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Microsoft Antitrust Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson Dead at 76
McGruber writes "The NY Times has the news that federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who ruled in 2000 that Microsoft was a predatory monopoly and must be split in half, has died. He was 76 years old. 'A technological novice who wrote his opinions in longhand and used his computer mainly to e-mail jokes, Judge Jackson refuted Microsoft's assertion that it was impossible to remove the company's Internet Explorer Web browser from its operating system by doing it himself. When a Microsoft lawyer complained that too many excerpts from Bill Gates's videotaped deposition — liberally punctuated with the phrase "I don't remember" — were shown in the courtroom, Judge Jackson said, "I think the problem is with your witness, not the way his testimony is being presented."'"
The only question is, where are they now? One was a lawyer, and the other effectively enslaved tens of thousands of Chinese workers. I don't like their odds.
They might be more competitive now had they followed his suggestion to split the company into 3 parts for OS, apps, and services.
I never understood why Microsoft forced Internet Explorer inside Windows. Did they fear Netscape's "API" would really threaten them ?
Two things would survive a nuclear war, roaches and Microsoft Office.
In other unrelated news Ballmer has perfected his chair throwing skills....
For some reason chair skills are very important to MS's upper management.
Look at BillG showing off his chair skills:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxaCOHT0pmI
This space for rent.
Good times.
Technological novice or not he had a better handle on the definition of "operating system" than many of the readers here. A solitaire game or web browser is not part of the computer operating system but instead just an application that comes with it. Rely on textbook definitions and not MS marketing or RMS seeing an opportunity to claim credit for a different project.
He showed bias before the final judgement, and the ruling was nullified. It was the last best chance to break the back of the beast. Instead, we have had to put up with them for these last 13 years. They lied, cheated and stole their way to market domination. There are *hundreds* of companies and *thousands* of people they cheated and stole from. Not just Borland and Stac Electronics and IBM and DrDos and Broderbund. Not just FoxSoft and Adobe, hundreds of others.
There is no more an Afterlife than there is a Priorlife. Afterlife is a fairy tale. That's a scientific fact, and a direct response to the prior comment submitter.
The anti-Apple point is also completely valid based on the historical prescient of how Jackson responded when MS was doing less evil than modern day Apple. MS only forced you to have IE with your Windows, Apple forces you to to have vendor specific hardware with vendor specific software to utilize your vendor specific device. Apple is everything Microsoft was not allowed to be a decade ago.
his botch may have been the downfall of the beast.
As others have already mentioned: Microsoft is in decline. Between Windows 8 and the Xbox One, few if any consumers are interested in their products for the sake of their products anymore. In their hubris they've taken a shotgun to their own foot and are repeatedly pulling the trigger.
The initial IE was purchased from Spyglass for a small sum plus royalties on sales. Needless to say they were screwed. When Microsoft later claimed it was an integral part of the operating system, Spyglass claimed the royalty on a basis of Microsoft's Windows sales. This was settled out of court, but some damn fine cars were seen driving the roads of Naperville, Illinois, soon thereafter.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Microsoft was doing embrace, extend and extinguish. They should have known better than leave out the .dll Netscape uses. Glad they got bit. Now only if more judges would rule against other monopolies and oligopolies. We have broadband without competition because when the state competes, it is unfair to Comcast. The cell phone carriers lock you into a contract, but you can't leave the contract even if they're not holding up their end of the agreement. Since the corporations bought out the government, there is like no regulation anymore.
There is nothing wrong with leaving IE on every OS and really if there is no IE how am I going to download Firefox?
in posting a GNNA BUWLA, or BSD be forgotten in a
Coincidence or plot by Microsoft? You decide.
"In order to access our Web site, your Web browser must accept cookies from NYTimes.com"
Fuck You.
Just like Standard Oil, MS was targeted by government because it didn't play by the government rules, didn't "share" part of its success with the politicians the same way other companies did.
This is destruction of private property rights, nothing else. Government has no place in 'fighting monopolies', when in reality it doesn't fight monopolies it creates them, and the companies that it does destroy are those who are not paying bribes big enough to prevent the destruction.
roman_mir
Judge Jackson put up with all kinds of crap during the antitrust trial that would have garnered normal people punishment for contempt of court. One of the more ridiculous examples was when Microsoft execs presented a forged video as evidence in the trial. Not only was the video doctored, it was doctored in a bad, amateurish manner, just like their software. Even at the time it was a puzzle why that went unpunished. Now we can see that was just standard operating procedures for M$.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Did the police check if the judge received any bread as a gift recently?
Bill Gates might have had Monsanto send him "special" GMO bread.
From another obituary, apparantly one of his jokes:
"The judge had a lively sense of humor. The Washington Post reported that he once told of a law professor, an appellate judge and a trial judge who went duck hunting. When a bird flew over, the law professor referred to a textbook. By the time he looked up, the duck was gone. When a second bird appeared, the appellate judge studied relevant precedents, and the same thing happened.
