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MS breakup will cost $30 billion?
ibbey writes "According
to a study released today, breaking up MS will cost
consumers $30 Billion dollars due to development,
marketing and support costs required for third parties to
adapt their software to "new Windows descendants," and by
fracturing the market resulting in higher retail costs."
sounds like MS is admitting defeat.. the well sure we lost.. but hey we cant afford to loose.. or really you cant afford for us to loose.. many large companies have used this crap before.. the "sure we lost the law suite, but your the one who is going to pay" thats crap. The truth is that they are going to raise prices even higher.. and then what ther competion will look even better. Maybe MS will loose the strangle hold they have on the desktop/application space. Think of it as punitive damages you assholes. Im sorry..but those guys know how to piss me off.
We can afford it. Go for it.
Bottom line? If the open-source community wishes to be taken seriously,
a) It needs to shed a LOT of its puerile arrogance,
b) Members need to learn to control their desire to immediately demolish MS, or at least consider the consequences,
c) and it needs to find people who write coherently.
It seems like things like lost time due to crashes high cost for M$ software and various bugs costs much more than $30mil.
How many of you have gotten the infamous "I can't print?!?!" thing over the phone and then everything works great after a reboot? I don't support M$ platforms anymore, but when I did, I told people to always reboot before calling me and ppl I know have the same policy.
Note that phone systems are not akin to software in one important regard; there is very little advantage to making one phone system incompatible with another, without providing a massive new set of features. People depend upon interoperability with phones, while software companies are not really compelled to have products that coexist peacefully.
Heh. That division between NT and Win9x might actually be advantageous to MS nowadays; people sometimes own licenses to both, since
a) NT4 has poor hw support, but
b) Win9x is remarkably unstable.
And owning both costs $$$; (well, not that much for employees, but the general public). Not to mention their incompatibilities regarding fs support and so forth.
And, from what I've read, NT5/Win2k will likely break a variety of old programs; not surprising, given it's a massive re-org... meaning perhaps people w/ legacy systems who want NT5 features may end up owning *3* MS OSes, at exorbitant prices. That unification may actually end up costing more, even in the long term. What fun...
On a three-way breakup; assuming it went hand-in-hand with the publicization of all shared APIs, this could end up boosting the Wine project. And with free OSes becoming more viable, and the cost model for suite software changing (now, StarOffice is available for non-commercial, personal use -- even on Windows!), perhaps only the home software group's turf is relatively safe.
Hmm. That's a lot of money. However, aren't the hardware manufacturers already wasting a bunch of money rewriting their drivers to work under Windows 2000? From what I've seen, porting drivers to Windows 2000 is nontrivial, and it breaks some applications too.
Besides, how can the cost of splitting up MS get passed onto the consumer? Microsoft is just a company, so they can't tax us. If they raise prices people will buy less MS products (although their mindshare might remain the same due to piracy). If NT is selling as well as MS claims it is, they should just raise the price of NT Server another $100 or $500 to cover the splitup costs (still less than a 50% increase).
He could at least have been more honest and admitted that he just pulled the number out of his butt!
Jeesh!
Go figure. I was watching the Long Beach Formula Atlantic race today, and David Cutler crashed (yes, that Cutler). With his car in the tire barrier, I got a good view of his sponsor: Compaq (it used to be Microsoft).
What is it, shake down the box makers so you can play gentleman driver?
Maybe the authors of this study would agree that IBM, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, HP, et al. should pool their assets or merge. After all, they're each paying for independent development costs for machines that are functionally equivalent. Surely they could save the engineering and advertising costs by merging, which will naturally get passed along to the consumer. If it weren't for the redundancy, PC prices would be falling. Oh yeah, PC prices _are_ falling. OOPS.
I'd ask you this.
What has a fragmented and competitive unix market done for Unix? Can you honestly say the last 30 years of infighting was a good thing?
There is a pretty big difference between AT&T and Microsoft.
The breakup of AT&T didn't cause peoples telephones to suddenly become incompatible with new versions of telephone service from competing companies. In fact, the hardware the consumer had to purchase was pretty damn cheap even if it had become incompatible (which it didn't).
Operating systems are different than almost any kind of monopoly ever before. Why? Because they are complex beasts that can easily become incompatible and the typical user investment in devices which utilize the service is much higher.
More importantly, what incentive is there to use any of the MS Windows clones? Either they're the same (and then no reason not to buy windows other than potentially price) or they're incompatible (in which case there will be very little which will support it).
Above all else, how does this help Linux? I don't think it will.
Why does everyone think a fragmented market is good for the consumer? It won't necessarily drive cost down.
Linux has helped drive down the cost of personal Unix, but the cost of commercial liscenses certainly hasn't changed much over the years.
Imagine other markets in which fragmentation would be disasterous. What if every car required a different kind of road to drive on or a different kind of gas to run on. (equivelant to hardware and software provided by the user).
What if every brand of TV needed a unique signal to recieve a picture? Or what if every TV station required a TV that only worked with that station?
What if every brand of VCR required a different tape format?
Clearly the market moves towards monopolies of various formats. It's easier on the consumer. The problem with PC's is that we're still trying to change the formats and get pissed when people don't want to.
I disagree. In the competetive market, the various Unix vendors _have_ attempted to differentiate their products. They do this by technology.
However, they often provide different, incompatible, interfaces to the technology. This is the problem you're talking about.
What are the possibilities of $ 120 bln cost on consumers if MS is not broken.
Each company wants to get the most money it can. It can either appeal to consumers by having lower prices than the others, or better product (maybe fewer bugs, maybe new technologies). The prices can only go so low. After that, they'll have to differentiate on technology.
All of this assuming, of course, that the companies are not colluding in some way.
"Note that phone systems are not akin to software in one important regard; there is very little advantage to making one phone system incompatible with another, without providing a massive new set of features."
Actually, that sounds exactly like operating systems. Unless you provide compelling new functionality, making your interfaces incompatible is just shooting yourself in the foot.
NT truly is better (well, less crummy) than Win95. If it hadn't required hardware that is just now becoming inexpensive, they wouldn't have this problem.
Lack of compatability is a sure sign of unreasonable control of the market - if I can tell you you're screwed unless you throw away everything you just bought, and you *put up with it*, clearly my excess of power has become harmful.
Nope.. Still short.. If we are talking about software compatibility.
Win 3.1 (still a lot of legacy use), Win 3.11, WFW and WFW+win32
Win 95 release, Osr1, Osr2, Osr2.5 (all with differnt software issues)
Win NT 3.51, NT 3.51 release and SP1/SP2/SP3..SP8, Citrix Winframe, NT4 SP1 SP2 SP3 SP4, Win NT 4 term server, WinNT 5 beta
WinCE 1.x, WinCE 2.x
Win98, Win98 osr (soon)
Each of these service releases must be supported seperatly for most software, like they are completely differnt OSes..
Count them up: 32 differnt OSes!
On a PII 266 running 2.2.7 I can play 12 mp3s at once into ESD and still run netscape without any problems..
What has a fragmented competitive UNIX market done? It has created LINUX Dude!!!! It has created FreeBSD. It has created an operating system legacy that spans beyond MS's short rise to the top.
NT has only been around for about 5 years and it is showing signs of cracking and breaking. UNIX has been around how long and still usable????
The cool thing about a UNIX application is that it works well even years into the system. The Internet runs on UNIX.
What frustrates me with NT is that every two months things change. Lets start with DDE, then OLE, OLE2.0, then ActiveX, then COM, then DCOM, then COM+. Sure they are all kinda the same, but enough differences are present to frustrate the f**k out of you.
Sorry, but competition has only reinforced what is good about operating systems and programs. And about UNIX not being easy to use? That is not entirely true. It is a different mindset.
Yes MS has done some good to the entire society, but lets not extend ourselves and say UNIX is bad!!!
Weeeeeellll. Thank you Mr. Helper!
Aren't there enough potential problems with Y2k to risk adding
even more costs caused by adapting to a Microsoft slpit up?
Microsoft is a valuable national commodity. Billions are invested
not only in software in use every day on which our economy
depends, but in investments Microsoft itself makes in all sectors
of the American and worldwide economy. Do we need another
1930's style depression because of meddling by do-gooders
like Nader or self-appointed policemen like DOJ?
Let the free market take care of this. If consumers and businesses
and computer resellers want to do business with somebody
besides Microsoft, the can! And without any shocks to our
national and global economies that drastic remedies to our
free market system might cause.
