Slashdot Mirror
The History of Microsoft's Anti-Competitive Behavior
jabjoe writes "Groklaw is highlighting a new document from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (PDF) about the history of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Quoting: 'ECIS has written it in support of the EU Commission's recent preliminary findings, on January 15, 2009, that Microsoft violated antitrust law by tying IE to Windows. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux have been framed in a context of anti-competitive conduct.' The report itself contains interesting quotes, like this one from Microsoft's Thomas Reardon: '[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.' It also has the Gates 1998 Deposition."
This might be old news but it is relevant as with the likes of BPOS and Azure it appears that Microsoft is attempting to shift their existing monopolies into the cloud by both providing different licensing models for themselves and competitors in a cloud and by linking it closer to services offered in their next generation operating systems.
Clearly Microsoft's agenda is to use their existing desktop monopoly to grab a monopoly in the cloud.
Posted Anonymously for a reason.
The irony that when Gates was in control, Microsoft was more aggressive on the business side, and since Ballmer took over, they've been working a lot harder on the technology side? Ballmer deserves credit for trying to actually do a good job on the technology side, without resorting to just nasty competitive moves.
Microsoft, anti competive? Wow... like we all did not know this?! In all seriousness, this is GOOD to keep the pressure and public awareness on what is going on. Even if we all have to hear about it 100's of times quarterly. The public and governments MUST be made aware that MS sucks.
I think they ARE aware of that. I think they're acting like the battered/abused woman who stays with the abusive man for years and years because she's fucked up in the head. After a while she starts defending the guy, not unlike the pro-MS posters here on Slashdot that you swear must be shills except they're probably not actually getting paid. Seriously, those people just can't understand that Microsoft is not your buddy, when you stick up for Microsoft like a loyal little sycophant it's not like they are capable of appreciating it, they are a mindless faceless corporation without any sort of feeling.
While I realize that this will get modded to oblivion as flamebait, please realize that it's not intended to be; it's just intended to be another view (dissenting as it may be in the /. community).
I'm sorry, but while I agree that anti-competitive behavior is generally wrong, by the same token perhaps I'm just too much of a moneygrubbing bugger to care. I think that MS's behavior is only seen as anti-competitive because they happen to own such a massive share of the market, not to mention have the financial backing to be able to buy out companies that are suing them.
Otherwise, it's just the way business works, at least as far as I can tell; you do what you can to get a leg up on your competitors, even if that means buying your competitors.
Much ado about nothing, in my opinion. If the competition actually had a hope of competing, then maybe we'd have a real problem. Instead they're relegated to litigation in something that not-so-vaguely reminds me of the MAFIAA - if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em (I know the analogy is somewhat flawed, but try to see it from the high-level that it's meant to be by the comment after the hyphen).
Btw, I'm a Linux user who uses Windows only for things he has to, and IMO linux has a ways to go before it's "desktop-ready" for the average user. For us tinkerers and people who know enough about computers to not get frustrated when it doesn't work immediately, great. But until it "just works", EVERY time, with NO mucking about, on EVERY piece of hardware that Windows works on with the same performance, it's not ready.
Mac, on the other hand, has a chance, if you don't mind vendor-lock in. But then, not much difference between that and MS.
There was a documentary on PBS about the rise of computers called Triumph of the Nerds from 1996. It showed how MS stumbled ass backwards into a lot great situations. Also showed how some companies completely misunderstood computers and showed a painful lack of foresight. Xerox, anybody?
--
My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
Well, I even remember a time before Microsoft; it seemed like some kind of strange magic that DOS came with it's own big, fat book (why?) in a three ring binder. Later even a brochure wasn't necessary.
I'm sure this document won't mention getting Access from Sybase, nor IE from SpyGlass, or how they screwed Blue Mountain, but that ship has sailed.
Now, for 20 years they've bullied all the other competitors out of the market and created a barrier to investors in *anything* that could be taken by Microsoft. Everything just slowed down; I felt it.
And these days, let's examine what 20+ years of ignorant and selfish predatory practices, assisted by a carefully-maintained harsh environment:
- The Army has been hacked. Remember the moratorium on thumb drives?
- A week ago it was released that the power grid has been compromised. Next war: lights out.
- Military satellites are being hacked by Brazillian ne'er-do-wells.
- The F22 project (future fighter plane) has been compromised.
