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DoJ Extends Microsoft Oversight for Two Years
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Department of Justice has extended its anti-trust oversight of Microsoft by two years. This only applies to the requirement that Microsoft make protocol documentation available to competitors, though. All of the other requirements have expired, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not give the states complaining the full five years of oversight they requested. Still, this should prove useful given that one of Microsoft's new tricks is to use OOXML extensions to tie businesses to Sharepoint."
What's the point? The DoJ has achieved less real change in the past decade than the EU has achieved in past two years.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I consider anyone still using Microsoft, and OOXML in particular, to be making a major oversight.
Of course, among people I know, that's almost as many now as it ever was. *Sigh...*
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"... MacBride couldn't be reached for comment, but Ballmer was heard saying: "No problem. Bill has been preparing me for this for years".
Seriously, though. Why does the DOJ seem so toothless when it comes to corporations or the ultra-wealthy, yet act like right-stomping psychopaths for small players (to the point of waffling on definitions of torture, or weaseling around the constitution)? How could it be anything but corruption?
It is clear to me that the sanctions are still relevant. What is not clear to me is how the consent decree is going to change anything, since TFA also states that "protocol specifications" were supposed to be released in 2003, and still haven't been fully released.
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Is it incompetence that caused Microsoft not to get the protocol specifications documented? If that is the case Microsoft is in big trouble. Or they are illegally going slow. Either way Microsoft should be in big trouble. I think the judge needs to wake up.
It depends what you are looking at.
Many businesses, especially small to medium businesses have very minimal IT requirements, mail, web access and general administrative tasks. If you go the windows route that basic set up is quite expensive, prone to issues, inflexible and it will probably require more in the way of maintenance than a well configured FOSS based alternative. Many businesses have huge numbers of call centre seats that in effect need a web browser and possibly a very minimal agent application, with maybe one in 20 users requiring a spreadsheet application or a word-processor (Oh and they like to hot-seat), again, it doesn't have to be complex, and again its probably a better solution to use FOSS here too.
The truth is that for most people a non MS OS would probably do, we can both list things that are non-trivial to achieve, or possibly even impossible (running certain applications), without Windows, which is all well and good, but it is true to say that there is a large base of companies who could live without windows at all or with a mixed environment.
I'm not saying that FOSS is only suitable for small organisations, because that is not true, there is some extremely capable stuff out there, I would certainly say that there is an awful lot that is possible using FOSS that is either impossible with Windows, or prohibitively expensive, the problem as always is the fact that most businesses are entrenched in one technology or another and would find it extremely difficult to get out of it.
Anyway, this posted at a silly time in the morning, and I'm tired so excuse any rambling / grammatical errors or typo's.
Cheers.
As I understand it, the courts don't aim to make them "not a monopoly", they aim to prevent them abusing that position to prevent competition.
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I think in the grand scheme of things, MS'es monopolistic practices are hardly anything to be concerned with. There is a lot more competition out there than you think. MS just has a better marketing machine to keep their motor running. While there is obvious concern on the part of the DoJ, they are doing just enough to keep the judge from getting too pissed. Usually in cases of monopolistic companies, resolutions take many years to resolve fully. The Bell phone company case took about 10 years to finalize. Standard Oil I believe was even longer, and RJ Reynolds Tobacco....not sure how long that took since it was well over a hundred years ago. So, in other words, stopy crying and complaining and have some patience.
I said it once and I will say it again, with out MS most of us tech-geeks wouldn't have a job/hobby/whatever, and I bet there is not a lot of us that can say "I have never-ever used an MS product".
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
I just think the effect of the courts remedies does little to nothing to solve the problem. They aren't nearly as effective as the TB vaccine ( 80%). I think the main effect of the court action is similar to most civil court cases: little changes except the lawyer's bank accounts. I think firefox has proved that real competition has more effect than any court case.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.