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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."
I remember one of my first computer courses in school where we were taught computer history. I still remember the professor telling us about the early days of Microsoft and how it didn't take long for them to start ripping off ideas, only to then buy the company that was suing them.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
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.
Campaign Anticompetitive Retaliation Organized Elimination Deceptive Elimination Attempts Elimination Campaign Failure Campaign Ongoing -Exxxttteeeerrrmmmmmiiiinnnaaattteeee!!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
Ok, I'm showing some age here.
Remember in 1989 the Stacker disk compression fiaso?
I think that was one of the original examples of this kind of behavior, in this case Stac electronics were able to get some money from MS - but it was a sour victory as MS has effectively removed them from the market place in the process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair, and as a business trying to please their shareholders it is very naive to expect them to do so. they have a monopoly and will abuse it to their benefit as long as they can get away with it.
whoah! I think someone needs a nap.
You fed the troll. Why would you do that?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Given the opportunity it is very hard for any person or company to pass up a chance to change the rules of a game in a way that disadvantages its competition in that game. This is especially true when survival is at stake. We do not and should never condone this type of behavior but we must realize it is natural and (without regard to morality) should be expected. This type behavior is bad for our industry as we have all seen so we must always be aware that some company out there will always try this as a means to advantage and stop it to allow strength to be generated via fierce competition.
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.
I just read through the entire document and I have to say that, well, it's probably the most professional, fleshed-out, well-worded summary of Microsoft's major illegal actions over the past two decades.
While nothing it says is necessarily new, the fact that several of the accusations people have been making for years have finally been put into one very highly professional document that is actually being used in a case that might finally do something about Microsoft's monopoly is impressive and has given me a lot of hope.
MS doesn't have a monopoly or even the top market share in some categories the EU is interested in such as servers. MS's presence in those markets is actually increasing competition. As was the case in the US, the EU is probably more interested in protecting specific MS competitors than in helping the consumer.
Everyone get's to be their own Microsoft. Instead of "GO!" you would have "START!", instead of "Jail" you would have "Court" and you would actually get to use goto's. Instead of Money you would have 'Bills' and instead of a dice you would throw little chairs.
The person with the most money get's paid by every other player. When you land on someone else's property, you get to sue them if you have more money or visa-versa. To win the game you are involved in the most lawsuits and have all the money.
I know exactly what photos would be on the front.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The fact that economics reduces to the ecology of metaphorical creatures/species was my idea!
I don't think you needed to 'get over' the point because you missed it.
There is no problem with microsoft bundling a browser, the problem was the inability for anyone else to bundle a browser that could compete with Microsofts turf. As long as the browser was tied to the operating system it was both advantaged by the fact that you could not remove it and even if you did remove it you would not be able to tie another browser to the OS. This arguably led to Netscape's demise as they wanted to bundle their browser via OEMs.
Linux by virtue of being open source would struggle to do anything remotely similar. Apart from there being no good reason to develop a crappy API for open source software, you could still write your own API and completely replace the crappy one.
It's similar to the accusations Microsoft have faced about putting undocumented hooks in their programs to disadvantage competitors.. except that in this case it was obvious as you can't hide the fact that you won't let anyone uninstall your browser.
Good points. If all those who complain about how MS treated Netscape had actually purchased a copy of Netscape's browser they'd still be in business today.
I think they ARE aware of that. 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.
I think you're confusing MS fanboys with people who like to point out inconvenient facts. Some uninformed people start ranting about some DRM in Vista or other untrue crap and how can you label the people refuting them arguing facts as MS fanboys? There's a lot of stuff to bash MS on, there's no need to make up BS and then call the people who point it out as 'pro-MS posters' or sycophants. Slashdot is losing credibility because of anti-MS zealots. And the mainstream media is catching on too. Just read this article.
This space for rent.
Bill Gates was beaten as a kid?
Maybe, just possibly, because people were worried, and therefore monitored what MS was doing, and made sure MS wasn't allowed to leverage their desktop monopoly advantage?
Not at all.
Not even slightly.
Microsoft has been leveraging the hell out of the desktop and (more importantly) corporate monopoly status to try and push people to use Microsoft technologies on the internet.
It's not because people were worried that they've not been able to establish a stranglehold - it's that there is real competition and the cost to use alternative solution is now so low, even from a time to build perspective.
We should all be worried as hell about what Microsoft is up to, but we should not make the mistake of not understanding what kinds of things will build Microsoft true monopolies. Happily Microsoft is seemingly short on vision these days and so there has not been as much danger.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
lol. Slashdot has always been like this. The mainstream media noticed us and ignored us years ago.
I've noticed a lot of posters relatively recently that are popping up and basically saying "linux is not ready yet, until you plug it in and it 'just works' it won't be ready", either implying Windows does "just work" or explicitly stating it. I know no computer does that, there's niggles in everything, but I seem to hear that mantra more often than I ever did.
Maybe you havn't been paying attention to them, but they're there.