So yeah...let's just let Microsoft keep doing what it's doing- surely it won't be a problem, and we shouldn't suggest Linux in it's place, 'cause we're all about doing what's comfortable, not what's best.
(Yeah, I'm more than a little hot about this company.)
I recently picked up On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. This book nicely illustrates your point. Fascinating read-- the guy running the company was a complete bastard. He had developed a 'survival' ethos, from his experience as a child in German concentration camps, and he carried this into the way he did business in his adult life.
For example-- he would contract with small suppliers, but then stretch out repaying them, so that when they were on the verge of bankruptcy, he could buy their entire company cheaply. This allowed Commodore to have some impressive vertical integration, like the acquisition of MOS Technology, the maker of the 6502 processor. He offered employees bonus packages for achieving certain goals, and when they did, he reneged on his promises. In other cases, he would knowingly set unreasonable deadlines so that when systems were not delivered on time, he could penalize his engineers.
The worst part is that after his employees left for poor treatment, he sued them! He clearly did this for vengeful purposes, and to discourage other engineers from leaving, because when the C64 group left, to work on a completely different product, Commodore brought a lawsuit against them for intellectual property theft without even knowing what it was they were working on!
As far as I can tell, Commodore mostly operated within the law, but they had no qualms about operating in whatever legal grey areas there were at the time. If it was unethical, it did not matter at all. Commodore destroyed the lives of many people who gave large chunks of their lives to the company, because the company made many promises they did not keep (which they shrewdly did not write on paper).
I agree that this is to be expected. Business should be expected to push everything to the limit, including the law. But we must also expect, then, that we have to scrupulously enforce the law when they do break it. I personally think that the best use of the government would be to encourage an environment where the 'greedy solution' is the one that best aligns with our standards for good behavior.
Jim Rapoza of eWeek has a great article on the subject of monopolistic behavior in this month's issue (which can be seen on line at http://etech.eweek.com/content/operating_systems/apple_trumps_microsoft_google_as_tech_monopolist.html) and while I'm sure the view might not be as popular here on /. I think it bears reading.
The fact is that MS existed before the PC and Gates really wrote code for their Basic interpreters. They were written in multiple assembly languages for each target processor. That's geek enough for you.
Also a great example of how MS set it's behavior early. Gates took quite a number of pre-orders on the strength of a promised delivery date. A year AFTER that date, many wondered if they had been had since they received nothing. Someone managed to grab a paper tape with the pre-release code, fix the large number of bugs and distribute the now working interpreter before Gates got the official one out.
That's what inspired him to write his screed against copying software which completely ignored the fact that the incident was the only reason he didn't have dozens of people breathing down his neck about the large (for the time) sum of money they paid him and the over a year late product he was to give them in return.
Another aspect that showed what was to come from MS, he was using Harvard's mainframe without permission to develop the code since there was an Altair emulator available and he didn't own the real thing himself.
Were someone to do exactly the same thing today, their university would promptly assert ownership over the work.
I'd say it's not marketing that Gates and MS excel at, but dirty tricks and borderline business practices.
Emphasis mine:
VI. CONCLUSION
Microsoft's conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft's willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. By understanding Microsoft's history of anticompetitive conduct, developers, consumer groups, and government authorities will be better equipped to recognize current and future Microsoft misconduct at an early stage and intervene to prevent Microsoft from using tactics other than competition on the merits. ECIS remains hopeful that the European Commission's latest Statement of Objections addressing Microsoft's misconduct will finally mark the beginning of the end of Microsoft's two decades of anticompetitive behavior and consumer harm.
Chairs must be flying in Redmond right now.
The Lisa was a technical marvel - the gui itself (the first commercially released GUI) solved issues the Xerox guys hadn't fully figured out yet (for instance, you could drag and drop items on the desktop - the Star relied on context menus for this, and they added conveniences like the menu bar and trash can). The Star it was based on was never meant to see the light of day as a commercial machine - it was a tech demo.
The two biggest technical problems with the Lisa were the price tag ($10000) and it felt a bit slow. The killer, however, was Steve Jobs - he tried to control the direction of the team and tried to cancel the Lisa project several times until he was told to stop interfering, so he pretty much took revenge with the mac team (which he took by pretty much ousting Jef Raskin).
I agree with you and the GP. 99% of users don't want to touch a command line, but we are getting to the point where they don't.
