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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.
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.
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?
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My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
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.