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Seven States Extend Microsoft Antitrust Judgment
Technical Writing Geek writes "A number of states have moved to extend antitrust judgments against Microsoft until the year 2012. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia are all contributing to the decision, and have released a report on the factors that lead to the extension. 'The report laments the state of OEM web browser bundling, saying that no major OEM currently distributes a browser other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). This is important due to the rise of new middleware platforms (such as Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's own Silverlight) that can create rich, OS-independent, web-based applications.' The report is slightly self-contradictory, but raises some valid points."
A number of states have moved to extend antitrust judgments against Microsoft
Ah yes, the old "embrace and extend" has come full circle.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
DC = !a state
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
So the totally ineffectual measures that've been taken to punish Microsoft for misusing its illegal monopoly to eliminate or marginalize its competition are going to be ineffectual for a longer period of time? That'll show 'em.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. You cannot punish a corporation the same way you punish an individual, because they don't care about the same things. There's only one thing a corporation values, so there's only one thing you can take away from one: market share. Pass a measure forcing Microsoft and its subsidiaries to halve their advertising budget for, say, five years.
The states' report seems to imply that Microsoft will try to find a way to tie Silverlight to IE in the future, and leverage the 80 percent market share of IE on the desktop to try and edge out competitors like Adobe AIR. In our view, it's more likely that Microsoft has learned to accept the reality of a web application future and simply wants to make sure that it is the driving force behind its development.
+1 Insightful
Microsoft is hedging their bets. If their cash cows are really threatened in the near future they need a backup plan. I think they're not sure how they would profit, be it software-as-a-service or infrastructure or development tools. But they know they need to cover as many angles as possible to survive long term.
Developers: We can use your help.
What with this and the releases of Gutsy Gibbon and Leopard, this is turning out to be a bad month for furniture.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
many people use IE happily if only because they are not even aware of the existence of firefox and opera
:)
i'd similarly wonder how many mac OSX users use firefox instead of safari
for everyone to have a win-win situation, the OEMs need to start pre-installing firefox AND opera AND safari in the windows boxes. OpenOffice can come too
It was relevant to the antitrust case because it generates platform lock-in.
For two perfect examples, you have to look no further than some major software out there. I will give two examples of software that we have implemented at my workplace. Maybe you'll recognize these (major, multinational) companies?
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence: Works 100% with IE. Works for report consumers with Firefox (with some loss of functionality). However, Report Studio (one of the report-authoring tools) doesn't work on anything but IE. There's no reason it couldn't be implemented with standard AJAX-type code.
BMC Software Service Desk Express (baby brother to the "Magic" helpdesk software that is very common): Works *only* on IE, doesn't work at all on other browsers.
Yes, part of the problem is these software vendors coding for IE-specific things. However, if they knew that most of their customers are probably using something else, they would code their products to support open standards. However, because MSFT has such a huge marketshare of browsers due to antitrust practices, third-parties code to support that, thus tying THEIR customers to MSFT as well.
It's a circular loop, but one possible only because MSFT used their OS dominance to push a certain browser 'standard'.
If you check out Web browser standards support summary from Web Devout you can see Firefox 2 (and of course other Mozilla-based browsers) and Konqueror have some pretty good standards support. It's really just IE that doesn't support the standards well, judging from the fact that IE has the lowest percentage of support in most categories.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What' makes this web-standards argument kind of ridiculous for Microsoft is that they say they can't follow the standards because it would break too many pages, which use non-standard HTML because IE doesn't follow the standard... MS can't follow the standard now, because they didn't follow the HTML standard in the past with either their web-viewing software OR their web-creation software, which was, of course, to aid in monopolizing the internet/crush their competition [which was Netscape at the time].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!