speed as you would have gotten on the NC. All for a tiny fraction of the cost of an NC but it did not did not allow sun to take over Sun to take over the chip market from Intel
They could have re written Java to cache the apps on the local machine and added a hard drive for that purpose so that if network connections were lost the program could still work. While it can now do that if they had done that back then Java would not have lost the steam it did for desktop apps
I thought it was written somewhere that the word 'beleaguered' could only be used to describe Apple's latest situation...
It's nice to see that word and Micro$oft in the same sentence.
Cursing in the French language is like wiping your ass with silk.
Burst.com with no product and no employees has investors who have managed to push a penny stock up to $1.28 a share solely on the basis of the lawsuit. Burst Investors.com
It seems a shame not to include this choice example of investment strategy:
When the share price dropped from $8 to $2 in October 2000, I started buying shares, confident that Burst.com's technology would eventually prop the price back up. Like many other investors in this new century, I decided to average down and purchased more share as the price declined steadily to four cents in August 2003. Second Act of an Internet Play: the Fall and Rise of Burst.com
These offenses (lying to the courts, destroying evedence) get us beyond civil penalties and into the perp walks. That's nice to fantasize about...
Thanks for the summary of what he said, it just makes the logical flaws more obvious. The argument is essentially:
MS is a monopoly therefore customers won't abandon them no matter how bad their products are.
Merely invoking the "M" word doesn't magically make the argument valid. What is the evidence that MS's customers won't abandon bad products? How come Quicken outsells Money? Why did MS have to drop their Tax preparation software? How come we aren't all using MS Bob?
MS is simply not a monopoly in the sense of the old AT&T. In those days you couldn't make a local or long distance phone call without AT&T. They designed, built, and owned your telephone (you had to rent it from them) and they also owned the entire infrastructure as well. There were simply no competitors.
My father is running a triple-boot PC: MSWindows98SE, RedHat9, Slackware. He has OpenOffice on all 3 OSes. He does his word-processing in MSWord (using MSWindows) because "everybody else needs the files in MSWord97 format." He sticks to MSWord even though OOo can save in MSWord format, because they have enough difficulty getting MSWord to format it correctly even when everybody is using the same version. (He is trying to convert them, but there are many people involved.)
I also converted (forced?) my cousins to use OpenOffice. The children (aged 2 to 15) complain because things do not look quite right when they open the files at school.
MS has 2 monopolies: the OS (MSWindows) and the office suite (MSOffice). Slashdotters are spreading the word about alternatives, but it will be a few years before the general public is happy using alternatives. OTOH, MS has upset so many people that their replacement is inevitable.
---
I hope to buy a Powerbook soon. That Slashdot article about how they work from a few days ago may have converted me. Except that I still need to program for MSWindows because that is how I get paid.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Two details. First, recent versions of MS-Office make it all but impossible to save in RTF and other non-MS formats. Even if you are very familiar with the process there are many extra steps involved. Second, ".DOC" as mentioned by other posters is not a single format, but a suite of formats changed periodically to force new sales of MS-Office.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
When DOS still ruled every pc, the only thing I have seen coming out of the hands of microsoft was the OS and flightsimulator. I was still very young and was only thinking of how I wanted to be come a developper and create innovative software. Those were really the days were one would try to write their own software, I even had a go in programming a small wordprocessor written in Basic. But at the time, Wordperfect really ruled the wordprocessing market even with alternatives on the market but they got rid of their competitors by just increasing the functionality so people would stay with the product they knew best. Even recently I found an article from back in the 90s discussing the competition between Ami Pro and Word as a wordprocessor first based on the graphical windows "runtime", later to be known as "Windows". http://www.zisman.ca/Articles/1991-92/OCP_AmiPro.h tml
Microsoft have started bundling their Business Intelligence stuff free with SQL Server. Its the same story over again, and a great shame. I wonder how it will hit companies such as Cognos and Ardent. Microsoft are destroying industries quite happily by extending their monopoly.
Its sad - the current releases of the products are quite poor, but already have good market share. Its hard to argue for buying another tool when Microsoft ship something as a freebie, and its Microsoft, so no matter how bad it is its accepted that it will get there one day and you ought to buy it as the others will go out of business. Its also hard, no matter how good the other tools and how bad the reality on Microsoft, to argue against Microsoft's hype machine.
Microsoft are just too big and powerful for anyone's good.
This goes straight to what Microsoft is famous for, "Embrace[ing] and Extend[ing]". It finds itself behind in a market and uses any means necessary to become the leader...
Apple - steals code from Quicktime. Apple settles by selling 50% of non-controllable stock to MS
IBM - develops OS/2 and then takes most of it's core to develop NT.
Sun - develops a standalone JVM implementation that "extends" Java's function... Extended to the point that code written for it only works on Windows. MS finally loses ensuing lawsuit, then strands developers by removing MS Java completely from XP and it's website.
Dr-DOS - adds code that causes a beta copy of Win3.11 to bomb when used under DRDOS. This code doesn't appear in the final release, but this and their anti-competitive actions against DRDOS in Germany, are enough to kill DR-DOS completely. Caldera later wins several lawsuits against MS. Currently, it is alleged that MS has agreements with Caldera to cast Linux in a bad light.
IANAL, but it occurs to me that proof of this sort of misconduct might well be sufficient for a reawakened DOJ to go back to the judge and ask for the Seattlement to be nullified and the case reopened (only possible if Kerry wins, obviously; if Bush wins, the DOJ yawns and rolls over again). It would depend heavily on the seriousness of the misconduct and the will of the DOJ to pursue it.
Does anyone actually know whether this is a legal possibility?
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
This "if you don't like it, don't buy it" argument comes up all the time with commercial organisations. It's complete hogwash.
Companies should be forced to act ethically. When it comes to protecting citizens from irresponsible greed, that's where law and government comes in.
...not just for selling more of their stuff.
Discounts for bulk? No worries. Discounts for declining to deal with anyone else? Big problems.
Simple enough for you?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not complaining about MS dropping the price.
I'm not complaining about MS dropping the price.
I'm not complaining about MS dropping the price.
Are we clear on that now?
The problem is that Microsoft drop the price further iff the dealer ostracises any competitors. This is not a discount for bulk, for performance, for anything positive, this is an extra discount for telling competitors to nick off, for removing them from your advertising, catalogues etc, for shutting competitors out.
The bad effect of this is that soon there no effective competitors, and the price goes up. Those last 5 words are the key and core of monopoly power.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing