US Antitrust Judge Examining Windows 7 Documents

Anonymous writes "After more than 11 years, the US antitrust case involving Microsoft is still alive, with a federal judge overseeing enforcement of provisions under which the software giant must operate. And now, Judge Kollar-Kotelly says she'll take a close look at new technical documents involving Windows 7. This case began during the Windows 95 era."

Comments

Summary

[microbee]

Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?

Re:Summary

[Dunbal]

Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?

      We paid a judge and some court staff their salaries for a few years? Oh, and let's not forget the lawyers...

Re:Summary

[Profane MuthaFucka]

There is no car company which can be considered to be a monopoly. Not even close.

You can't use monopoly power to keep others out of the market. You are being deceitful when you leave out the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly.

Re:Summary

[nmb3000]

Oh good grief. Yeah, the grandparent was a little exuberant, but your post is so overblown in the opposite direction that the net result is zero.

Microsoft has used unfair business practices to destroy one company after another. They got so blatant about their mission to destroy all potential competition, that the government got involved.

There is ample evidence that Microsoft was trying (sometimes successfully) to use their market penetration and sway over OEMs to their benefit. Examples include not allowing OEMs to bundle certain software. It should go without saying that they wanted to best the competition, that's any corporation's goal. The problem was with some of their anti-competitive techniques crossed the line.

browsers manage to catch the limelight because there are so many, and people notice them.

Except there weren't (this started in 1995 remember) and people don't. The browsers were almost exclusively either IE or Netscape/Mozilla. Maybe the biggest nail in the coffin for Netscape was twofold: Microsoft started bundling IE for free with Windows, and at a certain point IE started to eclipse Netscape in features and stability (shock, I know). Considering there was no real money for MS to make with their browser it made sense to include it with the OS because it meant they could leverage it for other OS-related purposes such as rich help files and things like Windows Update. It also helped them market Windows as an all-inclusive ready out-of-the-box product, pretty much exactly like Apple does now with OS X.

Tell us - why do you suppose that Microsoft has simply refused to make IE standards compliant?

Because Microsoft is a corporation and there was no profit in doing so. Likely a simple cost/benefit analysis. Windows and Office are their bread and butter, why blow development money on a browser?

You don't think it could POSSIBLY be that it helps to break the interweb

Break it? Originally the "interweb" was defined largely by what IE and Netscape implemented.

Why does Microsoft push ActiveX

How do they "push" it?

but won't turn over the source code, or even standards, so that other browser might use it?

Obviously they don't turn over source code because they are a closed-source commercial company. Besides, pretty much all browsers have a plugin/app architecture that serves the same purpose as ActiveX does on IE. While starting to be largely eclipsed by other technology like Flash/Silverlight/AJAX, ActiveX and friends still serve a useful role in providing web applications additional access to the users's computer through a browser when needed.

With or without a browser, Microsoft is going to make billions this year, eclipsing ANY OTHER software company. I say, take away one of Microsoft's toys, if they can't play nicely with the other kids.

We should punish a company just because it makes more money than anyone else? Punish their misdeeds, not their success. Statements like this just come across as envious spite with a weak facade of desiring justice.

Maybe next year, we'll consider taking away Windows media player, if they can't learn to be nice.

Uh, yeah, the brilliant minds at the EU already took a shot at that with forcing Windows XP N Edition. Nobody wanted it.

I think a lot of this "look what they did 15 years ago" stuff is pretty meaningless now. Enough time has passed that we'd be better off remembering the past, but punishing and investigating them for current infractions, and the best place to try and fix potential problems is going to be at the OEM level. Make sure Microsoft can't dictate to Dell what they can or cannot bundle in terms of competitiveness and make sure and keep hardware standards open and documented, but don't restrict what can be included in a retail Windows box. When I buy Windows off the shelf I expect it to come ready-to-use with Microsoft apps like IE, WMP, Wordpad, and Paint. If I want an alternative to one or all of these, I'll go find one.

Re:Summary

[drinkypoo]

There is no car company which can be considered to be a monopoly. Not even close.

It doesn't work that way. Instead, the collective major carmakers of the world collectively wield their might to attempt to prevent new players from entering the market. For example, they manipulated the US government into forcing California to drop our planned emissions standards schedule so that they should sell the cars they wanted to sell here, not the cars that the voters wanted to buy. (The legislation did not prevent the out-of-state purchase and subsequent in-state purchase of automobiles, either; this is not any form of protectionism, at least since the CA DMV was forced to stop raping people over out-of-state registration fees.) Whether this sort of thing is done at the request of the oil industry is of course the big question; I have no evidence either way. I do know that this years' cars don't have much better mileage than last years' and that everyone but the Germans (whose government is currently dominated by their green party) is pushing the boondoggles known as parallel gas hybrids; the German turbodiesels have a lower energy cost in production, get better mileage in almost all real-world driving situations, and have a lower recycling cost. The new ones (e.g. VW CleanTDI) have super-low emissions without urea injection, too. Meanwhile I'm prepping a 1982 MBZ 300SD and a 1992 Ford F250 for B100...

What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[phantomfive]

Of all the things I dislike about Microsoft, their aggressive (even outright dishonest) business tactics, their proprietary secrets, their chair throwing executives (honestly I actually like Balmer, he's entertaining), the thing I can never forgive Microsoft for is forcing upon the world such a miserable user environment, especially for developers. Take a look at the miserable little DOS shell.....writing a DOS shell script was the first time I ever actually wanted to stab myself with a fork. And each version has different incompatibilities, it is not even backwards compatible with different versions of windows..... given how feature poor the thing is, how hard could that have been? It's almost as if they wanted to torture developers. Developers developers developer! Right.

