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.'"

Comments

When did it actually start?

[gearloos]

It never actually started.

Re:When did it actually start?

[spire3661]

Do you even know who Vinton Cerf is?

Re:When did it actually start?

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:When did it actually start?

[metalmaster]

If Google opened up their search engine wouldn't it just allow developers to make clones?

If im not mistaken, the meat of a search engine is the algorithms that organize compiled results. If you copy Google's search algorithms, your search produces results identical to those of a Google search. How is that innovative? How does Google keeping their algorithms to themselves stifle innovation? Additionally, if Google open-sourced their search engine it would allow a SEO to see exactly how things tick and exploit Google's advertising arm. That'd make it even more useless than it already is.

Re:When did it actually start?

[Dhalka226]

They claim it is beneficial for companies to open source their products and keep customers by offering better services than others. It's an interesting claim from a company whose main product is closed.

That only applies to fields where you actually can offer better service. The value of a search engine is entirely based on the quality of the results. A company like Red Hat can open its code and yet still make a decent profit by offering support contracts and other custom services, while the open source nature, at least potentially, improves that core product.

If they release their code and all the data that helps their results be better, how, exactly, can Google differentiate themselves from the field? "We have a prettier website!" Yeah, no.

Open sourcing core products works for some fields, but not all of them. Pretending they're all equivalent doesn't make it so.

Re:When did it actually start?

[gad_zuki!]

Well said. People quickly forget that when a high profile employee speaks, hes just giving verbatim the position he'd paid to take. He's not some freewheeling loudmouth who does what he wants. Its employer/employee relationaship all the way down.

Re:When did it actually start?

[VortexCortex]

If Google opened up their search engine wouldn't it just allow developers to make clones? If im not mistaken, the meat of a search engine is the algorithms that organize compiled results. If you copy Google's search algorithms, your search produces results identical to those of a Google search. How is that innovative? How does Google keeping their algorithms to themselves stifle innovation? Additionally, if Google open-sourced their search engine it would allow a SEO to see exactly how things tick and exploit Google's advertising arm. That'd make it even more useless than it already is.

No, that's the brains of a search engine. The "meat" of a search engine is the database that is created using the algorithms... Google open sourcing their code would allow others to build a Google, but with empty data sets... Ergo: It would be so far behind that it wouldn't just be non-innovative, it would be less relevant. With AGPL licensed Google search code release, competitors could add improvements to the code, but it would do them little good against Google (because Google would be able to take advantage of the innovation of others).

My conclusion is along the same lines as yours, Google's search source code is only worth anything if they also provide the dataset they've built up over the years, and even then competitors would have little incentive to improve the codebase if it means sharing the tech with Google.

Re:When did it actually start?

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, if google opened up its search engine, then result spamming would reach epic proportions. Spammers would know exactly how google ranks sites, and could then game the system to make erection pills show up for every result no matter what you entered.

Re:When did it actually start?

[Missing.Matter]

Isn't that equivalent to security by obscurity? I mean, after all the Linux kernel is open to anyone so Linux should be riddled with viruses, right?

Re:When did it actually start?

[webmistressrachel]

"make erection pills show up for every result no matter what you entered"... ... they're already doing a pretty good job at this, I think I would probably start building my own database if it got any worse... Google - Don't Open THAT Sauce, Please!

Re:When did it actually start?

[billcopc]

Evangelist, bullshitter, to anyone with a working prefrontal cortex, are synonyms. The fact that corporations would associate a job title with the likes of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that right there should raise a million red flags.

If you need to pay someone to convince people, you are selling lies, plain and simple. If they were providing verifiable facts, they'd be instructors, educators, professors... not evangelists.

Good

[atomicbutterfly]

This means Microsoft can finally start bundling useful things like Microsoft Security Essentials in Windows 8 without being hounded by the feds.

Re:Good

[drb226]

My sarcasm detector is indecisive on this one.

Re:Good

[mjwx]

This means Microsoft can finally start doing the illegal things they've been doing behind closed doors out in the open, like strong arming suppliers without being hounded by the feds.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Good

[rolfwind]

This means Microsoft can finally start bundling useful things like Microsoft Security Essentials in Windows 8 without being hounded by the feds.

Yeah, because marrying Internet Explorer to Windows was a real winner in the security arena.

