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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."
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.
do you think they will ever come up with anything outside of MS Windows which makes them a profit? Please don't say Xbox because they'll need to sell that at a $1 annual profit for a number of years before that pays off the losses over the past many years. MSN has lost billions since the 1990s and their handheld OS platform itself has lost over $10 billion since it hit the market in the 90s.
They have done a great job at protecting and growing the monopoly but come on, they've been a one-hit wonder for over 20 years now. They can't even pull off a media player people like.
As far as what Bill and Steve added to this, IMO Steve was probably ruthless with the OEMs and the sales channels with killer exclusionary contracts. Bill, he made sure that the developers built software which locked ISV's into Windows and had something for Windows which was hot on the market and even if that meant taking it and dealing with the courts a few years later. It was a 2 headed hydra but not any more. Steve is still playing hardball with the OEMs but all he has for a weapon these days is cash kickbacks. Netbooks are a prime example of that seeing how quickly they were willing to increase the device price, increase the device hardware all to fit Windows on it and an old version of Windows at that. Steve still has the marketing dollars holding OEMs to restrict advertising of Linux based products but he's not been able to stop them from selling Linux products, only slow down the sales growth. That'll only last so long and they, Microsoft, have only PC based Windows to rely on for profits. They are great profits but at this point in time, those have little room to go up and lots of room to go down. IMO
So keep these kinds of historic reports coming, people need their eyes opened to what history really was and what the future holds.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Fantastic idea.
You could even make the interprocess language a standard for that OS so that any program that implements the port can interface with any other compatible program.
Users could mix and match functions within multiple applications!
You could call it AREXX...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."