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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."
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.
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.
The current version of Open Office is very competitive with MS Office for the vast majority of people. I'm sure there are some specific features used by a small percentage of people who couldn't switch away from MS Office but for what I use Office for I didn't have a problem switching, in fact being able to export documents to PDF from Open Office was a major plus that MS Office can't currently do.
When new, better ideas are being squashed by cashed up companies with a weaker product to protect, it's time to realise that a change is needed in the way that these two main government bodies are operated.
A few things that are notable.
--RIAA/MPAA essentially bribing politicians to be their puppets, to prolong their outdated business model.
--Large companies, simply suing smaller companies, then appealing and re-appealing until the smaller company is bankrupt.
--Trivial patents being awarded, when technology already supercedes them+prior art exists.
--Companies such as the MPAA&RIAA settling deals, then attempting to use more law suits to avoid forfilling their side. (Money already goes to the music co's for blank cd purchases, but then trying to make it impossible to use cd's to duplicate music under fair use. All while still charging artists the 15% vinyl disc breakage fee from the ages of records.
Finally the lack of realisation that certain companies shouldn't be making ever increasing profit. OSes are at saturation point, consumers only have so much money to spend on CDs and other non-essential items, we don't have significant population increases of talented musical artists every year. We shouldn't have massively increasing numbers of patent registrations each year either.
The list of abuses can go on forever, it all translates into american companies being hindered by other american companies, while other less legally restricted countries can leap ahead in technology advances.
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
That *does not* mean MS stuff is grandly spectacular, it just means their competitors are more litigious than they are innovative.
How would you compete against Microsoft?
No, really - how would you compete? Say you DO have something that's more terrifically innovative than anything Microsoft offers. And say you're an American following the American dream of trying to capitalize on a great idea and become rich, while meanwhile Microsoft has near-infinite reserves of cash and manpower and lawyers to throw against you if they see you have something which might be profitable to them.
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? And you get extra points if you can do this without being "litigious."
Really - tell me - I want to know.
This is a very simplistic view of the economics of monopoly. 1) Customers can't vote with their feet, choose a different product because microsoft's monopoly ensured there wouldn't be (a viable) one. 2) And as to it makes it cheaper for customers to buy a windows PC, yes it is cheaper than if the customer bought the pc + the OS at an exorbant price, but its still overpriced when bought as a bundle. (You can't assume that the standalone price is the true competitive market price) Note I'm not a standard anti-microsoft slashdotter, I'm typing this on XP right now. However you can't discount the chilling effect Microsoft's practices have had on the amount of innovation in the market. And you certainly can't just look at the end effect and use that to justify how we got here.
See, here is where you and I will never see eye to eye. It doesn't bug me that MS offers a web browser with their OS. If you are going to try to base a business plan on selling a webbrowser, something that you get for free in the dominant OS, then you'd better friggin make sure people know it's better. Yes, MS has an advantage because they have a popular operating system. So, why doesn't opera make a popular operating system? Why don't they release "Opera Linux" and bundle it there? And if it's so super wicked bad cool, advertise and tell people. I also said I've never seen Opera on a store shelf. How is that Microsoft's fault?
Here's the primary problem. The stuff that is bundled with windows is good enough for most people out of the box. There are superior products out there, but if people are not willing to buy them on the basis of their superiority then Microsoft cannot, and should not be blamed. I bought a mac because I wanted something better. I got it, and I'm happy. I will sing its praises, but if windows is still "good enough" for people, no amount of convincing is going to work. MS is not hurting consumer choice. The consumers have choices, they just choose microsoft because it's what they're accustomed to.
His point was this: Imagine that you are a small business that provides computational physics consulting to big companies. You don't make much money, but you have a big computer center which is most of your capital. Now, imagine that the feds investigate you for some reason (a competitor phones in an anonymous tip that you have warez on your servers or something like that). They bust in and take every computer that you own. In all, they have 50 terabytes of disk space.
Now, the feds don't have time to sort through 50 terabytes of disk space, so they just tinker with it little by little while they delay the court case while they try to build a case. In five years they give up and maybe return your computers.
