Microsoft To Change Desktop Search After Google Complaint

Raver32 writes to tell us that Microsoft will be making changes to their desktop search tool in Vista after a 49-page antitrust complaint was filed by Google. "Microsoft initially dismissed the allegations, saying regulators had reviewed the program before Vista launched. However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary."

Comments

Re:For those who haven't been following the issue:

[sid0]

The issue with your post is the statement:

The issue here is that Microsoft does not include a way to turn off its own desktop search

It does. It includes *several* ways to do so. Disable the service, use net stop, use the API.

Re:Wow!..Not so much

[mhall119]

"OSX supported hardware" is not a market, it's a product. You can legally have a monopoly on a product (patent, copyright, trademark), but you can not (unless otherwise specified) have and use a monopoly on a market (Desktop computing) to give you an unfair advantage in another market (Internet Search).

Here Microsoft is using their Desktop monopoly to boost their online search business and (this is the illegal part) restricting their monopoly product from using someone else's online search business.

Re:Wow!

[Chokolad]

> Keep in mind that before Google came in with a powerful search capability, Microsoft didn't have one yet. For all you know, if Google hadn't done one, Microsoft never would have done anything but the piss-poor dog-slow search they had previously. You think the next company will bother, if Microsoft is allowed to continually squash any product it decides it wants to squash?

They actually had a powerful search capability since NT4. It was not well exposed in GUI and was not running by default. It was called Indexing Service. Current Vista Search is modified Indexing Service + GUI. It was even done by the same team.

Re:Why don't they file against Apple?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why don't they file against Apple? I mean, they have Spotlight and that's Apple-only and bundled, right?

Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense. Second, Google was not even complaining about the bundling (although they have every right to). They complained about two things:

• MS's search feature slows down other search features.
• MS's search feature uses undocumented APIs that provide an unfair advantage to competitors who don't happen to also have the source code and documentation to Windows.

Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.

Are those enough reasons? If not, please RTFA before posting again.