Let's keep a good thing, and not throw out the baby with the
bathwater!
When was journalism ever serious.
As long as I can remember it s Yellower than anything else.
Journalism (no matter what the self-rightous juornalists tell you) is more about selling add's, copies,ect.
than telling the TRUTH.
Lack of compatability is a sure sign of unreasonable control of the market - if I can tell you you're screwed unless you throw away everything you just bought, and you *put up with it*, clearly my excess of power has become harmful.
But you see, that's just it. Microsoft can't just tell everyone to throw everything away and put up with it. If they could, we'd all have been running NT in 1993. Windows 95 was the result of the market thumbing it's nose at Microsofts will and saying they won't buy into NT until it changes.
Don't forget the most important "consumers" for the PC OS market are not home users, hobbyests,
schools, unix fans, slashdot readers, and so on. The real consumers are the businesses who collectively
made the decision that they want a "standard" desktop OS.
That's goes to Hardware MFG also, I work for one of them, and they don't care about Average Joe, They all think that Joe is waste of money, most Joe don't know how to operate the hardware so they have setup TechSupport for every joe.
"OEM" and "Corparations" are the real customer, They'll do anything to sell.
e.g: A harddrive if a OEM wants crappy heads or platters so they can get it for cheaper they'll do it and shit fall off in 6 month.
Techupport: They can make chunk out of them by sending them support person on site and charge them for it.
Just when will people understand the difference between software and objects (hardware). For the sake of sanity sit down in quiet corner and think about it. It's just guys like you who mess up the real issues with the silly banter about cars with different steering wheels and vcrs with varied formats. It is this mentality which has created the patents HELL that software is in now. You need to be talked to. buddy.
Most shows on ZDtv like to talk about M$ products a lot.
Yeah, I think that's the best bet. I don't get why people assume that Microsoft would only be broken up into 3 or 4 companies. Then you're looking at an oligopoly instead of a monopoly, which is no real improvement.
I'd like to see them broken up into 10 or so companies. Just off the top of my head, I can think of:
MSN
Consumer OS's (Win 9x, WinCE)
Enterprise OS's (WinNT, Win64)
Consumer Apps (Works, games)
Productivity Apps (Office, Outlook)
Development Tools (VC++, VBasic, etc.)
Internet Apps (IIS, IE) (OS's would have to pay a
royalty to use IE
As I was saying before I hit submit...
Yeah, I think that's the best bet. I don't get why people assume that Microsoft would only be broken up into 3 or 4 companies. Then you're looking at an oligopoly instead of a monopoly, which is no real improvement.
I'd like to see them broken up into 10 or so companies. Just off the top of my head, I can think of:
MSN
Consumer OS's (Win 9x, WinCE)
Enterprise OS's (WinNT, Win64)
Consumer Apps (Works, Outlook Express, games)
Productivity Apps (Office, Outlook)
Development Tools (VC++, VBasic, etc.)
Internet Apps (IIS, IE) (OS's would have to pay a
royalty to use IE)
Enterprise Apps (Exchange, SQL server)
Hardware
This way, we're creating competition in the OS arena, and getting people used to buying their OS from more than one company. It's also important to seperate the apps from the OS (for reasons which have been repeatedly repeated), and it's even more important to seperate the development tools from the OS and the apps. Also, wherever possible the client should be seperated from the server, in order to encourage the use of open standards.
And none of these companies should be allowed to use the name Microsoft, or anything that resembles it. We might add 'Windows' to that too.
Anyone else think of areas that should be broken off?
--
No matter how hard you work to make something idiotproof, someone will always come along and make a better idiot.
Because it shouldn't happen. The Government has no cause to intervene in a free economy and break up Microsoft. Microsoft's competitors should learn how to run their businesses better rather than go whining to the Government. Instead they spread FUD about Microsoft. What's amazing is that some of you folks aparantly believe them.
Microsoft never intended to replace Windows 3.x with Windows NT 3.x
Replace? Not quite. Succeed? Yes. Microsoft originally did intend NT to be the next mainstream Windows. Windows 9x turned out to be neccessary primarily because backwards compatiblity (expecially with real-mode device drivers) was too hard to do with a protected mode kernel.
Thus the need for an intermediate system (Windows 9x) that would provide a 32 bit enviornment while allowing backward compatibility with old stuff. Once all the old stuff (3rd party drivers, old apps, etc) had time to be updated to new stuff, then it would be "safe" to promote the protected mode kernel (NT) as the mainstream system. At least that had been the plan with calling the next NT "Windows 2000". Looks like there's still some concern about moving the mass market forward though since Windows 98 is going to "version 2".
I agree with pretty much all your other points.
Do you have any basis at all for that assertion? Or are you just making it up?
The consumer benefits from Microsoft being just the way it is. Having a defacto standard is good for consumers and good for software developers. Multiple incompatible programming APIs would be a nightmare. Today it is easy for the average technically ignorant consumer to walk into a store and purchase a software product that will work on their machine. With a fractured market, that capability, and the booming software industry that it created, goes away.
Yes, I agree. You'd see the same fragmentation effects that have occurred in the Unix world as each company tries to differentiate it's product vs. the others. It'd be a nightmare.
So at least you admit the whole lawsuit thing is just extortion. Too bad the States Attorney Generals aren't as honest as you. So you'd let MS "walk" for your piece of the pie. Microsoft earned that money fair and square. It's called capitalism. This kind of Government imposed money redistribution tatics, going after someone just because they've been successful, makes me sick.
Just the opposite is true. You can look at any Windows binary and see what API calls it makes. If MS apps made any undocumented calls it'd be public knowledge. I realize you're claiming just that, but I say no way. Either point to a documented reference that shows this, or admit you're just a FUD spreader.
Some people will say anything to defend Microsoft (why?). Some use the argument that Microsoft makes a technically superior product, but then the question is: where is the technically inferior competition? No competition = no proof. So many people think Microsoft is so great but they do not realize just how much more advanced today's computer technology would be if not for Microsoft's interference.
"Bundling new apps into the OS, hidden APIs in the OS tailored to MS applications etc", dominating a market if done legally and morally is really nothing to be punished for...
That's the kicker now isn't it? MS does all of this to give itself an advantage over it's competitors and to run them out of business. If there were no other competing browsers, IE would certainly be a product that one would have to buy. There are probably other products that are being bundled into NT to choke off competition in other areas too. I suppose the hidden APIs provide a business opportunity for people who publish books or magazines documenting them, but I would rather have all developers on any given platform to have access to the same documentation.
I guess that doesn't include the bilions of dollars it will cost to MS shareholders.
Who cares about shareholders ? If some people are greedy and stupid enough to buy MS shares they have to live with the consequences !!!
Extortion ?
....".
Just like when Micro$oft goes up to PC makers all the time and says "... Do what we say or we'll put you out of business
Just like all the companies that are forced to upgrade to the new version of Office, not because they want to, but because M$ released new encrypted file formats and nobody has a choice.
(SOB !!) (CHOKE !!)
It just breaks my heart !!!
How about letting Micro$oft open up it's piggy bank to pay for $20 billion and let "Big Brother" Bill G. cover the rest ?
Hey you people are not smart if you dont believe that Micorsoft is really really good see why on my web sites pages at http://www.freeyellow.com/members7 /geraldholmes/
Anyone else think of areas that should be broken off?
;-)
Redmond. Break it off and bury the entire city beneath the sea.
Allegedly, the State Attorney Generals want MS to license the Windows source code to several other companies, thereby creating a competitive market. The downfall of this, if you think about it, is that this means we end up with 3 or more companies all pushing Windows (or close derivatives) as the platform of choice - and probably at lower costs. This actually acts to further entrench Windows into the marketplace and would likely drive out non-Windows-like OSes (e.g. Macintosh).
A unique alternative: Require that Microsoft commit to shipping MS Office for Linux for at least the next 5 years. Its the same deal MS did with Apple. This would give Linux an enormous and immediate boost in credibility and usefulness, and ensure that there is a competitive market for operating systems, not just clones of the same Windows base. This achieves the DOJ's goal of increased competition for PC operating systems - without further entrenching Windows as the only OS we will ever see. Think about it!
(I don't have an account so signed in anonymously).
