Slashdot Mirror
States Seek More Oversight of Microsoft
taoman1 writes "A group of states led by California said in a court filing Thursday that ending oversight of Microsoft's business practices in November would not allow enough time to consider the antitrust implications of Windows Vista. The states want oversight extended at least through early next year. 'The justice department said in its report that while Microsoft's operating system market share hasn't dropped because of the consent decree, "it would misapprehend the purpose of the Final Judgments to rely on these facts to argue that the Final Judgments have been ineffective. Microsoft was never found to have acquired or increased its monopoly market share unlawfully." In its report, Microsoft directly countered California's claims and said, the "Final Judgments were never designed to reduce Microsoft's share in any putative market."'"
The California action is from the state's office of the Attorney General, not the Governor. Jerry Brown, to be specific.
My broadband isp and phone company (comcast) is already a regulated monopoly. Also, I do have other choices that I could move to in a very short time with very little economic impact (if I get dsl with at&t, for instance....I'd be up and running quickly, and my computer and software would all work just fine).
I switched to mac a couple years ago, and it made a HUGE impact as I had to get and learn all new software. And I haven't been able to get rid of the PC (in fact, I recently got a new one as my old one was getting too old to be usable), because I am constantly expected to run this or that piece of software because most of the rest of the world runs Windows.
So yeah, the Windows defacto monopoly affects me every day, while the ISP/phone/oil company issues, less so.
Still, problems do not need to be addressed one at a time. Why because one issue hasn't been solved to your satisfaction should we do nothing about another issue? The world is able to multitask.
The "free market" gave Microsoft a monopoly and the free market will continue that monopoly. If Microsoft wasn't scared of the consequences, they would buy Apple tomorrow. Regulating Microsoft's actions in light of their unethical and often illegal business practices does not mean designing their OS for them. It just means keeping their business practices in line with what is expected in a modern capitalist democracy.
Go educate yourself. Make no mistake. When you do business with Microsoft, you are doing business with a criminal organization:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
Under current law, you can have a monopoly so long as you don't use that monopoly to gain a monopoly to another market. Microsoft used their desktop OS monopoly to get a browser monopoly and then a media player monopoly.
No, the industry would have been better off with open standards for file formats, network connectivity etc.
Bert
Who runs a company
In most states (including California), the attorney general is elected separately.
Maybe Microsoft's problem is that, like you, they have no idea how their own government works, to the point of bribing the wrong people?
Really, people, you can't change your government for the better if you don't know how things work as they are.
Part of it is [M$ Office's inability to work with itself] that they simply can't. Hell even if there's a difference in the installed fonts or a different sized screen, documents have to be reformatted by hand to look good.
They could use ODF without charge any time they want. The same thing goes for every other file format they have a special, inferior version of. I can easily share my work across gnu/linux distributions, Solaris and Mac. M$ is always the problem child.
Eweek has an interesting view of what all of this has done to Windoze itself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.