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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.
Why can't the system have a panel of retired judges look at civil cases before a full trial to ensure it is warranted? If the plaintiff wants to move anyway when told there is not case, so be it. But the loser and the loser's lawyer should have to pay something to the winner. There has to be some meaningful consequence for the losers.
> There has to be some meaningful consequence for the losers.
Almost nobody wants to go to court. (Attorneys sometimes do because it's fun to do advocacy before the court, but most of them are smart enough to put client interests first. Debt Collection agencies also want to because they're almost never opposed, because people don't have money to fight them, but they don't even really think of it as going to court.) Courts also have pre-trial systems in place to try to get the parties to agree to a settlement before trial is necessary--pretrial conferences serve that function in most courts. A judge can look at the record and say "Are you sure you don't want to just settle this?"
Losing a lawsuit that you've spent years on (and likely paid for someone else to spend years on) is a pretty meaningful consequence for the losers.
You've also got the problem that the bigger the consequence to the loser, the less likely they are to bring legitimate claims to court.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Even Microsoft admitted Vista was bad and worked hard on 7 to get it to market fast before Vista irrevocably harmed their image.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Unfortunately a lot of Linux flavours take their cue from Windows
FTFY. "Queue" means something else entirely.
At any rate, I don't think I'd say Windows sucks any worse than pick-your-own-distro-Linux. Why? Because I use them for entirely different purposes. As long as I'm a PC gamer, neither Linux nor OSX is going to serve my needs; as such I can hardly say Windows "sucks", since it's the only OS that actually does something I really want to do! (And no, wine is not sufficient.)
If you're going to say "Windows is worse than Linux", you really do need to qualify that with what tasks you're talking about; clearly, each OS has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it's silly to pretend one is unilaterally better or worse than the rest.
No, you're good if the plaintiff doesn't prove you did it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Having recently started working with a Mac, I am actually really surprised at how far behind Windows and Linux OSX is in UI. It is inconsistent, and poorly designed compared to it's modern counterparts. I mean, you have to jump through some pretty fiery logic hoops to come up with a good reason that a green plus would shrink a window.
oh please use your brain. how were they forcing them to not sell XP? by not selling it to them in the first place!!!!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
This is from the article:
Computer makers, not Microsoft, charged users the additional fees for downgrading a new PC from Vista to XP at the factory. However, Alvarado did not name Lenovo Group Ltd. in her lawsuit.
She sued MS for a practice of the OEM. Wrong defendant.
It's possible that she could have shown vertical market manipulation, but that might not have been relevant. Such practices might give rise to a federal antitrust suit, but she brought a state unfair practices action.
I'm no expert in the laws of Washington state, but from the article it appears that among other things she had to show that she did not receive value for her money and she failed to do so.
72.54% of Windows users continue to use XP, so it is abundantly clear that the the market prefers XP to 7/Vista. If Microsoft had any competitors they would be forced to continue selling XP in order to avoid losing market share, however their monopoly means they do not have to worry about this since there literally aren't any competitors*. They are therefore abusing their monopoly by forcing 7/Vista onto a market that does not want it. What the judge says is true and Microsoft really aren't benefiting from this since they get a sale whether it's XP or 7, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a clear case of severe monopoly abuse. I certainly feel abused because I want to buy a laptop with Windows XP but all the options in my price range come with Windows 7 Home Premium. How can the judge conclude this isn't monopoly abuse? Somebody get the EU!
*Mac OS is not a direct competitor to Windows since I can't legitimately install Mac OS on my PC. Alternatives like Linux aren't quite ready for the mainstream desktop user yet.
Most of the world's non-embedded computers run Windows. When a company reaches that level of influence, it ceases to be just another firm and instead becomes a part of our societal infrastructure. It's certainly reasonable to hold such organizations to a higher standard than we hold smaller organizations. The power company can't "do as they want" either.
As long as Microsoft wants to enjoy the lucrative benefits of being a singular part of society's information infrastructure, society ought to have a say in how Microsoft is run.
You might argue that imposing such restrictions is "punishing success". That's hardly true. The people responsible for Microsoft's growth have been rewarded many times over. If Microsoft finds regulations unbearable, it can split itself in two smaller companies, or shrink some other way. Then, it would no longer be subject to the same scrutiny.
But as long as Microsoft
In addition to tying the purchase of Vista to these machines, OEMs charged a significant amount of money to replace Vista with the desired OS (Windows XP)
Fixed that for you. It was strictly an OEM charge.
A computer should be separate from the software; as such a customer should never be compelled to buy a computer conditional on also buying the software on the device. Of course this is already covered under US antitrust law as illegal tying even if it is rarely if ever enforced.
In other news, Apple Computer has hit an all time high in the stock market...
