Justice Dept. Defends Microsoft Against Google

Frosty Piss writes "The Seattle PI reports that Google has complained to US antitrust officials about the hard-drive searching tool built into Windows Vista, saying that it stymies Google's similar search program. The complaint, lodged late last year, was revealed Saturday by The New York Times in a story about the Bush administration's handling of Microsoft antitrust issues. The real story, though, is not the Google complaint itself, but how the Justice Department is failing to enforce the Microsoft anti-trust decree. According to the story, Thomas Barnett, the assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of antitrust issues, sent a memo last month to state attorneys general across the nation, seeking to persuade them to reject Google's complaint."

Comments

Even If google is evil!

[3seas]

So what does google have to do with MS's search engine always running?

Even if google was evil, I'd still want to be able to turn off a search engine created by a proven anti-trust violator.

Wouldn't you?

Just because people claim google is evil is no reason to dismiss an act of a part that has been proven evil.

There must be a lot of MS supporters responding to the article, for who could miss the obviousnesss of this.

The party bringing out the fact that MS's search engine is always on is itself not an evil act. Unless you work for MS.

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[andydread]

How the hell is this strange. This is the Bush administration.
They put oil executives in charge of the EPA
they put antitrust defence lawyers in the Justice Dept.
They put drug company executives in charge of the FDA

I mean really now. Take a look here. http://www.iraqtimeline.com/bushcab.html

And maybe someone can lookup these clowns and see what their prior industry affiliation is http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[Qzukk]

What makes this wrong?

It's a conflict of interest.

Look at it this way, why don't we take your idea here and run with it. Let's put the rapists in charge of crisis centers and murderers in charge of prisons, after all, they have "background" in the field.

Re:Thomas O. Barnett

[AdamKG]

See, crazy me, I'd want a anti-trust prosecutor running anti-trust prosecutions.

But that's just me.

This is what Microsoft normally does

[Animats]

Historically, Microsoft has moved widely needed functions into their operating system and thereby eliminated the market for alternatives. When they did that for disk compression, Stacker went out of business. When they did it for TCP/IP networking, Trumpet Winsock disappeared. When they did it for email, Eudora stopped being a viable business. When they did it for browsers, Netscape Inc. went from a dot-com success to collapse.

Right now, they're doing it for anti-virus tools, which threatens McAfee, and desktop search, which threatens Google. They'll probably win on both of those, because there's little incentive to install a competitor's tools if those come bundled with the operating system, and because those tools can be tightly integrated with the operating system.

Re:Grep against Google

[Macthorpe]

Instant Search merely interacts with the indexing service. If you turn Windows Search off (which is trivial) then indexing stops and the Instant Search reverts to doing a file-by-file search a la Win98/95, which is exactly what Google's Desktop Search doesn't do.

You're right to say that the Instant Search box cannot be removed, but Google are saying that the indexing that is being done interferes with their own indexing, which in fact it does not as Windows Search indexing only occurs on idle CPU cycles, so Google's will be given a higher priority. They're also saying you can't deactivate it, which you can - GDS modifies the Services when it sets itself to start on boot, so it's once again trivial to include in that a method of deactivating Windows Search. As I mentioned in another post, they tacitly admit that GDS works fine by providing Sidebar plugins and other miscellaneous extras that are designed specifically for Vista.

Google's arguments here are disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst - I have a feeling they're trying to get Windows Search removed merely to cripple Windows searching and create a niche which doesn't currently exist for them in Vista.