There are many reasons why stopping MS from bundling their solutions to all things the last decade was actually good for consumers.

Re:Good

[ozmanjusri]

My sarcasm detector is indecisive on this one

How about expressing it differently:

"Microsoft now has a choice between making a secure OS, or bundling Security Essentials with their insecure OS."

Re:Good

[Penguinoflight]

He's probably referring to the relationship of an OEM who is granted an illegal discount.

On the one hand this company now has fewer market options; in today's market this is a minor inconvenience and often a blessing in disguise; global markets don't favor companies that have a hundred mediocre solutions.

The OEM's advantage to receiving illegal discounts regards how this effects potential competition - if Microsoft or Intel offer the big players half-off for their exclusivity agreements the barrier to entry climbs for small businesses. This can create a situation where an individual will spend more on the components of a computer than the complete product with support agreements from one of these laughing OEMs.

The lucrative situation doesn't make this any less wrong, it still hurts consumers and small businesses alike.

Re:Good

[rolfwind]

That is not a valid comparison. Internet Explorer (with its addition of Active-X controls) was an obvious security nightmare by design. On the other hand, Microsoft Security Essentials has been well received as a good, lightweight AV solution. Unlike IE, its inclusion in Windows would definitely increased security of the OS.

Of course it's a valid comparison. What happened to IE when it reached 90%+ marketshare? It stagnated like crazy. You don't think that will happen to an A/V package that's automatically bundled in and will get predominant marketshare just by virtue of riding some coattails?

Re:Good

[Gadget_Guy]

The first time I ever came across complaints about an operating system ruining somebody's market by bundling the functionality in an update was back on the Amiga. Whenever an OS gets more features then you are bound to negatively impact someone. But is that a good reason not to do it?

Vista introduced a much improved firewall that previously required the purchase of a third party solution. Sucks for the likes of ZoneAlarm, but shouldn't a good OS have a firewall as standard? It is the same for anti-virus technology. Security is something that is entirely appropriate to be handled by the operating system.

As long as they keep the API for the other AV solutions to hook into, then there is nothing wrong with providing a default option. Sure it is essential to have competition to spur things on, but Microsoft do have an incentive to not let MSE stagnate: the more viruses that slip through, the less secure it make the entire operating system seem.

Re:Good

[mjwx]

"Illegal discounts"? What in the world are you on about?

What's illegal isn't the discount, it's what they ask in payment.

I.E. unless you agree to never sell one of our competitors products, we will charge you full retail pricing, which is about 5 times what your competitors are charging. In effect they remove the ability of a manufacturer to compete by denying them the special deals that their competitors receive. As a monopoly, this is quite easy to do.

It's those sort of proviso's are illegal and as the GP said, hurt both consumers and business alike.

Hard to say that, but google really looks evil?

[spaceplanesfan]

"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.'""

Sure, open source is strong, but you claim that Microsoft didn't make tech innovation suffer?
And what about all these small OSes that died?
What about all these small firms that made competing programs and were crushed by Microsoft?
Really, I am not a Google hater by any means, but I don't like that.
(And I don't like that they didn't release Honeycomb source regardless of excuses they provide.)

Re:Hard to say that, but google really looks evil?

[Archangel Michael]

This has been my position for a few years now. Linux's success can be partially put on the shoulders of Microsoft. To mangle a Voltaire quote ""If Linux did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it". Linux was and is the best foil against Microsoft. Today, it is running in thousands of places where Windows and Microsoft Products aren't nor could be. Microsoft is a Windows company (I've said it before), they have one product that makes them money, and that is Microsoft Windows / Office ecosystem. Everything they do, is built around Windows.

The web, (and Google, Apple) are going to slowly eat away at the desktop marketshare of Windows in such a way that most people will miss it. It is already happening. We have Laptops and Android/iPhones that do much of what we need done day to day. And with iPad and Android tablets, they are going to further eat into desktop market.

This is why I think that Skype is going to die a slow painful death, perhaps everywhere but on Windows. It will become a Windows only product, and die on the dying market. Don't get me wrong, windows will be around for a long long time. But its influence is diminishing, but will never go away.

And all of that is made possible by Microsoft Domination in the 90s that gave rise to a little known hobby OS created by a kid in Finland. Because it was free.

"FTFY," said Vinton Cerf, ...

