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

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

[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

[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.)

"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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?