There are a lot of pro-MS postings, I've done them myself, but they tend to be more objective against trolls saying Linux is perfect at everything and Windows couldn't possibly be any good. Windows is a perfectly usable OS, I just consider Linux to be architecturally better and has the potential to be significantly better.
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.
So what you're saying is that society needs much harsher punishments for such behavior as a counter-incentive?
I seem to recall that it wasn't bundling the browser so much as dictating what the computer distributors could do. Microsoft did a Darth Vader vs. Lando Calrissian ("But we had a deal!" "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.") with the license distribution arrangements they had with vendors like Dell. The vendors were allowed to install a bunch of crapware in their standard Windows distributions that come on the hard drives of new PCs, but they were forbidden to pre-install Netscape, thus cutting off Netscape's air supply. MS threatened to unilaterally change the terms of the license distribution if the vendor installed Netscape. This was an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly power, as the PC vendors had no choice but to do what MS said, since there was no way for the vendors to compete with other PC makers if they couldn't pre-install Windows.
This is possibly covered in the article, but I haven't got around to reading it yet.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
I did buy a copy of Netscape, back in the "Internet in a Box" (think that was the package name) days.
That was, I believe, before Microsoft started their whole "cut off their air supply" thang.
Microsoft's monopoly is singular, though. Few companies outside of government-authorised monopolies own more than 90% of their particular market, and very few indeed have such a share of a market which people are so dependent on. You may have a government-monopoly water company, but the government calls the shots, and you call the government's shots, at least in principle. You currently have an MS-monopoly computing industry, and only MS and its major shareholders get to call the shots. Either the monopoly has to be broken to allow consumer choice and therefore a drive for companies to listen to their consumers, or the government has to get a say in how MS is run as a way of ensuring they listen to their consumers.
As a specific example, Microsoft still ships products which perform certain kinds of statistical analysis wrongly, and those products may be calculating your insurance premiums and taxes right now. Due to their monopoly, there are probably few places that your insurer or local government can go for an alternative, and due to their disregard for standards, it's possible that MS offers no easy means for them to migrate to that alternative. So you're stuck with the MS product, and unfortunately you don't get any say in the discussion of whether they should finally fix the stats handing in the next release.
People bring up Apple all the time, but if you don't like their vendor lock-in, you can go to another company. Even their biggest monopoly, in MP3 players, is only about 70%. Microsoft has something like a 95% market share in operating systems, and that's after a couple of years of drooping.
embrace extend extinguish may have worked in the past, but how do you do this with a competitor that does not play by any rules of engagement?
its hard to offer a hand of welcome to something that has inherently been available to you from day one (not like java)
its difficult to extend something in a means that mandates you extend it in a fair manner, and has thousands of eyes to ensure your extension is well received regardless of lax documentation
its difficult to see how extinguishing the product will work at all with the freedom squarely in the hands of the developers and consumers (OLPC project anyone?)
how can you place market squeeze or pressure on a competetor that can exist in a both free, and for profit context?
i predict the only way microsoft can continue its tactics is through embracing open source licenses. build numerous standards of it that seem "better" than the GPL, and corporations will become their prime adopters surrounding "viral nature" fud...but even this seems a bit uncertain to work.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Not going to happen but, just as in the trust-busting days of yore, only a self-policing solution (the break-up of the corporation into separate businesses) will work.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Story Time!!
I have a friend who developed a database technology that caught Microsoft's attention due to its amazing performance benefits over all dbs out there. My friend was extremely careful not to give M$ access to his systems, though they wanted executables so they could test it themselves. He forced them to give him their data vectors and queries for performance testing. He gave them the results in record time, he demoed it on his laptop in person. They tried to get him to join the company--he wouldn't. He wanted them to purchase the technology and had a set pricetag. The day after he got back from that trip, every server in his house that was attached to an outside network was hacked.
Fortunately, He keeps his source on a machine not attached to a network...so he kept it safe. But of course this story's only circumstantial... it's not like he could prove it was M$ mischief... but then, the timing was awfully curious.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Installed Ubuntu and it "just works" right out of the box. Unfortunately, what most people mean by just works is compatibility with most of Window's legacy software, including their third-party stuff. Given that, I think linux has done a fair job, partly because it has been more developer friendly than windows. It's much less annoying as a poor college student to get linux rather than to get a 'free' version of some windows sdk and bother with shelling out 1k to un-cripple it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Just works" is inherently subjective, and dependent on hardware and usage needs of the user. This makes it pretty-much a worthless metric (whether we're talking about Linux, OSX, or Windows), unless you're talking about a particular OS-software-hardware combo (in other words, an out-of-the-box experience, like OEM PCs).
For instance, Linux rarely ever "just works" for me, and I usually have to jump down into hand-editing config files in order to get it working. Does that mean it isn't ready for the desktop? Not necessarily; in this case it just means that I'm unlucky and my hardware doesn't work well with Linux.
If you use your computer for email and web browsing, Linux definitely "just works." If you want to play games, then its not going to "just work" for you.
My Mac just worked for me, but for my girlfriend? Not so much. I had to track down and install codecs so she could use Veoh.
So yeah, I rank "just works" up there with TCO. It says little about what kind of experience I can expect.
