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

[Swift2001]

We forestalled the compete domination of Microsoft in the computer industry. They behaved like better computer citizens than they otherwise would have. And they should have gone along with the breakup. It would have made for a much more nimble company, with independent units that made the OS, the applications and the hardware.

Re:Summary

[Repossessed]

They secured the big OEMs the right to sell more than just windows, eventually paving the way for netbooks.

Re:Summary

[Galois2]

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

Briefly, in the 1990's MS was found to have a monopoly in its OS, which is not illegal in and of itself, but that it also illegally used its monopoly OS to create barriers to entry in other competitive areas. Particularly, it illegaly tied its browser to the OS, making other browsers not function as well (e.g., for help file viewing) and more difficult to install. At trial, they were shown to be either liars or, if you are very generous, incompetent.

Detailed findings of fact found illegal anti-competitive behavior in multiple areas, and their punishment was to be broken up into several companies. On appeal, MS successfully got that ruling overturned, on the basis that the judge in the case had made some negative comments about MS prior to issuing his ruling. In the meantime, 15 separate cases against MS brought by state attorneys general were merged, and MS settled with them for something so trivial no one remembers what it was. California, New York, and maybe one or two other states held out and separately obtained billion dollar settlements.

Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped. MS essentially got off scott-free, in the sense that they illegally transformed their OS monopoly into a browser monopoly, with all the due profit that entailed, and weren't punished at all except for what they had to pay their lawyers and a billion to California.

To summarize and answer your question: Not Much.

Re:Summary

[jonwil]

Microsoft DID document a number of otherwise undocumented APIs. And they have internal processes to ensure that Microsoft programs like Office, FoxPro, Visual C++ etc dont call anything thats undocumented, see this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia/archive/2005/01/26/361033.aspx

They did later document lots of network protocols but that was the EU and not the US that got them to do it.

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

[scamper_22]

Yeah. Pretty amazing how a website for engineer and computer scientists don't like to pay their own salaries.

Do you remember the 'good ole' days of software. Do you remember how much of it was funded? It was funded by the old telephone monopolies which used their guaranteed monopoly over phone lines to fund such ventures as the invention of C++ at ATT/Bell labs. Wait a minute... do you remember what happened to these great labs once they were forced to breakup from their monopoly? Oh yeah... they sucked and they have no money to fund anything useful.

I mean seriously, there is a reason Microsoft employs 100 000 people and treats its employees better than 99% of other companies... they have some money.

Microsoft is not a natural monopoly (like cable, electricity, water) where there is only going to be one infrastructure going to your house. Microsoft should not be regulated with these 'anti-competitive' behaviors. It's amazing to see all these engineers and computer scientists act like we need to always reduce cost and we need maximum competition.

Let me know when the rest of society operates like that. When anyone can practice medicine. When lawyers don't make needless laws so complex you need them to navigate the system. When teachers give you a voucher and you can choose the best deal in town to send your kid for an education. When bankers don't get massive bailouts when they screw up. Tell me when we get that world...

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.

The market provides plenty of ways to kill the 'monopoly'. MS, in trying to defend the desktop OS market, let the web float away... and the market produced Google. MS missed the mark on the smart phone, along comes RIM and Apple.

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.

Please... no broken window philosophy. I know about it. I agree with it. But as I said... get the rest of society to agree with it. 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. Meanwhile, he won't even let me bundle a browser with the operating system I sell him :P //I don't work for Microsoft. I Actually work for their smart-phone competitor.

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...

Re:Summary

[Intron]

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

The outcome was a complete success. Windows 95 no longer dominates the desktop.

Now, that's interesting.

[Bruce Perens]

Still alive? Wow! The Bush administration made it known they weren't interested in pursuing this case, and as far as I was aware, there was little movement in 8 years.

Re:Now, that's interesting.

[stevejsmith]

Amen. Face it - Microsoft's monopoly is crumbling in the face of Apple, netbooks, and cell phones, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that the government stepping in and regulating computer code was gonna make it happen any faster.

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?

[causality]

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.

Open Source is pretty good for that, too.

