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Microsoft Wins Windows XP Downgrade Lawsuit
CWmike writes "A federal judge has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the 'downgrade' rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. The order put an end to the lawsuit filed by Emma Alvarado in February 2009. In her original complaint, she accused Microsoft of coercing computer makers into forcing consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista, or later, Windows 7, before they were allowed to downgrade to XP. The judge rejected Alvarado's accusations, saying that the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented."
I'm not a lawyer but how do you not prove that they benefited by having OEMs sell the newer version of their software before allowing a downgrade path?
Microsoft is under no obligation to give you a license for Windows XP if it doesn't want to. They've removed it from the general marketplace, but have left even Windows 3.1 in the MSDN subscription packages, even if those are a high price to pay for an old operating system, it's still the going rate.
What a waste of resources. This lawsuit had no hope, and the money spent would have been better off asking Congress to lower the copyright expiration standard for software.
Besides, this was already covered under anti-trust legislation as illegal tying as Vista was the unwanted product tethered to the purchase of most OEM computers. Unfortunately, the chances of this ever being enforced are slim in the United States.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
In addition to tying the purchase of Vista to these machines, MS/OEMs charged a significant amount of money to replace Vista with the desired OS (Windows XP) which she claimed raised prices relative to a competitive marketplace which is certainly true.
That is subjective and further irrelevant because the question is not whether you wanted Vista on the machine but whether the purchaser wants Vista on the machine. To her and millions of others, Vista was very undesirable.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
That's pretty much my opinion on any current desktop operating system. They're all just good enough. I currently use Linux pretty much exclusively, except for a VM instance of XP, so I've learned how to deal with and get around anything that bugs me, but I would imagine the same could be said for both OSX and WinX.
There really hasn't been anything new in the desktop world for decades, other than eye candy. Filesystems (which actually could have an impact on how we handle our data) have tended to evolve, rather than radically change.