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

Re:Now, that's interesting.

[Columcille]

Perhaps because there is no case to pursue? It was all somewhat bogus from the beginning. Today it's simply pointless.

Re:Now, that's interesting.

[je ne sais quoi]

I'm not sure that the government stepping in and regulating computer code was gonna make it happen any faster.

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.