The trial judge had no scholarly compunctions when a third bird flew into range. He pushed the other two aside, raised his shotgun and blew the bird from the sky.
“I hope to hell that was a duck,” he said. "
Wonder what would have happened if his ruling, (to split MS into separate 'Windows' and 'Office' divisions) would have stood?
I suspect both a better 'Office and a better 'Windows'...
Ok, that's just total nonsense. Microsoft operating system and applications are, simply put, not known for their stability. I can't even imagine you typing that with a straight face.
Yeah, sure. They just haven't been able to break into the mobile device market while that market is in the process of devouring their core business. No big deal, right?
To be fair to the judge, he was the victim of a focused smear campaingn by MS. MS was fighting for its life and did not scruple at using every dirty trick it could.
MS complained about several interviews that Judge Jackson gave with journalists, in which the judge uttered some blunt and unflattering comments about Microsoft and its icon, Bill Gates. The judge said that Gates had a Napoleon complex, that Gates's "testimony is inherently without credibility," and he likened Microsoft's behavior to that of street gangs and drug dealers.
However, the judge's interviews and comments were made after he had heard all the evidence and the cases were closed. He decided that MS was not telling the truth, and that was his job. His only mistake was in granting the interviews before he issued his final judgment.
The judge was careless, certainly, but his decision should have been allowed to stand.
Hate to rain on your parade, but MS will remain very viable in the near future. They may be suffering a loss of mindshare, but the profits are still rolling in and are likely to keep rolling in for the future.
While sales of Win8 is slow, a majority of desktops still sport a variant of WinX as their OS. At some point, it is a certainty their users will want to upgrade and there is no significant competition for WinX right now. Both Lunux and iOS are relatively niche products.
It is still to early to call on Xbox One - while consumer market is heavily negative at the moment, it only ships in November and there is plenty of time for MS to try and catch up. Anedoctal evidence seems to show that most gamers prefer the Xbox One hardware and games, but hate MS policies which can be changed.
Further, any growth for Android is a win for MS. Many Android hardware makers have a licensing patent agreements with MS and MS earns for every device they make.
While reception to Office365 is unenthusiastic, for many people there is no other viable alternative to Office. MS knows, and is banking on this to be their bread-and-butter.
The idea the browser could not be separated was a fraud. Microsoft had just gotten done spending years developing and pushing its COM interface technology, and IBrowser was its flagship plug-and-play example. Anybody should have been able to slap a different browser in there.
Whether the company should be "forbidden" from including a browser is a sepsrate issue. Security problems with IE (drive-by web page view hijackings, for example) probably did more to drive people to non-IE browsers than any judicial fiats.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
My personal favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html
Then you'll realise that YES, Microsoft DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE.
The way active desktop was done also indicates the cluelessness of microsoft on how the network works. That ONLY makes sense on a completely air-gapped private network. For which you weren't licensed...
But guess what: your PC builder will install them for you.
He can do the same for your web browser too. But Microsoft told him he could not install whatever browser he wanted for his customers, to differentiate his offerings from others and instead had to use Microsofts required browser.
And without that copyright, Microsoft wouldn't even exist.
"I have survived your predecessors, boy, and I will survive you!"
Companies which take the long view always win.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I do like the fact that Microsoft jumped through such hoops to get vendor lock-in, that all these years later it bit them in the butt because corporations are hanging on to XP simply because of non-standards compliant IE 6...which they tied to the OS. Hahahaha.
The real obstacle to Microsoft on the desktop over the next few decades is not Linux or OS X, it is prior versions of Windows that had some feature that won't work in a new version. Again, Hahahaha.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
May he rest eternally, viewing the blue screen of death.
"Good.....good..."
I remember following the MS antitrust trial and hearing about him falling asleep on numerous occasions. I guess now that he's dead he can sleep as much as he wants.
I wonder how many people of his caliber are still out there serving as judges and i pray to god that i never have to deal with one of them
that Microsoft would remain a monopoly over my dead body?
Hmm...., there you go Microsoft.
Technological novice or not he had a better handle on the definition of "operating system" than many of the readers here. A solitaire game or web browser is not part of the computer operating system but instead just an application that comes with it. Rely on textbook definitions and not MS marketing.
Users have never been interested in the geek's textbook definitions.
They are shopping for systems. They like consistency. In-store demos. The out-of-the-box experience. Core applications which share a common look and feel with the desktop or mobile UI. Bare bones doesn't sell worth spit.
So? The beige box under the desk is not a "hard drive" no matter what the lowest common denominator says.
Similarly I don't see why we should accept the MS marketing department definition of an operating system over the textbook one - yet so many have.
Until Netcraft confirms. Have you people gone soft or something?