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

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Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped.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

[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: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: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: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.