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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."
I don't really know much about the politics of this issue but i know that Google desktop sucks. It isn't worth it for me regardless of who is "good" and "evil".
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
This brings to mind disk compression back in the '90s. Third party tools emerged to fill the gaps in Windows, then Microsoft filled those gaps and the suppliers of those products got a little bit upset. I know that there was an IP issue about that specific example which makes it different so maybe its a bad example.
To take an extreme position, what if google has an alternate kernel which they think people should run. Should Microsoft be made to provide a way to turn off the normal kernel?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
1. Google doesn't care if the search tool is bundled or not, they just want MS to expose some why to turn the thing off. Having both indexing tools running at the same time hinders performance more then having just one run. Given that you can't disable Vista's most people will opt for disabling Google's. Hence anti-competitive.
... Or is Google tyring to sue their way back into business?
2. It's similar to IE & Netscape because the end user / OEM can't remove IE from a machine and replace it with an alternative.
3. Everything else you said? Google toolbar is off topic (for what it's worth I'm sick of applications trying to install it too). Also if Google makes any headway with their talks with Microsoft Vista will actually have less bloat then before as the file indexing service can be disabled.
*I* can turn off indexing in XP/Vista. Are Google more stupid than me?
Yea.. oh shit, Windows has 90% market share, anything they do kills some competition! Anti-trust blah blah!
Well figure that out: anything Microsoft improves in Windows will kill some business.
You're running a site that let's people download YouTube videos? YouTube adds a simple "download" button: it kills your business. Should you sue YouTube, "hey YouTube owns majority market share on video views, dump that download button". NO, you morons. It's their right to improve their product.
It's not fair, it's just how things are. Stand up, clean the wound, rethink your stategy.
It's not a search engine it's an indexing service. What you're complaing about is libraies providing a card catalogue. Hard drives are growing in capacity faster than bus and chip performance. This is an old solution to an old problem in a not particularly new way because of new storage media capacity. It also happens to be overdue.