Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
In case you've forgotten he, or at least his wife, owns one.
Wrong.
~Philly
BeOS.
Well, that sentence alone makes me think you are a troll, but I'll respond anyway. I did run BeOS, for about 3 days, until I realized that it blew. A friend of mine had it on his mac and liked it, but always said the PC version sucked balls. I could never figure out the difference, but rest assured, Windows was better. And that is so depressing I think I'm gonna cry...
Apple. The combination of iTunes and Quicktime.
Well, I did say Quicktime runs well on my mac. I don't know if you've ever used iTunes on a PC, but I was messing with it on a P4 2.4ghz machine yesterday and was considerably underwhelmed. I don't suppose *anybody* here will defend realplayer though. At least we're probably in agreement there.
Not true. It ignores all the monopoly abuse that Microsoft indulged in to get where it is.
Well let's look at office suites. MS didn't have a monopoly on office suites. Corel used to make one (do they still? I haven't used it since it sucked so bad it made me puke.) What else was there? It's hard to blame Office's success on exploiting a monopoly when historically you had just one competitor, and that competitor sucked.
We already discussed media players, what about web browsers? Which one did everyone start off with? Netscape. In fact, if you had a memory that reached back more than 5 years you'd remember when everyone was cheering how microsoft missed the Internet boat. "HA HA, netscape and AOL have pwned MS!! They're stuck with that old cd-rom multimedia mantra! It's the web that's the future baby! They're done for!" That is, until ms came out with IE 4, and it blew netscape away. Virtually no one denies that. You mentioned Opera...I'm not sure I've ever seen that on a store shelf. And no, most people probably will not pay for something marginally better than what you get for free. That's not a consequence of monopoly abuse, it's just common sense.
No. It's evidence that a no cost application is something that Microsoft can't cross subsidize to undercut. Opera has been better than IE for years, but costs money, or needs adware.
I never understood why cross subsidization was a problem. If you'd refer to my first post, I made some sarcastic remarks the jist of which was that MS should not be condemned for selling something cheap to consumers who are willing to buy it. "Damn their black souls!" I think I said.
Be happy with your PowerBook, as I am with my Mac. But realise that the superiority of the Mac platform hasn't stopped it from dwindling to 2% of the market. You aren't going to claim that is lack of innovation too, surely?
No, I won't claim it's a lack of innovation. I will claim, however, that when people see a 1.5ghz mac put up against a 3ghz PC that costs less, they aren't eager to buy one. (insert comment about the mhz myth etc.,etc. Normal people don't know the difference). Macs are expensive. What you're paying for, essentially, is a wicked operating system, a cool looking case, and a few badass accessories (Airtunes anyone?). That's not enough for some people, and those people aren't necessarily stupid either. Not to mention there are some people who actually like the Windows interface better...lord knows why.
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.
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.
I never understood why cross subsidization was a problem.
Cross-subsidization is one of the core items of anti-trust regulations, as it is used to maintain monopolies and screw the consumer.
Let's go back in history to the 1950s. Standard Oil (split up into Amooco, Exxon, and many others long ago) owned the gas station market in the US. If you were foolish enough to open a gas station near a Standard Oil station they would reduce their prices to below cost until you went out of business, then raise them again and rip the customers off. They could afford to do that, and ended up with little competition.
Go back another 40-50 years or so. Before refrigerators there were ice boxes. You got ice delivered to keep your beer (and other food) cold. There were ice trusts that owned the ice delivery market. If you tried to compete, same thing, they would price you out (or send Bubba and Louie to take care of you physically, things were rougher then). As soon as you were gone, prices went back up. Again, competition eliminated, so carte blance to screw the customer as they have no viable alternative, the competition has been squashed.
This is all the same now with Microsoft. You try to compete, they squeeze you out of the market in one way or another. The big pie is at risk, so they take a loss in that little area until you are dead and they dominate. They just use different tactics. Next thing you know, you are locked into a $300 OS.
Take Wordperfect. Once they squashed them (arguably with a better product in this case) they dumped the documented RTF format, and used the ever changing, proprietary, doc format. They could get away with a proprietary format as they ruled the roost. Problem is, competition is essentially locked out due to format issues.
Anyway, cross-subsidization is evil. The big guys use this to crush competition wherever it rears up. End result, few can compete, the monopolist remains the owner and screws their customers. This is why monopolies are split up or regulated. To remove this ability to screw the consumer by crushing competition. It is at the core of any capitalist system, to keep things in check.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
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
[sigh] The DoJ under Clinton aggressively pursued the Microsoft anti-trust case and was close to asking the courts for a breakup -- which they would almost certainly have received -- when Clinton left office. The DoJ under Bush walked away from a clear win and let Microsoft dictate the terms of a settlement that accomplished nothing. You can argue all day about corruption and corporate control of government, but in this particular case there was a clear difference between administrations, and to claim otherwise is to deny reality.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Let's go back in history to the 1950s. Standard Oil (split up into Amooco, Exxon, and many others long ago) owned the gas station market in the US. If you were foolish enough to open a gas station near a Standard Oil station they would reduce their prices to below cost until you went out of business, then raise them again and rip the customers off. They could afford to do that, and ended up with little competition."
Much the same thing happens today here in Australia, only it is more a duopoly, and it occurs in the liquor store market (You can't buy beer & wine in the local convenience store over here in Australia).
The alcohol retail market here is dominated by two large players, Woolworths and Coles Myer. Basically, one or the other of these two companies will open a new store in an area that's currently being serviced by one of the dwindling numbers of "Mom & Pop" operated stores, and proceed to price their goods at far lower levels than they do in their other stores where they are not attempting to destroy the local competition. Once the independant store is gone, they go back to price parity with the rest of their own stores and they are one step closer to having 50% each share of total market dominance. They can't be done for being a monopoly, because there are two of them doing it. They don't go up against each other like that, just the independants.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
You are incorrect. Microsoft never disallowed any OEM from shipping Netscape with their computers, and quite a few did. I bought Toshiba laptops with Netscape pre-installed, and there were several others as well.
You are basing your argument on an invalid assumption. You are probably one of those people that completely misinterpreted the (admitedly poorly worded) news stories about MS canceling Compaq's license for Windows because they chose to ship Netscape *instead* of IE. They were free to ship Netscape *IN ADDITION TO* IE, they just couldn't replace IE with Netscape.
Now, whether or not it was right or wrong for MS to do that is largely irrelevant to this argument, as it completely changes the assumptions you are basing your argument on.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Maybe you should ask Quicken ?
Long list you've got there!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.