I have a friend who'd dad loaded PClinuxOS on a new laptop 18 months ago. He ran it for a good 9 months before calling me for help on something. My first instruction to him was "Open a command line".
His response:
"What's that?"
He'd never touched a shell before and had been running Linux fulltime for almost a year.
I think that speaks volumes.
It seems to me that copyright terms should be reducing, as the dissemination, proliferation, and hobbyist creation of media increases.
Technically, it was stolen, but since he was one of the people that had paid for one and it was a year late, he could equally argue that he merely enforced some of the terms of the deal (it was still a year late and bug ridden, but he wrote that off once he finally got the copy he paid for).
If he really did use Harvard's computer, so what? He must of had some cooperation from the Harvard staff because computers in those days weren't just sitting in unlocked rooms.
When you get a bank employee to 'help' you that way, it's called an "inside job".
It's just interesting to see when people have such a strongly defined sense of what's "theirs" seem to have a much free-er interpretation of what's someone else's.
Of course, computers in universities are and always have been subject to regular minor security breeches.
In those days, physical security was often tight, but other security was often hacked in as an afterthought.
Except it is happening. Try installing a modern Linux distribution, especially a user-friendly one. It will default to runlevel 4 and Gnome, which means you never see a command line unless you go looking for it. Gnome's menu system makes Windows look very complicated by comparison. I'm not a Gnome fan because it's *too* simple for me, but many people (particularly the audience you're targeting) love it.
I'm not so sure of that. I've been running Ubuntu, and I've found many problems and limitations with the GUI. They still haven't figured out what's required to be user friendly towards people used to other operating systems.
But luckily I have a list.
1) Switch to Admin button.
The first time I had to edit xorg.conf, I was very annoyed by having to use the terminal to open it so that it can actually save.
Tip: If the user requested it, the user wanted to edit it. Hide it from view in Nautilus if you want, but after searching it out, opening it, and editing it, at least *prompt* me for my password to save it, if you're not going to give me a button to do it manually.
Oh well. For now, sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2) Switch to Admin button.
There's nothing that peeves me more than a failed file copy. And when I can't copy from my desktop(where I unzipped something) to another folder on my computer, that really annoys me!
I didn't realize the desktop has such strict security. So strict, in fact, that it can't prompt for a password when you try to copy something off it. Instead, it just fails with an error message. Keep in mind the desktop is the default download location. I can't even copy the tar.gz file elsewhere, so it's simpler to re-download it.
Or... I can open the terminal and type sudo cp /home/bikehelmet/Desktop/filename OtherLongDestGoesHere.
3) Switch to Admin button.
It appears your desktop isn't the only high security folder! The first time I installed something in /usr/share, it was quite the challenge! Don't even bother with Nautilus, as short of the "Open Terminal here" optional extension, there's not much it can do. Just go straight to the terminal and type sudo tar -xvvf /home/bikehelmet/Desktop/blahlongtarname_version0.5.1.5.3.6_something.tar /usr/share to unpack the folder into the proper dir.
Now, don't forget to chmod it then make a link and stick it in /usr/bin!
4) Poorly thought out/non-descriptive GUI programs.
I found this thing in the Ubuntu repository called "startupmanager", which is supposed to help get rid of the six extra kernels in my grub boot list.
But... there's no way to manually edit anything. No listbox with +/- add/remove buttons.
All it has is a "Limit the number of kernels" checkbox, and you can enter a number.
Is it going to remove my WinXP or Solaris references from grub!? I can't find any info on how this thing works! So far I've been disappointed by how shortsighted third-party programs are, so I'd bet it'll wipe out the entire boot menu. Gah... looks like gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst is the answer.
My point? Ubuntu, apparently the most friendly desktop linux, still has a long way to go before it has that GUI polish that Microsoft has had since Windows 95.
Don't delude yourself. Linux is wonderful, but if you refuse to acknowledge all the UI shortfalls, they'll never be fixed! I actually believe this is part of the reason GUI progress is so slow in Linux...
If Ubuntu could just be like OSX and prompt for a password (rather than failing with a non-descriptive error message), then I'd be happy.
mdielmann thought (remember... hey thought if ith first, so it's his 'property' so he can limit you in doing with that idea because it's his copyright) about partying in you house first. So now he can demand you never be able to party again at your place.
Now please, don't waste our time and just admit IP is BS.
Here be signatures