And this doesn't even touch on the pile of misery that is MFC, which makes .net look like heave in comparison. .net, which is so complex that they had to implement autocomplete to make it usable.

Nay Microsoft, I shall not mourn thy demise. I have suffered enough at thy hands.

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[bladesjester]

.net, which is so complex that they had to implement autocomplete to make it usable.

Yes, .NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.

As for needing autocomplete to make it usable, personally, I think that autocomplete and the graphical debugger are two of the best things to ever happen in programming. It saves me time, makes my job one heck of a lot easier and allows me to be more productive.

You may learn the value of that sort of thing some day.

I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[Anpheus]

With open source libraries, you generally have to find the wheel before you can reuse it.

Often people end up reinventing the wheel because they (a.) couldn't find one someone else made, (b.) found one, but it wasn't under licensing terms that they could use with their project, or (c.) found one, but the project lost its way and ended up incomplete with a lead developer who may well have been hit by a bus.

Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[internettoughguy]

may we continue with the slashdot Microsoft apologist categories? first we have the developer who has invested so much time into learning the windows API that he's scared shitless about the thought that customers/bosses might consider using anything else, and his livelihood rests on making jokes about the Linux desktop, free BSD, macOSX, the iphone, google android, or anything else that threatens the software dictatorship that he's to ignorant to look beyond. Second we have the childish one that likes to play these silly things called "games". strangely enough i have more patience for the second one, because their position is a little more justifiable.

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[shentino]

The case B you mentioned is exactly why I think open source should be used from the beginning.

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh what's the point? It's like the woman with the two black eyes.

Just like the women with two black eyes, the M$ customers will stay in a relationship with M$. Lots of them will defend and stick up for M$ and really make you wonder if they're paid shills even though almost all of them aren't. "He didn't hit me, I ran into the door!" and "it'll be fixed in the next version!" "He's a good man, honest" and "Microsoft takes security seriously". "I gotta stay with him because of the kids" and "we need to buy Windows because we need the support of a big vendor".

Da Nile? It's not just a river in Egypt ...

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[justinlee37]

The only downside to using Windows is the cost. It takes a reasonably competent user to install a Linux distro, drivers, use WINE to make Crysis work, and so forth. A reasonably competent user can also operate Windows without losing the system to malware and repair any infections that do occur. So a reasonably competent user should be indifferent between Windows and Linux.

I would never purchase Windows for a business enterprise, just because of the cost, and because at work you don't need to run Crysis. It fulfills all of my needs at home, though.

I wish they would sell Direct X as a separate product, though. Using it to try and force Windows upgrades on gamers is a dirty move.

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[iminplaya]

I'm using 7 now. It's junk. Being marginally better than Vista don't cut it. And we already have many things that are better, including of all things XP. And Linux supports new hardware better than XP now because fewer people are making XP drivers. Nope, the new Windows is still dog slow on anything less than a massive cluster that would fill a 747. Unimpressed I am.

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[iminplaya]

You are aware of the concept of inertia, aren't you? I don't care if it still sells. That doesn't make it less crappy. People buy crap all the time, even when a perfectly good alternative is right there beside it. Microsoft is a forgettable operation now. We have plenty of good options before us. But here we are with the old "lead a horse to water" routine. I guess some people still prefer swill. Fine by me.

don't forget that...

[AlgorithMan]

Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped

And don't forget that this happened right after Microsoft heavily "funded GWB's election campaign".

Re:wiping competitors with reformat, reinstall

[tomhudson]

.. and if you compile statically, you also don't need a package system, since there are now no external dependencies ...

... but to claim that "a problem Windows doesn't have - massive amounts of intricate and interlinked software dependencies. " is a lie at best, since the whole antitrust case was on the way that IE was supposedly such a core component of the Windows OS, and that so many processes and programs depended on it, or libraries (dlls) that were part of it ...

Remove all the dlls from your system - Windows won't even boot.

I don't get it, is this a troll?

[drinkypoo]

Until that time, let us people who produce goods that we need to sell in the brutally competitive free market have a few tools to have a steady income. If that means proprietary file formats, exclusive deals with distributors, making funny protocols... so be it. The free market will determine when that is too annoying to bother dealing it and get with the competition.

If all that shit was eliminated, you'd have a level playing field to work on, and be able to compete based on merit.

What are you afraid of?

I'm not living in a world where my neighbor who makes windows break my window every morning, so I have to pay him to fix the window.

I personally have never had a problem with it, but that sounds like WGA to me.

For that matter, it sounds like the Windows update schedule (or OSX, I'm not prejudiced.) Either way, a new OS comes out every so often with new APIs that developers are convinced or cajoled into using so that we have to buy a new operating system. Sometimes it's made sense, because computers have come very far since the last release. Sometimes it doesn't; Windows XP supports all of today's hardware. And for that matter, paying so much for OSX minor releases is pure bullshit.

Would the world be better if everything was free as in freedom? YES...and I won't argue with that. But we don't live in that world... and I don't feel like making my industry a martyr.

So wait, you think it's a bad thing if this industry is regulated like every other industry is regulated, while this industry more than most could NOT EXIST WITHOUT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE in the form of their obeyance of copyright law? They are LOSING THAT WILL. Your customers don't want the future you want. You'd better correct your course, or you and they are going to be sailing in different directions.

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[mcgrew]

It takes a reasonably competent user to install a Linux distro, drivers, use WINE to make Crysis work, and so forth.

Try Mandriva, it doesn't and hasn't for a long time. Windows is only easy for the end-user because it's preinstalled on the PC. I build my own computers, so I wind up installing Windows on them (dual boot) and Windows installation is a long, frustrating ordeal. Installing Mandriva is a piece of cake.

Actually the only reason for Windows is games.