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States and DoJ Divided On Microsoft Antitrust Success
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that the US Department of Justice and five States
have declared themselves satisfied with the antitrust enforcement efforts taken against
Microsoft despite a further seven States maintaining they have had 'little or no
discernible impact in the marketplace.' While the US DoJ and five States — New York,
Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin (The New York Group) — reported that the final
judgments have succeeded in increasing competition to the benefit of consumers, seven
States making up the California
Group are not convinced."
Are you more able today to buy a computer without a Microsoft OS than you were 4 years ago?
Well, now we know which states Microsoft has the most paid lobbyists in.
Seriously, I don't see how the antitrust suit has had much bearing on Microsoft's behavior. They continue to act like a monopolist. Prices for Microsoft operating systems have actually gone UP, not down (despite prices for virtually everything else in their industry dropping) and their market share hasn't changed significantly in anyway -- when it has changed, it's been due to superior and/or cheaper products, such as all-in-one file servers with embedded OS, Linux, or improvements in Apple's Mac OS X.
My blog
For Microsoft it's just a business decision. If the fines for not complying are smaller than the loss they would face by complying, then they won't change anything and just pay the fine. This has happened in Europe, where they had to pay hundreds of million of dollars and elsewhere.
This is just another example how much power they wield and how _corrupt_ some states in the US (and ofc elsewhere) are.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Microsoft's continued abuse of its monopoly for operating systems is clearly apparent in its failure to implement web standards in IE.
Smaller browser vendors with vastly less funding have made giant strides in their implementations of CSS, SVG, mathml and DOM. Microsoft has done as little as possible to implement those standards, but somehow has found the resources and the rationalization to implement SilVerliGht, which is a stolen, bastardized clone of SVG.
Unlike 10 years ago, the world has moved past its reliance on Microsoft to embrace other vendors products willingly. No wonder IE's market share continues to fall precipitously.
Really the Department of Justice deliberately bungled the law suit, and now they have no choice but to claim it's a success till the bitter end. The last thing they want is yet another investigation into official mismanagement and White House interference in a anti-trust case. Immediately after Bush was elected they pulled all senior DoJ staff off of the case and left only a few inexperienced lawyers (from that Bible School they're so fond of hiring from) on the case.
They had Microsoft up against a wall, and then suddenly they were best buddies with Microsoft and nothing had ever really been wrong in the first place. It was sickening and another black eye for the United States, but if at any point the DoJ admits that it's unsastisfied with the results, it opens up an old can worms for the house or the senate to investigate.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Would you count tampering with ISO approval process for OOXML to standardize something only they can implement as furthering their monopoly? Suddenly they can keep locking in documents from government bodies that require an ISO standard file format
/. all week
Seriously, this has been on
Apart for 2b and 8 ( which are debatable at best), the rest seem to be normal business activites which any other for-profit organisation would undertake.
I think extreme situations require extreme measures, and it is clear that the anti-trust control measures are not only ineffective; they are actually a suit of armour for Microsoft to further abuse their monopoly power. The world has close to a billion PCs now; that's a huge number given there's about 6 billion people. If the US will not act, and the EU will not be allowed to act... bodies like the ECMA and ISO will be subverted; then someone else has to take up the fight to bring justice.
More worrying than the monopoly is the fact that the PC burns much more power and is inferior as a platform compared to even small devices like cellphones, game devices and appliances. The failure of the OOXML fast track process shows that there is still hope, if only the whole world can act in concert. I suggest some measures to bring speedy correction in the PC industry:
1. Any component of the PC that does not conform to published, patent unencumbered standards must be taxed - this includes processors, video cards, winprinters, winmodems, audio devices, DRM chips, TCPA engines, kernels, hypervisors, operating systems, word processors etc. etc. The tax must be high enough to deter unscrupulous mfrs. to dictate their 'default' standards and abuse their positions to the detriment of the platform, the consumer and the market. A 30% tax should be levied for starters, and the corpus must be used to fund devleopment of 'free' alternatives in each segment above.
The recent network 'penalty' while playing system sounds in Vista is a case in point. Could Microsoft have got away with a 'published' audio device and driver architecture under a transparent benchmarking system? Who will compensate for the 'defective' protected media path architecture? Will the h/w mfrs freely replace their buggy cards with better performing ones? Countries other than the US must force them to do so.
2. Patents must be abolished in the PC industry - it is clear from the unholy MS - Novell alliance that even the biggest firms cannot enforce their patents, and they actually hinder innovation; and encourage cartels. The EU and several other nations do not still recognise s/w patents; the 15 year lifespan for a patent is absurd even in the h/w industry where monopolies can be built up in undre 5 years.
3. International standards need to be evolved that govern the use of the internet - it is too big and valuable to be subject to the machincations of a toothless US commerce agency. Companies that actively or passively contribute to the abuse of the internet must be punished and / or taxed. For instance, is a particular OS is the platform of choice for botnets, then the mfr. of the OS must fix the problem within a reasonable timeframe, or else open the source so the community will fix it themselves.
The proceedings in some of the standards bodies on the OOXML vote shows that they can govern the IT industry better than the anti-trust agencies. I tihnk they must be allowed to have a say, now that the US bodies have failed.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Is it possible that the reason that Dell, HP, and Lenovo are now offering desktop PCs with Linux has little to do with Linux and it's merits and more to do with the fact that the antitrust enforcement against Microsoft is about to expire and is up for review/renewal. OEM bullying to lockout competitors was one of the biggest complaints against Microsoft. But since the big 3 desktop PC vendors are selling Linux, the measures slapped on Microsoft have obviously worked and are no longer needed.
What annoys me is how most organizations focus on the inclusion of Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer in Windows despite the bigger antitrust violations that Microsoft has been commiting for years. Probably the worst antitrust offense Microsoft is commiting lies in its OEM license terms for Windows. Companies large and small rely on the huge discount that comes from selling OEM versions of Windows on their hardware, but the license terms prevent those vendors from selling PC's with no operating systems installed on them as well as PC's set up to dual boot Windows along with any other operating system. Yes, I know that FreeDOS has been used to work around the former of those problems, but regardless of the effectiveness of these tactics is the fact that Microsoft attempts to use such anti-competitive practices and the fact that they are always overlooked.
And on a slightly different note, could the fact that Windows is the only operating system that doesn't have a boot loader with the capability to load other operating systems be considered anti-competitive? Linux has had this feature for many years and even OS X supports dual-booting Windows, but Windows simply overwrites the MBR and renders all other installed operating systems to be unbootable until a recovery disk is used to repair the boot loader.
And finally, my biggest complaint about the EU and the US DOJ is that they fined Microsoft for including WMP and IE in Windows, but they have made little to no effort to "vote with their wallets" and use other operating systems. If they really found Microsoft's tactics to be anti-competitive, they could back up their statements by at least considering the use one of the many viable alternatives to Windows. Instead, they issue a fine while continuing to use Windows (hypocrites?) and make themselves look like a bunch of greedy grab-asses out to get a piece of the Microsoft pie. EU and US DOJ: actions speak louder than cheap (relative to Microsoft) fines.