Re:M$ Should Be Finished

[binarylarry]

M$! From hells heart I stab at thee!

*wave finger*

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?

[theheadlessrabbit]

Why does every Microsoft Bashing Troll have a homepage that looks like it was designed in 1992?

because those websites were built with frontpage.

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[rohan972]

Why does every Microsoft Bashing Troll have a homepage that looks like it was designed in 1992?

Black text on a white background? Possibly it's a demographic that places importance on information rather than aesthetics. If I put up a web page it would probably look like that. Before I got married I had virtually no decoration in my house other than family photos. I still have less in the way of decoration and entertainment than most, but considerably more tools and educational books than most people.

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:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[Fluffeh]

Amusingly people fall into categories. People of like characters are often quite similar in other things. One of the characteristics in the common Microsoft Bashing Troll that I have found, apart from the obvious ones (Likes Linux/Unix, writes perl/ruby, can understand and troubleshoot very complex SQL, has a dedicated webserver at home on the local network) is that they generally are not very arty. More about the Arty ones in a tic. Most of these un-arty folk like to have a webpage of some sort, but don't have the design talent to make it look sharp. Following that, they will go through a bunch of CSS styles or a prefab gallery and pick a (to them) sharp, clean looking theme. Due to being freebies, they don't look quite as crisp as we might want, and without the arty talent to pep it up, it ends up looking like you describe - as if it was designed in 1992.

Oh yes, the arty Microsoft Bashing Troll types. Hi Mac users!

Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up?

[bladesjester]

Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]

As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.

You've never had fun until you've been at a conference and had someone come up to you and basically start yelling at you because your banner has a technology listed on it (it was on one of the covers) that "cost them business" because people moved to it from what they were doing.

Believe me, it's a surreal experience. After a while, you start to doubt that "subtle humor" is actually meant as humor with that sort of thing because you see it used in a serious manner far too often...

To be honest, the response you gave to my first post is really easy to mistake for actual zealotry. I've gotten real comments (both in person and online) that were just like it.

Re:Judging technical documents?

[Martin Blank]

Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually seems pretty bright. She saw through many of Microsoft's tricks, and did well in keeping up with technical discussions in court according to at least some case watchers.

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. Her term expires in May, at which point she will also no longer be part of the FISC, as judges may not be reappointed.

I generally hold judges in high regard, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly ranks highly overall in my mind. She would, I think, make for a respectable member of the Supreme Court if she were appointed, though I think that's unlikely at this point, as she's around age 65 right now, and I think the trend over the next few administrations is going to be to pick much younger potential justices to fill those positions.

Re:M$ Should Be Finished

[ozphx]

Parent's excellent monologue, delivered in the style of renowned technology analyst (or analysts!) Twitter, shows solid construction and consistancy throughout. With clever use of symbology - especially with the dollar symbol - this well-reasoned posting is a pleasure to read.

Truly excellent application of delusion and paranoia. Four and a half stars.

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.

Red Tape

[flyingfsck]

Essentially, Microsoft has been burdened with red tape to make them less competitive and slowly reduce their market lead. Preventing them from forcing unfair business practices onto their vendors also helped a lot. Dell and others can now sell Linux machines without fear of reprisal by Microsoft.

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:wiping competitors with reformat, reinstall

[drsmithy]

MS "systems" have lacked and still lack a unified, easy to use package management system such as have been available elsewhere for years.

That's because packaging systems (*especially* on Linux) exist largely to solve a problem Windows doesn't have - massive amounts of intricate and interlinked software dependencies.

OS X lacks a packaging system for much the same reason - there's simply no compelling need for one.

(Of course, it doesn't take much imagination to realise the level of apoplectic outrage that would come out of Slashdot, et al, if the only easy way to install software on Windows was via a centralised repository controlled by Microsoft.)

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.

Re:Windows 7 is dead

[Hatta]

The only downside to using Windows is the cost.

The lack of basic interface features like virtual desktops and "always on top" is a downside. The lack of a comprehensive package manager is another one. Having to install Cygwin to get essential tools like SSH and GNU Screen is still another downside. As a competent user the dumbed down Windows interface is a downside I experience constantly.