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