[Samantha Wright]

said Vinton Cerf, one of the fundamental architects of the technology that has shaped human experience in the past thirty years and also Google's chief Internet evangelist.

I guess Computer World doesn't do much background checking on the people they interview for robot-like micro-snippets?

i dont buy any of this

[decora]

if it hadn't been for this anti-trust case, Microsoft would have crushed Apple like a bug, just like it did all it's other competitors before it. Anyone remember Wordperfect? Do you remember the guys who invented the spreadsheet? Anyone remember the company who invented visual programming? Anyone remember the company that put out the first commercial web browser? Anyone remember GEOS? BeOS??

Instead, Microsoft had to actively support Apple, including the massive investment in porting Office to Mac, release after release, even through Apple's transition to a BSD-like subsystem. Why? Because Microsoft didn't want to get sued again. That's the only reason it has allowed Linux to live; SCO was just a test fire to see if Linux would blink. Now comes the Patent Wars, which will crush Linux into the dirt.

No hedge fund shareholder of Microsoft is going to put up with this open source hippie bullshit. They are, instead, going to scream out and pound the podium: "Law and fucking order!". And that is who controls Microsoft and other public IT companies - shareholders, banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, etc. None of them understand open source, they barely understand copyright law. What they do understand is the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. And all of this Linux shit is getting in the way of their profit margins.

Re:i dont buy any of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you remember the guys who invented the spreadsheet?

Yes. And they'd be the first people to say that Lotus was the company that killed them. And when MS pretty much crushed Lotus (till IBM took them over), it was karma coming back to them.

BeOS failed because there were no apps and it ws over-hyped as this "modern" OS. It was cool, for sure..

Wordperfect?!? Pft. It sucked. MS jumped on the GUI bandwagon first while WP was still pushing their very expensive backward product. Wordperfect killed Wordperfect

Re:i dont buy any of this

[Rhodri Mawr]

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!

Re:i dont buy any of this

[maztuhblastah]

the massive investment in porting Office to Mac, release after release, even through Apple's transition to a BSD-like subsystem.

Yeah, about that...Office for Mac was never a port.

It's existed as a separate, independent codebase ever since the 80's. The MBU shares file format specs with the Office team proper, but there's virtually no code overlap.

Re:i dont buy any of this

[man_of_mr_e]

Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die. And it has little to do with Microsoft (though certainly, they have their hand in it).

That reason, is that they fail to provide a product that consumers want. Microsoft is really good at making consumers want it's products, thus it gives people what they want, and people buy it. Let's look at your examples.

Wordperfect? They sat on their laurels after Windows was released, were late with a Windows product, and that product sucked and their existing userbase did not like it. They failed, time and again, to produce a product that their customers wanted in the GUI world. They ruled DOS, but they miscalculated how quickly DOS would die, and how people would quickly jump ship to a better product. In other words, Wordperfect created suicide. Later owners of the technology didn't do a lot to differentiate it from the by then dominant Word. Then, the companies that owned the technology did not put enough money behind it, and they would sell it off again and again before it could gain traction.

The guy that invented the spreadsheet is Dan Bricklin, and Visicalc was killed by Lotus. Microsoft didn't even have a decent spreadsheet until years after Visicalc was dead.

visual programming? I don't think that term means what you think it means. I'd be interested to know what company you're talking about.

The first commercial web browser? That was Spry. They sold a product called "Internet in a box", derived from NCSA Mosaic. This product existed and died before Microsoft even entered the market. So i have to wonder exactly how it was that Microsoft killed them. Spyglass was the next, and though they licensed the name Mosaic and technology from NCSA, they never used any of the code and wrote everything from scratch. It's true that Microsoft was the cause of their destruction, but it was because Microsoft out-developed them. They had 1000 Developers on the IE team, and spyglass had 20. None of this had anything to do with anti-competitive behavior, other than that Microsoft could use it's massive war chest to out-develop everyone else, and frankly there is no law against that.

You should really read http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html as that covers it pretty well.

GEOS? Are you freaking kidding me? That was an 8086 based task switching system, no memory management, etc.. it did a lot, sure.. but they didn't have the resources to make that into any kind of major product.

