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Microsoft Antitrust Oversight Ends
dcblogs writes "The US Department of Justice remedies supervision in the Microsoft antitrust case ends Thursday, closing the landmark case, which began in 1998. But the questions posed by trial federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's attempted remedy remain: Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Not really,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
Microsoft's dominance over the desktop, especially office desktops, still gives it too much monopoly power for Microsoft to compete fairly when combined with Skype's net phone dominance.
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make install -not war
Yes, the guy who was a good engineer 40 years ago when he was in the right place at the right time to properly design a fundamental internet protocol that has stayed relevant ever since.
That's why he's a Google evangelist, not a Google engineer.
Besides, I spent all afternoon in his DC office about 5 years ago. He's also a top Google bullshitter. His position on Microsoft's monopoly effect is entirely based on whatever lobbying position Google has taken this week.
He certainly doesn't have indisputable assertion powers.
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I find it interesting that because of the ruling MS could no longer dictate that OEMs not put any crapware and couldnt force its own free AV onto them. So end users now get these machines with a fairly decent version of windows, but bogged down in crapware and with multiple AV products screaming for subscriptions which most people ignore.
I'd rather the court just break them up into OS, office, and enterprise software solutions than this kind of odd hand-holding that in the end didn't do much good.
Open Source was going to take over the horrible overly expensive commercial unix market regardless. Apple would still be around and even kept alive by MS to avoid regulators, etc.
Outside of the Netscape issue, I dont think this was justified. I'd rather the court better handle this as its own issue. I'd also would rather have legislation in place that controls whether a large corporation can produce free/bundled software against a small competitor on a case by case basis. We already have undercutting and dumping laws for other industries.
I honestly think that even without this ruling Firefox, Linux, and Apple would have done just as well. The lack of a breakup really just turned this into a useless compromise. Shame the government had the balls to take them to court, but not to actually win anything.
Lotus made more from 1-2-3 when they sued Borland over elements of QuatroPro than they ever made from software license sales.
There's plenty more of that coming in the next few years...
The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun, the IP War has!