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.
Don't forget Go Corp.
~Philly
But this approach will NOT work on the desktop. To get Linux to work on the desktop Linux will have to make a 180 degree shift away from its current position, which I don't see happening.
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.
Linux would have to abandon CLI in favor of all the GUI interfaces like those that Windows has in abundance. GUI interfaces, wizards, everything will have to be "clicky clicky" and the simple fact is most developers and IT guys HATE that. They hate the fact that the GUI robs them of power just as much as the users hate that the CLI is too strange and requires arcane Unix commands which they have NO desire to learn.
False dichotomy. There's no reason why one can't develop a good application that has a command line interface as well as a GUI. And while many Linux folks are CLI gurus, that's becoming an anachronistic stereotype; many Linux users these days prefer the GUI. Not to mention which, many developers have the goal of crushing MSFT (likely or not), so they're attempting to make Linux easier. Additionally, even the most ardent CLI guy has a wife, grandma, sister, cousin, neighbor, etc. who's constantly asking for computer help; if he wants to switch them to linux (and he does), he knows it's going to have to be stupid simple.
Seriously, most people use the internet and create documents. It's not hard to set up Linux with firefox and OpenOffice on Gnome. At that point, the Linux experience ain't much different from Windows.
It's easy to say that Microsoft faces competition in all its major product categories. From my perspective, some of Microsoft's behaviour which *could* be characterised as monopolistic is much more complex, and needs to be looked at from a broader perspective.
For example, Microsoft's Campus Agreement arrangement built on top of the strong-arming of desktop sellers to include a license in every sale regardless of whether that license was required, and over the mid-term, pushed educational institutions into a corner it is extremely difficult to work out of. These agreements require a MS O/S license be purchased with every desktop, and then gives the license holder the 'right' to backgrade or upgrade the license to the standard MS O/S in use at their institution. So most place purchased the cheapest MS O/S license, and then placed their own image - say XP - on that desktop.
Fast forward to a time where the institution wants out of the Campus Agreement. There is no incremental option available - if you don't renew, you have to fall back to the O/S purchased with the desktop (or notebook). Aside from this being a logistical nightmare (what license was purchased for each particular unit?) you have to forklift the entire upgrade in one go - there is no option for reducing the license, which is usually (but not always) based on full-time equivalent employees and students. So you can't do half your installed plant one year and the other the next, unless you sustain the full price agreement across that period.
I know that you can say that the institution should have seen what they were getting into. But there really was no other way for shops to afford the O/S licenses than to buy into the Campus Agreement approach, even though they knew they were making a deal with the devil. Too many curriculum-required applications were Windows-only, and you had to support it somehow.
Gist for the mill.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Or maybe, just possibly, because Microsoft's internet apps all sucked, and therefore no one used it
Are their desktop apps any better? In an absolute sense, no. In a relative sense, probably. In other words, people had no better alternative. Windows fell into a natural monopoly, while their cloud services have come up against the brick wall of competent competition.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
"I think that MS's behavior is only seen as anti-competitive because they happen to own such a massive share of the market" anonymous astroturfer
.. This is not something that you get to decide. This is company policy"
.. and IMO linux has a ways to go before it's "desktop-ready"', anonymous astroturfer
'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'
'The only real difference between Microsoft's more recent practices and its earlier ones is that, as Mr. Gates predicted, Microsoft has now changed its document retention practices'
"do not archive your mail. 30 days
'Btw, I'm a Linux user
Sure you are, and what can't 'Linux' do yet for the average user, email, browsing, typing and viewing videos.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Very clearly written, a lot of clear examples of what MS is doing.
Very intriguing to see it as such a consistent pattern.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
or as I said earlier, Novell (Netware).
better than calling him a anti-semtic bigot and really feeding what he is looking for....
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Making Windows only work on MS-DOS, per-processor licenses, charging extra to IBM for behavior they disliked, boycotting Intel, keeping Windows API trade secrets from Novell, WISE, the whole Netscape thing, etc. are all competitive maneuvers.
Nope. Microsoft has settled antitrust lawsuits with Digital Research, IBM, Novell, Sun, AOL/Netscape and others to the tune of billions of dollars.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So yeah, I rank "just works" up there with TCO. It says little about what kind of experience I can expect.
which is exactly why the marketeers use the term, its like panning the camera away from the attack scene, your imagination fills in far more than those 2 words could ever actually mean.
Now lets see! If instead of tying IE to Windows they had required every program that ran on Windows to be sold through them after a lengthy approval process, for the safety of your system mind you, I guess it wouldn't have been Anti-Competitive Behavior!
I'm just wondering why its legit for one company to decide what can run on its system, and make a profit being the only reseller, while MS has to always let every Tom, Dick and Steve do so. Must have been the mistake of making an operating system that wasn't tied to a machine only Microsoft could build and instead making it a system to run on a machine everyone could build.
Hmmmm! Guess it only Anti-Competitive Behavior when you start making a bigger profit from selling a system everyone can run on their machines and don't use the its "For the safety of the customer" as your PR.