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DOJ Nixes Lax Policy, Hardens Antitrust Enforcement
eldavojohn writes "A policy from the Bush era seen as a hurdle to the government prosecuting companies under antitrust laws has been withdrawn by Obama's Department of Justice. From the article: 'The DOJ's Antitrust Division has withdrawn a September report that "raised too many hurdles to government antitrust enforcement and favored extreme caution" toward antitrust enforcement action, the DOJ said. The change in policy could mean that the department looks harder at the actions of technology vendors such as Google, Oracle and IBM, as detractors have raised antitrust concerns about all three in recent months.' You may recall that Google has come under some antitrust scrutiny recently and the pressure may have just gotten a little more intense."
Microsoft would had never had the money to launch the XBox as a successful invasion of the video game market if it were not for the combined cash cow monopolies of Windows and Office. (And ironically, if they hadn't been able to move in on the video game market at that time, then the Halo series would have stayed on the Mac platform.)
Breaking up Microsoft might not be worth the effort today, but then again, having a natural monopoly has never been the (legal) issue. It's abusing that monopoly to take over other markets that is illegal, and it certainly is necessary to make sure that Microsoft can't continue that pattern.
Google isn't abusive either, sure they have expanded rapidly, but they haven't been destroying the competition. Now if they redirected all searches of Yahoo to "Did you mean Google?" sure, but not presently.
True. Search for "search engines" on Google. The first link in the results is a news article about the Wolfram Alpha. In results further down, live.com is listed ahead of google.com. When I click on the "list of search engines" link at the top, I get a page that lists yahoo.com, but *does not* list google.com.
Seems reasonable.
They have repeatedly and willfully violated the laws of multiple countries, have been fined multiple billions of dollars, and that has not deterred them as they continue to violate those laws. That means breaking them up into multiple competing companies, with the products decoupled from each other, is the only real remaining remedy with teeth.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And now back to reality! Most of software being developed in the world is developed for custom orders. So even if MS, Oracle and IBM disapear, "software engineers" will still be valued.(It's like saying that a cook is worthless without a restaurant.)
Yes it IS extremely low, but players like MS make sure that the adoption is close to 0%, in certain areas. That is the main problem.
That is a load of bullshit! I work in a quite large company, that is one of the leaders in it's market, however the competition is extremely fierce. And I do understand clients are actually benefiting. I am pushed a lot to bring value and I like it.
Oh, and BTW, any "Good job" in your post is the 1980's programmer's job or when programmers were considered gods of the tech world and asking them to do something was like praying and hoping of returns. I would never call that lazy-ass job as good.
If you want that kind of job, please become an CS researcher.
And BTW, the company where I work, is basically a competitor of Microsoft in certain niches, so I know how they push the clients to agree to their terms.