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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."
Did anyone actually *read* the NY times article? *rolls eyes* this truly is a dazzlingly brilliant strategy for Microsoft. Legal problems with Big Gov? Insert your own people into the process ... then everything comes up smelling of roses!!!
Rule of the people by the people for the people? This is more like rule of the people by big govt for big govt.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I'd mod you up if I had points.
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An oh, so familiar strategy -- bundle a product similar to your competitor's, or, roll it into the kernel and then claim it can't be removed without damaging the kernel.
I think this establishment of a Government-Microsoft cabal is the last straw. Bush has definitely replaced Carter was the worst President of the modern era, if not in the history of the US.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
What makes this wrong? If I were going to seek people to supervise an industry I'd sure as hell want people who had a background in that industry so yes you do chose folks from drug companies to supervise drug companies you do chose anti-trust lawyers to run anti-trust divisions of the DoJ.
it seems unreasonable to suggest that Microsoft can't do the same just because a third party happens to be selling similar software for their OS.
That would be unreasonable but it's not the complaint. As you point out, OSX, KDE and Gnome all have similar tools that don't bother Google. The complaint is that Vista has the usual traps for competitors. M$ has a long and court proved history of breaking their competitor's programs on Windoze. This old issue drove technically competent people off Windows years ago.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ah, yes more of the same from mactrhope:
Except once again you haven't read a single thing on the thread and have jumped straight to the only conclusion we could have expected from you - 'MS am bad, lol'.
No, I had to wade through all the lame excuses and "I'm with Microsoft Astroturf before I found a remotely reasonable question. If history is any guide, Googles claims are true. If what you are saying is true, tell me why Mac users don't have the same problem with OSX and GDS on the same box and why Linux search utilities also don't suck life. The point of M$'s sabotage is to say that GDS is slow and buggy, but that does not work when there are other implementations that work outside of M$'s reach. As usual, all you have is namecalling and nonsense.
This is a very old and court exposed M$ game. They break a program then flood the lists with bullshit. When you see through it once you never listen to it again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The problem, in all of those cases, was that M$ sabotaged the competitor from the OS. They then blame the competitor for the problem. This is a very old trick that they play again and again. The end result for the user is a platform full of intentional bugs and devoid of real competition or choice.
Your list of driven off competitors is something M$ should be ashamed of. They have never managed to match, let alone better, the program from the competitors they have destroyed this way.
The Google fight is one they are going to lose. It's not just search, which is a tool only M$ Windoze users really need, it's web search, YouTube, Google applications that M$ is unable to compete with. Given the choice between M$ and the world, users are increasingly choosing the world - GNU/Linux, Mac anything but M$.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Your admissions mostly make my point, thanks.
So Microsoft are in fact saying that there is no issue with GDS ...
Really? No argument there. That's what they always do.
Regarding OSX and Spotlight, GDS actually uses extensions of Spotlight to achieve some of it's indexing, so that's a fairly simple reason why they're not complaining. They don't do this with Windows Indexing because they can't ... The fact that Linux's indexing does or does not 'suck life' ... is also completely irrelevant.
So, everyone else gets the job done without stepping on each others toes but only M$ can do it on Vista. KDE and Gnome don't interfere with each other in the GNU/Linux world. GDS works great on OSX. Yet, for some reason only M$ works on Vista. This alone gives weight to Google's charges.
Besides common sense, we have reputation and history as a guide. Google knows it's platforms and has a sterling reputation. M$ has been proved guilty of sabotage in the DRDOS case above and Netscape. It's obvious you are on the M$ side, I just wonder why.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.