Finally, we get to BeOS. BeOS was killed by Apple, not Microsoft. Ok, Microsoft may have leveled the killing blow, but apple crippled them to the point that a toddler could have killed them. Why? Because BeOS was positioning itself to be the next MacOS. They thought it was a done deal, until apple went behind their back and bought NeXT instead (just noticed, both of those have 3 capital letters and one lowercase, an e in both cases). Be had put all it's eggs in the Apple basket, and apple crushed them. In a last ditch effort, they decided to port to x86, but they were already a dead man walking and only had a handful of developers doing all the work. They couldn't support a commercial OS with that.

I think we've found a happy place.

[pecosdave]

Apple is big. Arguably the biggest player right now, but it's arguable and that's a good thing.

Microsoft is the has been that isn't forgotten and still wields power.

The previous two are big enough to keep Google from really taking over, and is the only player that has truly embraced what the public wants (though minus the draconian parts Apple does a good job of that too).

Linux is huge, what the public really wants even though the masses aren't smart enough to realize it's what they want. They're happy as long as we spoon feed it to them with Android phones and in embedded devices they use and love while calling Linux that freaking weird hard to use thing their nephew likes.

The technology world is at a happy place. I don't know if smacking Microsoft down with the court system enabled this or not, really I can't guess how things would have worked out without the regulation they got. One of the few things mafia tactics worked on after the break up was making sure mobile music players, especially those in cars, didn't support OGG/Vorbis, but the only reason they succeeded was because Apple was the biggest player and was on the same page without actually having to conspire with Microsoft to do it. I'm certain other software companies were still bullied, but they did keep it on the down low, the PC vendor bullying was put into the spotlight, not fixed, but at least suppressed and lessened.

I think we're finally in a happy place were OS and hardware vendors are concerned.

Now we need to move on to communications companies, deregulation is good, but we need to deregulate enough to allow new competitors to breach the market and we have to stop the big players form bullying local co-ops and count/local level players from building networks where the big guys won't.

Skype Monopoly

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Controversial issue

[gad_zuki!]

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.

Re:Ambiguous

[Samantha Wright]

ComputerWorld may not be stating that Vinton Cerf (leader of the project to design TCP, Internet god of one of the world's largest open source companies, and staunch defender of net neutrality) said that open source makes tech innovation suffer, but they sure are insinuating it.

Kind of like how Old Spice insinuates that their products will make you smell like a millionaire jet fighter pilot, but don't actually say so. They do, however, state that they're insinuating it—which, all things considered, is more honest than ComputerWorld.

What exactly is the world coming to, anyway?

If only they had broken it up!

[davevr]

Then only one company (at most) would have had Balmer as a CEO....

- a Microsoft shareholder


PS: and none of the mini-microsofts would have paid 8 BILLION for F'ing Skype!

In other news ...

[PPH]

... Google staff evangelist speaks out against strict DOJ antitrust enforcement emphasis.

Not so fast Google guy

[krizoitz]

Yup, Open Source is the reason things changed.
Like how Linux became such a strong force in the desktop OS market. Um, wait, let me try that again.
Like how Google's open source search engine revolutionized the way we find things on the web. Nope, that one didn't happen either.
Like how Apple's open source iPhone reinvented mobile phones. Hmm, I'm starting to see a pattern here.
Like how Adope's open source Flash platform brought video and interactive content to the internet. Damn, I know I'll get one.
Like how open source Mp3 technology revolutionized digital music. Fine, I give up.

Look there have obviously been open source projects over the last decade that have had an impact. Linux on the server side (especially coupled with Apache, MySQL, and PHP) for example. But commerical server offerings are still a major part of that landscape. And Android has had strong success in mobile, but before the iPhone changed the landscape it was just a Blackberry look alike. Windows (and too a lesser extent OS X) are still what most people use for their daily computing needs, and frankly it wasn't the open source that led the way on new tablets. Open source has contributed, and its a good thing to have around. WebKit and Mozilla/Firefox on the browser side are the biggest factors in re-igniting the web and HTML 5 looks to do away with the decrepit old Flash hopefully sooner rather than later. But Open Source was NOT the driving force behind inovation the past decade, sorry but it just wasn't.

we'll never know

[Locutus]

we'll never know because the companies not created because of fear of entering the market because of Microsoft's power over the PC market can't be asked. And yes there is fear within the PC desktop, laptop, server market surrounding Microsoft. It was only a few years ago when the head of the Taiwanese Manufacturing Association stated publicly that the association members fear Microsoft on the netbook and PC hardware but not on the phone device side. There are probably thousands of companies who would not enter the PC software market just because their product might compete with a Microsoft based product and they might 'get Netscaped'.

so we'll never know. What I think we do know is that Nokia would not be turned into a Windows shop and Skype would not become a Windows company.