As a user of Linux, OS X and Windows, Windows is still the worst. Unfortunately a lot of Linux flavours take their queue from Windows where they should be taking them from OS X.
I believe the word you are looking for is "cue." That said:
The latest client OS webstats from Net Applications, W3Schools, and others, should be out early next week. There have been some surprises posted already: Windows 7 eclipses Vista on Steam, 64-bit dominating 32-bit 1 in 5 Windows PC gamers running 64 Bit Win 7.
The one certainty is that Linux will be bringing up the rear.
The Apple OSX model is a tightly integrated - tightly controlled - bundle of OS, UI, hardware, apps and marketing. That targets a profitable upscale niche market little changed in 33 years.
It's not a comfortable fit for a geek.
Windows is shamelessly middle class and commercial.
It is good, serviceable, tech that is available in every form factor and at every price point. The "protected path" is there for the user who thinks Netflix and Blu-Ray offer something of value.
Windows doesn't compell you to buy Corel Draw and MS Publisher when Inkscape and Scribus are available. But neither does it give the GIMP a free ride because of its ideological purity or political correctness.
That seems to be what most folks want.
The green button is a "zoom to fit" button. The plus sign inside might be suboptimal, but there are no "fiery logic hoops" involved. If the window is larger than the "fit" size, it shrinks. The button's behavior is quite consistent--the destination is always the same. Different starting points just lead to different paths.
The plus sign on hover might be suboptimal, but I don't think there's a simple symbol for "zoom to fit"--and zoom is generally regarded intuitively as zooming in. I doubt most people associate the mouseover symbol with the button function, though, given the strong associations people have with color.
For what it's worth, when you click the maximize button on Windows on a window that is already maximizes, it too shrinks back--the button symbol doesn't reflect this, either. I can't really see a meaningful difference.
This may be a petty complaint on my part, but if I click the red X, I expect the application to stop
If I click the close button on a window, I expect the window to close. I do not expect that command to be passed upstream or laterally to other windows. Application-level control is performed at the application-level interface: the menu bar. As a shortcut, some simple apps automatically close when the last document does because the application can't do anything without windows open.
If I have no windows open for a given application, I do not expect that application to be considered to be "running".
And I wouldn't expect that closing desktop windows would terminate an application that continues to work in the background without open windows.
Word, iTunes, Firefox, etc. however all CAN continue to run without windows open, playing music, downloading files, etc.
It saves me tremendous amounts of frustration that applications with long load times don't shut down when I absentmindedly close the last document I was working on before opening the next.
It's your conditioning entirely because the way windows work in Windows is different, and the popular Linux desktops duplicated the market leader for familiarity. Nothing more and nothing less. The windows model puts the application in a master "frame" if you will, with all the child windows contained within it. Close the frame, close the child windows. Apple doesn't use the frame; there's no "master" window for most applications.
For what it's worth, when you click the maximize button on Windows on a window that is already maximizes, it too shrinks back--the button symbol doesn't reflect this, either. I can't really see a meaningful difference.
Actually, when you maximise a window in Windows, the button icon changes to reflect a different action will occur when you click it again. This has been true since at least Windows 3.0.
Instead of counting as an XP sale. It is instead counted as a Vista sale, and the marketing clowns at Microsoft get to beat their chests about how well the uptake of Vista was going (in stark contrast to the bad trade press no less). Nothing builds momentum like manufactured momentum...
Your comment is not true at all regarding recent versions of Windows. Flaws in Vista and Win 7 typically only go up to remote code execution as a restricted user, and the user gets a security prompt if the exploit tries to go further. Additionally, IE is sandboxed (unlike FF, Safari and Opera) which means the most common by far vector into the system can not even touch user files. 3 year old Vista was declared by Charlie Miller, mac user and winner of multiple pwn2own hacking contests, to be MORE secure than brand new Snow Leopard, but don't let facts interrupt a good troll..
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
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.
In theory, you're correct. In practice, however, things don't really work that way. What is the content size of a terminal window? Even Apple can't decide. since the "zoom" button in Terminal.app simply fills the screen. Then there's web browsers. Safari seems to implement that zoom style behaviour, but Firefox does not. It's application specific behaviour on a control that appears on every window, and that's what's confusing.
Contrast this with Windows, where the maximise button always either makes the window fill the entire screen, or returns it to its original size. As other commenters stated, the button does indeed change its icon to indicate that this is the case, and it may not be entirely intuitive (two overlapped boxes?) but neither is an x, a - or a + sign with traffic light colours, it's all something the user has to learn.
Alternatives like Linux aren't quite ready for the mainstream desktop user yet.
Yes, but 2010 will be the year of the Linux desktop; just you wait and see...
As long as Microsoft wants to enjoy the lucrative benefits of being a singular part of society's information infrastructure, society ought to have a say in how Microsoft is run.
Society already has a say. They can stop buying Windows.
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