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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."
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
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.
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.
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Maybe you should ask Quicken ?
Long list you've got there!
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