LoB

Re:So I assume Firefox won't work with next patch?

[man_of_mr_e]

You still remember that day huh? That's interesting, because it never happened. No google results. Nothing in the conspiracy theory archives. Strange that.

More than likely, you're conflating multiple different events and mixing them up and putting a netscape tag on it. Certainly, updates to Windows have broken apps, but never because they removed a dll. Most apps break when a new OS is released because the apps were relying on some undocumented functionality that changes in an update. It happens on Macs, it happens on Linux, and it happens on Windows.

Microsoft goes out of their way to make broken apps work in Windows, even competitors. Microsoft actually had to put bugs back in the OS to make various apps function properly on some versions of Windows. On Windows 9x systems, there was a file that contained "hack bits" that were used to enable certain processes to turn on compatibility features for them, so they wouldn't break.

Huge impact on MS and Silicon Valley

[billstewart]

Perhaps you young folks don't remember the late 90s (:-), but the primary business models for Silicon Valley startups in those days were to make something popular and

• Maybe IPO, or
• Sell your company to Cisco if you made hardware, or
• Sell your company to Microsoft if it was software or services.

Microsoft's bought Hotmail for $400M, and it transformed the previously IPO-centric business focus.

The Anti-Trust suit meant you could no longer sell your company to Microsoft, so it was much harder to get venture capital, because VCs wanted to build and sell companies, not try to actually run them and have to deliver profits selling dogfood online. It didn't help that Alan Greenspan raised interest rates six times in early 2000, making capital harder to get, and the Y2K Disaster Prevention Retrofitting business was over, and the market itself was starting to get more realistic about what internet advertising was worth (enough to support free web hosting and search, not enough to support physical delivery of dogfood.*) Al Gore the Senator may have invented the Internet, but Al Gore the Vice President anti-trust activist helped crash the dot-com boom.

* There was one of the Webvan competitors that was making money, not for its investors, but at least for its drivers, but that was only because they weren't just delivering munchies late at night, they were also delivering weed.

Not true about Word Perfect

[dhammabum]

Your point about Word Perfect is false and misleading. Word Perfect died because Microsoft targeted it. MS viewed Word Perfect as a big threat and abused their monopoly position to end that threat. They purposefully changed specifications and withdrew APIs in Windows 95 a month before it was due to be released. Word Perfect/Novell had to recode much of the program, hence it was late and bug ridden. All this came out in the Comes vs MS trial and is about to resurface if Novell continues their case against MS. Before you say prove it, read for yourself:

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720190018

I note your plugging a Microsoft shop in your sig - aren't astroturfers normally less obvious?

Re:Not true about Word Perfect

[man_of_mr_e]

I'm talking about Windows 3.1, not Windows 95. Try 5 years earlier. Before Novell bought Wordperfect.

Also, no. Microsoft did NOT withdraw any API's from Windows 95 a month before it shipped. Windows 95 was RTM'd on July 11, 1995 and shipped August 25th 2005. That means it was finalized 6 weeks before it shipped. What's more, Windows 95 was basically static since December 2004, and went through extensive beta testing with only minor bug fixes and no feature changes.

That's simply not true. I'd thank you to point to an actual document, not the entire archive of comes v microsoft to support your claim.

I know what you're referring to, though. Items 75, 76, and 77 of Novell's complaint. However, the complaint contradicts itself in numerous places. For instance, it claims "In public test versions of Windows 95 released a few months before the final product shipped to consumers, ripped out these programming interfaces without warning to Novell." Ok, a few months not "a month", but let's look further.

"Thereafter, when Microsoft released Windows 95 and Office 95, at virtually the same time, Microsoft suddenly reversed course and documented the programming interfaces. Doing so voided the alternatives that Microsoft previously forced Novell to expend an entire year developing and, at the precise moment when WordPerfect needed to enter the market, forced Novell to spend additional time designing basic functions of WordPerfect all over again."

