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Google Calls For More Limits On Microsoft
teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement." Update: 06/26 17:20 GMT by KD : The judge is unwilling to play along with Google; she said she will likely defer to an agreement on desktop search forged between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the case: i.e. Justice and the states.
I know, Google is big and scary now as well, but I am pretty happy to see a new 300 pound gorilla in the room standing up to Microsoft.
The world is better with the dominant operating system open for competition. A court understood this once ( http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm ), but clearly the DOJ is not going to enforce it without Google (and others with the wherewithal to do so) being vocal about it.
Like, say, Charles Manson?
My blog
Google isn't the evil company that we know Microsoft as. Google focusing on the development of a great search engine, instead of taking the money and selling out for media development(Yahoo), is why they have grown to such heights. The fact that a fresh and legit force is now bossing evil Microsoft around, is quite refreshing for the tech world, and should be applauded instead of demeaned.
I'd rather have two 800 pound gorillas than just one. Competition is good.
Anyway, I just don't see the comparison. Size isn't the issue. Google doesn't have a network monopoly, which is the big difference between Microsoft and Google. If I want to stop using Google tomorrow, I can switch to a competitor without any downsides -- other than the competitor might not be as good. (example: gmail lets me forward my mail to a new account, use a non-gmail address, etc....they seem to go out of their way to NOT lock me in. That's a HUGE difference from the way Microsoft has always done business)
Ok, normally I would agree with you, but in the case of MS I don't think hate is too strong a word, or at least in the context of their business practices. Any corporation that actively attempts to stifle/destroy new innovations that they don't control by use of illegal/monopolistic methods deserves nothing but contempt. They stopped being "just a software company" a long time ago.
You either aren't old enough or you haven't been paying attention. Microsoft has cemented its dominant position in the industry by employing tactics against its rivals only slightly less ruthless than Saddam's, all while crowing about its own prowess as an "innovator". At the time Netscape broke through in 1995, the PC desktop software industry had been stagnant for several years because of Microsoft's reputation for crushing anyone who came up with an original idea.
Naturally, Microsoft responded to Netscape not only bundling its browser into the operating system ("free" for anyone who bought a Windows PC), but making it architecturally part of the operating system so that Steve Ballmer could tell a judge that he didn't know how to remove IE without completely breaking Windows. It was the default browser for most PC's sold.
And that's just one competitor, one story that was essentially repeated several dozen times throughout Microsoft's history.
BTW I'm not suggesting that Google will be any better, or that they shouldn't be watched like a hawk. Chances are they won't be, and they should be.
I believe we're invoking the age-old D-The-Ends-Justify-The-Means argument, which of course means we're destined to spiral way off-topic.
So let's to it.
IMHO, the ends don't always justify the means. I lost a lot of respect for Novell, and for Xandros, when they made deals with Microsoft. I feel that, no matter what good could be gained from it, that these things upheld the philosophical underpinnings of the OSS community. Even if GPLv3 gets twisted in such a way that MS gets bent over a barrel and has to release their code, that won't be good. It will have been sneaky and underhanded, and we would be just as bad as them.
In much the same way, if Google resorts to the same power-brokering that Microsoft does, they will be doing evil. Doing evil is what makes one be evil. (Sorry for getting it wrong earlier, btw)
This could quickly become a PR nightmare for Google if they get painted in the wrong light, and for something that I see as trivial. Google is one of those companies, like Apple, where looking cool is important to their image, and their market base. Why risk it?
--"insert clever quote here"
This is a marketing tactic. Google knows that many people will respect this move.
;-) And, no, I don't like it, either.
But it brings into focus a new corporate strategy... the use of regulation over competition. Asking for regulation is against the traditional American business philosophy, which typically favours deregulation.
This could play out in favour of Microsoft who will likely ask that Google get regulated more heavily, which will result in some interesting news for the world, to come. And yes, I know something you don't.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I think this is a good change, but does Google really have the high ground here? They are using an extremely dominant product to market their other products. They use their search engine to push everything from google maps to gmail.
As an example can mapquest come along and demand that when a user searches for a street in google that their map be displayed prominantly as the first search item instead of google maps? This has a huge impact in the online maps business. Google has used a dominant product to gain a massive advantage in a new area. Not entirely unlike what the boys from Redmond like to do. Im not saying its evil, but it does seem kind of like a bully who starts crying when a bigger bully comes along.
Wow, and people rip on Apple fanboys for drinking the kool-aid. Let's be clear, google is complaining that Windows ships with a feature that's trivial to disable either by a user or an installer, that given todays media sizes, it should ship with by default (or else explain why Microsoft should be permitted to supply a file manager, or even a built in text dialogue). Google is inconvienenced by this development as they ship a horrible product with truly lacking privacy protections, which *they* don't even charge for. So their remedy is to have lawyers write my OS.
