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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."
Perhaps because there is no case to pursue? It was all somewhat bogus from the beginning. Today it's simply pointless.
I love my sig.
I'm just so pissed off that Microsoft ships a browser with their operating system, and I applaud the efforts of judges to try and stop this.
What I don't understand is why they don't start tackling the bundling of seats with cars, it completely destroys the 3rd party car-seat market.
We need to break up more successful companies, and ruin their products, to let capitalism thrive.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
YOU ARE HIGH!
Microsoft got away with corporate murder in the 1980s because the government agencies who normally stop that kind of thing were still using 1960s technology (even inside of NASA and DOD they were only on late-70s/early-80s tech --microcomputers were completely off the RADAR). What's more is that computers had progressed very, very slowly from 1968 until 1988 and IT WAS BEYOND THEIR COMPREHENSION that what was happening could happen or even mattered. There was nobody advising the President (Carter/Reagan/Bush Sr.), Congress or any Governor about what was happening!!!
Well eventually, the government slowly got PCs and crawled out of its 1960s mainframes (very slowly --Iran Contra involved e-mail in IBM Profs!) and began to see what was happening (the hundreds, if not thousands, of letters from distinguished Americans helped them too). Unfortunately, by that time it was the statute of limitations had run out and Microsoft already had risen to TOTAL domination with Steve Jobs out of one and Bill Gates becoming the RICHEST MAN ON EARTH.
So the feds did the only thing they could do when you really piss off the government --they used their "bully pulpit" to force Microsoft into what's called a "Consent Decree" basically meaning: Don't Do It Again, Or Else.
Nobody was happy with that, people had lost their livelihoods, the progress of mankind had been stifled, we'll never know what dealing with that backwards DOS technology cost mankind during its 20 year FORCED OCCUPATION.
So when Microsoft attempted to put Netscape out of business by using it's old "bundling" trick (the standard procedure they had used to put thousands of other tech companies down), even being so bold as to leave a giant 20-30 foot inflatable balloon overnight in front of Netscape's building, the DOJ let them have it with both barrels and began to make it rain red tape so badly that workaholic Gates had to become "Chief Software Architect" and eventually retire in his early 50s.
The guys who are under 36 right now still don't really get it, so they complain it is dragging on forever and wasting the public's money. Can you imagine how OUTRAGEOUS that kind of rant is to the people who survived the Microsoft holocaust? In another 10 years, maybe that twisted sick point of view will have evolved to the point where Bill Gates was the victim and could have made even more money if the Man hadn't put him down!
For years we've heard MS boosters bleating the mantra: "reformat, reinstall" That heinous time-waster needs also to be looked at from an anti-trust perspective.
MS "systems" have lacked and still lack a unified, easy to use package management system such as have been available elsewhere for years. APT is probably one of the oldest and best examples, and there are abundant graphical front-ends. Lacking a point-n-click, (nearly) single step installation method for packages, and automatic handling of dependencies on MS Windows, means that when practicing the MS "reformat, re-install" there is an extra barrier to re-installing 3rd party apps. As a result, given enough iterations of the mantra, or when a large enough install base is considered, the loss of market share through attrition is quite large.
In shops afflicted with MS Windows and the mentality of the flunkies that fiddle with it, I hear that excuse all the time though in other words: there is no package repository. The result: MS Uber Alles policies and few or no third party apps.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
'While hundreds of companies have donated to this week's Republican presidential convention, Microsoft may have the most at stake. Microsoft gave US$900,000 in software and US$100,000 in cash to the committee hosting the convention'
'Microsoft's budget for political lobbying exceeded that of Enron, the judge residing over the antitrust case has heard'.
'the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct'
Incidentally, she's the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since her tenure began in 2002, the number of warrants that had to be modified before being accepted jumped dramatically.
Considering that her tenure mostly coincides with Bush going hog wild on FISA warrants - iirc something like 6000 total from the creation of the court in the 70s through 2001 and then roughly 2000+ per year from 2002 onwards - that isn't necessarily all that meaningful.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You got modded funny, but I'll bite. Why did it take five and a half years for Microsoft to release Vista, and when they finally got around to it, they released software that was so bizarre that they are not even re-using the name for the subsequent release even though it looks to be only an incremental improvement? It's because they're a monopoly. If the government had forced Microsoft to stop leveraging the OEMs, my guess is that Vista would have been released sooner and would have been of higher quality because the OEMs would have been able to threaten to switch to a different operating system unless Microsoft delivered a usable OS. As it is, Microsoft could do things like introducing all the DRM crap in Vista because they don't care about the customer, because usually the customer has no practical choice but to buy their products. Linux adoption would have been improved right now if the government had done something. Also I bet we'd have a native linux version of Office already if MS had been split up.
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