Uhh.. ok. So where exactly does the "year of development" come from? First Novell claims that "a few months" before the release, microsoft withdrew the API's, then when the release actually happened they claim Microsot then again documented them. At most, this could be, by definition, "a few months" and not a whole years worht of development, other wise Novell would have had to have started their development a year before the release of Windows 95 in order for their "years worth of work" to be voided when Windows 95 and Office 95 were released at the same time, and the API's documented.

Then there's the point that if Microsoft simply withdrew the API's and then redocumented them, all the work they had done previous should have still be valid. They didn't just "throw away the code", it was still there. If the API's suddenly start working again, their previous code would have started working again.

It all makes no sense, and is contradictory. The only conclusion one can come to is that Novell was making crap up, and they lost track of their lies. These are Novell's own words.

Then there is the claim that Novell made that they had to redesign their program because Windows 95 wasn't a pure 32 bit OS, and made the claim that 16 bit applications would not run correctly on a 32 bit OS (complete BS). This is of course a lie, because 16 bit code worked just fine, even on NT which WAS a pure 32 bit system. It's such a ridiculous claim that its laughable.

Oh, here's another fun one "Microsoft refused to publish the APIs that were used to place items on the Windows Clipboard, although its own developers had the documentation. The Clipboard provided a location for storing information until it was "pasted" into another application. Novell ultimately had to forgo this functionality in its applications because the expenditure of time and resources required to duplicate the hidden APIs was prohibitive, so Novell could not provide the same richness of data integration that Microsoft's applications could provide."

The clipboard functions were documented in 1992 When microsoft published the Win32 API for Windows NT. It was in book form, from publishers. Not beta information. The clipboard api did not change in Windows 95 in any way. Wow.

Here's another good one "Further, Microsoft unilaterally announced that OLE would be incorporated directly into Windows, instead of existing independently of the operating system as a technology to be adopted or rejected by ISVs, depending on their assessments of its technical merit."

Re:Not true about Word Perfect

[dhammabum]

Nice strawman you created. No, I was primarily referring to the Microsoft emails and document exhibits in the Comes vs Microsoft trial. Here's a quote from Mr Gates himself (exhibit 2151):

"I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. This means that Capone and Marvel can still live in the top level of the Explorer namespace, but will run separately. We can continue to use the iShellBrowser APIs for MS provided views such as control panel, and can use them for other MS-provided views that don't create a large compatibility or ISV issue."

While telling Novell (Gates' letter to Novell's Frankenburg in 1995 - http://www.groklaw.net/pdf2/NovvMS-104-21.pdf):

"In fact, Microsoft goes out of its way to make early copies of API and protocol specifications available, hold design reviews (that even our competitors attend), and run the largest beta test programs in the industry. Novell has been invited to participate in many of these "Open Process" events -- and all without requiring a tit-for-tat arrangement."

Unfortunately, Novell's claims and these exhibits have not been tested in court. And now with Attachmate in control, I can see a confidential settlement happening. But we can see Microsoft's unpalatable tactics in these exhibits for ourselves, and while Gates poo-poos Novell's anti-trust concerns in the above letter, they were vindicated by the federal monopoly abuse conviction, the adverse settlement with Caldera for Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour with DR-DOS, and with the adverse browser ruling from the EU.

As we saw with the ISO OOXML "Standard" farce, the patent suit against TomTom and now another against Barnes and Noble, Microsoft certainly hasn't changed its ways. I just hope they shrink from the scene sooner than later.

Re:Examples

[sensationull]

You're full of it on the IP6 front, the Windows implementation of IP6 is actually one of the better ones, much better than OSX or at least it was a while ago when tested. IP6 i also supported in XP and is a case of a couple of clicks or I beleive a single command line to enable it. Half the new tech that MS is pushing has heavy reliance on IP6 like DirectAccess and Vista/7 have it enabled by default. Apart from the exception of ISA/TMG MS actually seems to be pushing as hard as any vendor for IP6 including supporting it on products made so long ago that Apple has been through three architectures since.

Of course Google would say this

[CptJeanLuc]

A well-known employee of a technology giant that is frequently threatened with antitrust accusations, is asked about whether the break-up of a monopoly is a good thing, and the answer is "no". Hardly any surprise there.