Seriously, fuck google. Damn the collateral damage, examples must be made. I don't see Google opening up page rank and exposing ever aspect of their technology through their API, and they have a monopoly on web searching. I'm going down to Home Depot, I find myself short kerosene and a pitchfork.
the only way they can do that is to make the best product. they can't threaten suppliers with higher OS prices like MS did if they tried to sell OS/2. they can't write in subtle incompatabilities to prevent uptake of standards.
if google started whacking great big annoying ads in gmail and search, i'd just move to another provider in the blink of an eye. no money lost, no inconvienence.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
First, let me say that I'm evil. I'm a corporate code tool for Microsoft, because they pay me money to play with lots and lots of their servers. Flame away, I've heard it all before.
I always find the reaction to stories like this one interesting... I know all about what my camp thinks and how we see these issues. I wasn't present for the netscape/IE thing, and during school I was a pretty serious linux user for four or five years (as a freshman, the ability to play half life was more important). I use Firefox because IE7 still sucks. Google search was my home page for a long time, and frankly their search still does a great job... it's not what I use every day, but it is where I go when Live is being slow or I want to get a different view of the same search.
For me, if I go out and pay an arm and a leg for Vista (don't like the pricing, but they don't ask me about these things), it should be great out of the box, and it should have all the basics (a browser to get online, a file system I can use to store and browse, the ability to play a CD, etc). I'm not paying for a skeleton system that's only done enough to let me DIY the rest... when it's finished installing, I should be able to reasonably use my computer right away. It's like buying a new car... I should be able to drive it off the lot, not need to go buy tires that aren't included (because I might develop a bias towards those tires?). For the average users out there (ahem, my computer hating mom), who want their computer for every day, uncomplicated tasks, it's even more important that it just works.
So in a nutshell, I guess what I see day to day is that if there are features a user will reasonably expect out of the product, and we have time and budget, shouldn't we build them in? It seems more evil to me to leave them out.
MS does have to play by difference rules, of course, because we're all evil, money hording devil worshipers who eat babies (delicious with a nice cayenne hot sauce), etc, etc. But I'm really curious for you on the outside world, do you design your products with defenses against users becoming biased toward them? Or were you us, and it's your product that people say is unfair, how would you balance "justice" with usability? Especially for something as basic-functionality as searching a file system? If it becomes jammed with ad-supported semi-functional competing products (by which I mean parties other than, and less scrupulous and skilled than Google), because competitors need the right to install random crazy software that will run under the name of your-product-name-here, did you make a good choice?
That and keeping MSHTML.dll around is a bit different than building an OS around an application designed to compete with a smaller company.
So you're saying that Explorer.exe can't use HTML? Or that if it does the html component can only be used in Explorer? Or that Windows can include MSHTML.DLL but not Iexplorer.exe? Incidentally as far as I can tell third party applications literally embed Internet Explorer, not MSHTML.exe, which is why it's so hard to remove it. It's not like the edit control where third party applications depend on the EDIT class, not the whole of Notepad.
If Office were provided for free then Wordperfect would have had a right to bitch. Notepad is a thoroughly simplistic tool.
What about Wordpad and the RichEdit control? Is that near enough to Wordperfect's functionality that Microsoft should have been prevented from bundling it? What if they'd gradually added features until it looked like Wordperfect - should that be illegal?
And how about multimedia codecs? Should be illegal for Microsoft to specify an API for codecs? What about if they bundle a toy application that demonstrates how to use the API? What about if they include MediaPlayer which started off as a toy application and got gradually enhanced. Ironically I actually use MediaPlayer Classic which removed all the enhancements and reverts it to a toy application that just knows how to host codecs.
As far as I know in the EU Microsoft have been forced to provide a very of Windows where the MediaPlayer executable is not bundled but presumably the API is supported and Microsoft codecs are supported, because RealNetworks demanded it.
Incidentally, if anti trust law forces them to do this, is ok for them to provide Media Player as a free download? What happens if there is an icon in the start menu and it installs on demand when people try to use it? Is that ok too?. How user unfriendly do they have to make it to use the Microsoft application in your opinion?
Seems like it's not as clear cut as you think doesn't it?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's extremely clear cut, you're just mildly psychotic.
Rather than being an Operating System company, Microsoft is a software company that uses their dominance in Operating Systems to leverage dominance in other software markets. These budding monopolies feed back into the Operating system monopoly, it's called vendor lock-in. Essentially, user-friendliness does not enter the equation, much of the Windows API simply should not be there in the first place.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Then tell us how MS is keeping Google out of desktop search business. From what I see, it is MS that's providing platform for Google apps to work on. Have you actually read what Google is arguing about? It's ridiculous! They complain that it's too hard to shut down indexing service. I've written several services and programs that control other services. There's nothing magical in it, just tell Service Manager to stop that particular service and it will stop it if you have sufficient rights (user can't stop system services, UAC to the rescue). Google is complaining that end-users don't know how to do it but fails to mention that Google's installer app, which is used to install Google search, can pretty well do it. Google is whihing that OEMs don't know how to do it. Oh gimme a break.
Everyone's yelling about monopolies and stuff but nobody's actually focusing on the subject at hand.
You don't know what you don't know.