Of course, you spent $50 million dollars on that computer hardware, and were making only a modest profit on the investment - before it was confiscated. For the next five years you make nothing and go bankrupt since you're still paying the loans on the computers that you can't use. Then, when you get them back they're worthless since they're slow by modern standards and you'll need all new servers to keep up with the competition. However, you can't get a loan for new servers since you defaulted on the loan for the old ones. They go on ebay and you recover a few hundred thousand dollars for your creditors.
Sure, this is a bit of a contrived example, but you can probably use your imagination to come up with similar scenarios. The feds don't care if they don't have enough resources to analyze the evidence - it isn't costing them anything to store it until they get around to it...
The government routinely kills small businesses in the course of investigations by confiscating capital equipment. They'd never do it to Microsoft, however...
And it wasn't just media apps. I could process SETI@HOME unit at twice the speed on the very same PC when using BeOS as when using Windows.
I'm a programmer. Developing software for the BeOS was a delight compared with Windows. It was a truly modern OS. Frankly the only thing better about Windows, was the amount of software already available for it. Just as that is the only advantage Windows has over OS X. There is no way that Windows was a better OS than BeOS. That's simply not the case. If you honestly thing you have enough knowledge of BeOS to disagree with me, make your case. Otherwise just accept that you are misinformed.
Yes, I run iTunes on Windows as well as OS X. It's identical. The only difference is that the Windows version uses more memory. If you have a low memory PC it'll be sluggish. But most people are fine.
I didn't mention Office suites because I didn't disagree with what you said the first time. It's the one area where Microsoft deserved to take a market. However, they did abuse their monopoly once they'd taken the market by changing the file format with every release so that customers had to pay money to upgrade whether they wanted to or not.
Come back when you do understand that cross subsidisation is a problem for monopolies. It's in the Sherman act.
Spend some money, patent what you have, and make sure you havn't infringed on any of MicroSofts patents. This way they either have to buy your idea, get your patent revoked, or play the market against you.
Provided you're not treading on their turf they probably wouldn't bother you until you become a threat.
Silly rabbit
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.
I don't know if double jeapordy applies to corporations, I really don't think it does.
Also the sentence MS got was conditional on them being nice, if they haven't been nice it's back to court.
Finally nobody got tried for perjury, evidence tampering or witness tampering (intimidation). All those are crimes and all of them were comitted by employees of MS. There is no reason not to try individuals with crimes.
evil is as evil does
> nothing will change until the viruses and spyware hit critical mass...
Critical mass has already been reached, for some people. I recently switched a customer of mine (who is an airline pilot) from Windows 98 to Linux + Crossover Office because he felt "persecuted" by Windows email viruses.
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
If they don't compete in this way with each other, but they do with independants, then they sound very must like what the American's call a trust (a cartel). As such if it was happening in America, then it's be a violation of the Sherman Anti-trust act just as much as if it was a monopoly doing it. I think the same would apply under European competiton rules too.
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.
No. Did you miss the part where MS Money "got better" ?
That wasn't competition in action.
Of course it was. Microsoft had to compete because their product wasn't as good. That they also tried to buy out the other product is irrelevant - that's *also* competition in action.
If MS had had its choice, there would be no Intuit right now.
Surely the decision whether or not to be acquired by another company should be the sole domain of the target company's shareholders or owners ?
And since Intuit is basically their only competition in that arena, MS Money would've disappeared and MS would have another monopoly.
And we'd still have a good product in Quicken.
But, they didn't, so now we have Quicken *and* a better MS Money.
Actually, the problem wasn't that MS added classes to their JVM, it was that they didn't implement part of the Java spec, but still marketed the JVM as a full Java implementation.
Not being a Java developer, or having a great interest in Java, I'll concede to not knowing a great deal of detail on the subject. I do remember, however, the problem not being with the functionality of Microsoft's JVM, merely the semantic details of how their additional functionality was accessed ("too easy for developers to make Microsoft-Java-only code" was one of the arguments used IIRC). Certainly from my end user's perspective, the Microsoft JVM was faster and worked with everything I ever tried.
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