States Claim There is No Match for Microsoft

Bergkamp10 writes "State antitrust regulators have dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla Corp, and software technologies such as AJAX and SaaS as "piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system and browser markets". According to the report ten US states, including California, New York and the District of Columbia have called for an extension of monitoring of Microsoft's business practices until November 2012. They claim that little has changed in the OS and browser spaces since the 2002 antitrust case ruled against Microsoft. In their most recent brief, the states countered Microsoft's contention that Web-based companies — Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, eBay and others — and new Web-centric technologies constitute what Microsoft dubbed a "competitive alternative to Windows." Not even close, said the states, claiming that while these companies' products provide functionality for users they still rely on Operating Systems and browsers — the two spaces where Microsoft dominates. Experts were apparently even more damning, claiming competition in the market has not been restored since 2002 and that the collective powers of Google, Firefox and Web 2.0 are about as effective as a one legged man in a butt-kicking contest when it comes to unsettling Microsoft's monopoly of the market."

Comments

I'll have whatever it is you are smoking

[westlake]

Microsoft is Microsoft's own worst enemy.
Popular news and media outlets are routinely running stories about the slow adoption of Vista by major corporations and small businesses alike. New sales of Office are apparently lagging, too.

Microsoft had a spectacular first quarter.

Tremendous strength in Windows, Office, and Server products. Revenues in each division up 20%. Microsoft Q1 2008 By The Numbers

Office 2007 at retail "sells like gangbusters."

Office commands 17.4 percent of all PC software dollar volume, including PC games. When people go to the store to buy software, there's a good chance they'll end up buying Microsoft Office." PC Software's Great Year [October 20]

The October OS Platform Stats from w3Schools are suggestive;

Vista at 6%. Up 4% from March 07.
Linux at 3%. Up 1% from March 03.
OSX at 4%. Up 2% from March 03.

Apple stocks owned by Microsoft

[falconwolf]

ms has only a nonvoting portion of the stock. of course, this stock is worth several hundred million...

I heard about MS buying the non-voting Apple stock when it was announced in 1997, but after reading your post I was wondering what happened to the stock so I Googled and found this From Apple's 2003 SEC filing::

"In August 1997, the Company and Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) entered into patent cross license and technology agreements. In addition, Microsoft purchased 150,000 shares of Apple Series A nonvoting convertible preferred stock ("preferred stock") for $150 million. These shares were convertible by Microsoft after August 5, 2000, into shares of the Company's common stock at a conversion price of $8.25 per share. During 2000, 74,250 shares of preferred stock were converted to 9 million shares of the Company's common stock. During 2001, the remaining 75,750 preferred shares were converted into 9.2 million shares of the Company's common stock."

Falcon

Re:But according to the states

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello?
Linux didn't work with my winmodem.
Linux didn't work with my USB DSL modem.
Linux does not work with my USB 3G modem.
My X, at one point, did nothing but segfault when faced with an unknown graphics card.
Back when I used Mandrake, my usual experience was that half the startup processes said FAILED, the console kept getting spammed with a weird error message, and at one time it even corrupted my partition table giving me the "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message.
Just last year, attempting to install Xubuntu on my old laptop resulted in mysterious installer crashes.
When I did get it to work, my battery life was crap, both the power manager and the wifi program acted really weird, randomly not working without giving me any error, forcing me to go into the console every other bootup to manually turn the network interface on and off and launch the DHCP client.
I've been using Linux for over 10 years now. Ah, ye olde glorious days of using Netscape under TWM.
I went from Slack 4 to Red Hat 5 and 6, Mandrake 7, 8, 9, and now Ubuntu.
I have this huge love-hate relationship with Linux. I love it, but it also sucks in so many god damn ways.
I *am* a technical person. But there are limits to my knowledge and thirst thereof. I do not know or care to learn about stupid low-level DSL details that only a handful of specialist people at the local telco could give me, and support is unwilling to hook me up with them or anyone remotely technical for that matter.
Linux is not and will never be a viable alternative until the average user can lift up a rock and get 20 high school kids willing and able to fix their computer. I don't care how good or bad the software is, it needs to be officially supported by every hardware vendor and manufacturer. Someone has to be held accountable for my computer working, and they need to be at a store in my neighborhood, within walking distance of my home (can you tell I'm european? :P)
Oh, and BTW, throughout that time, Windows has worked *wonderfully*. It used to crash in the pre-98SE days, yes. Ten years ago. 2K and XP also worked fine. I've been using Vista on a new laptop for less than a month, though, and it makes me want to throw the damn thing at the nearest wall :P
So many stupid crashes and little incompatibilities, it reminds me of Linux!

Re:Market Capitalization tells another story

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh. Look, I've used Linux in some form since SuSE 6.1 and now run gentoo exclusively at home. MS are hardly my favourite company. However, the fact is that the NT kernel is actually pretty good. The core architecture is similar to VMS, since MS hired many VMS developers for the NT project like Dave Cutler, with various improvements based on the lessons of OS/2. With Vista, they've done some interesting and sensible things with the driver model etc.

The win32 API is a train wreck in some areas, and overall windows is probably more complex than it should be, but there's nothing particularly wrong with the kernel.

Re:We will know when...

[Jesus_666]

That depends on how the app is written. An app written entirely in Microsoft's latest version of Dotnet, using DirectX 10 and WPF is not going to be easily ported to, say, Linux; a port would essentialy mean a rewrite from scratch. Similarly, an ObjC/Cocoa app using Growl and Sparkle will require large parts to be rewritten (and several new libraries to be added) in order to work on Windows.

On the other hand, an app written with Gtk/Qt, using backend APIs like SDL and OpenGL might even be compilable on different OSes without changing a single line of code. It all depends on how the app is written, whether you used nonportable elements and how easy those can be separated from the rest of the code.

Re:Market Capitalization tells another story

[Locutus]

MS Office was on the States radar but when they joined with the DOJ, MS Office being dropped was a requirement for the combining of the cases. IIRC, it was Microsoft who asked/required that MS Office get dropped for a combined case to go forward. I always thought it was foolish to drop that since it being a monopoly in its own right and being so tied to MS Windows, well, it just makes it part of the perpetual nature of the Windows monopoly. Can't get rid of Windows because we need MS Office, can't get rid of MS Office because .doc is used everywhere.

Also, I just that much changing with respect to Microsofts marketshare. Sure WinVista sucks but like WinXP and Win2k before it, after about 2 years for it being forced onto OEM machines, business cycles eventually start the uptake. Linux and OSS is growing because of it's cost and flexible nature of OSS in the hands of people who know how to use it. Not because Windows Vista sucks. As far as security goes, many businesses have found the dozen or so reenforcement apps required to surround Windows and make it somewhat secure to use. Those people don't want change because they just figured out how to stabilize what they have. Bringing in cheap Linux and OSS boxes are much easier than the rip-replace requirements of Vista. But hey, maybe the slow growth of Linux and OSS will become an awareness of less need for Microsoft and decaying Windows boxes will get replaced with Linux/OSS boxes on the desktop too. I just don't see it happening now. Too many IT manager zombies running around saying they'll buy it only if it's got the Microsoft name on it. Way too many too ignorant to know their jobs are on the line by staying with Microsoft because of the costs. Way too many believe nobody ever gets fired for chosing Microsoft. IMO.

LoB