Ed, vbook@vbook.com
With all due respect -- from the POV of people who mostly _aren't_ heavily relying on MS products for our livelihoods (many of us), our opinion may be a little coloured. What about the vast number of end-users who depend on MS products, largely because that's what they've been using for their entire computing experience? What about the impact on businesses and individuals everywhere? Do you really expect them to be _able_ to leave MS en masse, at the drop of a hat, and migrate onto the "free" OSes? That's easy for _us_, perhaps, but there are a LOT of people who have neither the time nor inclination to completely switch their whole IS philosophy and systems. _That's_ who's going to pay; people stuck in the MS world, and will need to pay for the extra development and _support_.
NOT EVERYONE IS A LINUX GEEK. Think about the rest of the world, not just yourselves.
You are absolutely right. And the funny thing is that MS is accusing the Linux community of forking to multiple OS's.
The same source code tree is used for all Linux hardware platforms, from palmtop to 4 processor DEC Alphas. Can the same be said for Windows? I think not.
If you have a palmtop you will be running CE, most desktops run Win3.1 or Win95. Multiprocessor workstations need WinNT Workstation and high end servers need WinNT Server and all of these only run on a limited set of hardware platforms.
You cannot run CE on an IBM Compatible. You cannot run Win95 on a PowerPC. You cannot run WinNT on a StrongArm.
Basically windows sucks.
Why should breaking MS up add 2 extra OS'es? We all know that Bill will be the CEO of one and sit on the board of the other companies. Breaking the law is something that MS does very well. The three companies will probably work exactly the same as they do now to stick it to the competetion.
Natural Monopoly? I think not!
A fracture market may indeed induce competition, but it doesn't appear to induce new technology.
Take the Unix marketplace for instance. dozens of vendors all fighting over who's implementation of what will be the standard for decades. Even today the mostly unified market is still too busy fighting within itself to advance the core OS technologies very fast.
I happen to believe that the OS market would be a lot more advanced today if the Unix community had not been so bent on reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Microsoft is sort of the opposite, but also equally bad. Microsoft doesn't change unless they have to. For the last 10 years or so they've had good incentive to change. They want everyone using Windows NT instead of of crappy 16 bit products. In Microsofts eyes, if everyone were on NT their support nightmares would be greatly reduced. This gives them a huge incentive to try and push people to NT.
Unfortunately, the market didn't agree. So Microsoft was forced to create Win95 and then Win98 in an effort to make the transition to NT more bearable. This effort has also set MS's OS back since they've been spending so much time and effort on compatibility.
Either way, I don't think further fragmentation is going to help anyone.
I'm not quite sure of all the rememdies to MS. But I think that (in addition to whatever happens) they should be fined extremely hard. I don't care if technology moves so fast that the Caldera case or the DOJ case are 'out of date.' What both of them are about is having illegal business acts. The punishment must fit the crime. Otherwise, people will accept that the risk that they get caught because in the long run they have the gains. I would like to see MS fined so harshly that all they have left in cash (without debt) is $20 billion in the bank. Then they won't be able to buy themselves out of everything that they do. That would be less cash on hand than Apple has.
~$2 billion profit on ~$4 billion sales is insane.
I'm not a huge fan of Oracle's CEO, but I tend to agree with him on what to do with MS. Split the company up in 2--one run by Balmer, the other by Gates. They both get a copy of all the current IP. Then let them go at each other. Only the truely open standards would win. But then we'd all have to worry that they would be colluding with each other.
As for Liebowitz, I don't like him. I think that I read on Techweb or someplace that he's one of the university profs that get money from MS by having all his students required to use MS products. So of coarse he's going to make it sound like a travesty to MS.
-Matthew Smith
If breaking up microsoft's monopoly would cost so much, wouldn't that indicate that the Windows OS should be the property of everyone?
The whole study sounds like a giant strawman argument. The point of dividing Microsoft would be to establish public interface standards, not to bastardize Windows. Therefore it has been suggested to break them up along functional divisions: operating system, applications and services.
It's amazing how people like Liebowitz are willing to sacrifice all their credibility and integrity just to protect Microsoft.
Only in the past 12 to 18 months has Microsoft started to market the idea of a single Windows base for all its users.
Not true at all. If you go back and read some of the trade rags from 1992 you'll find the message from Microsoft quite clear. NT will be replacing windows when it comes out. It had even been stated publicly that Windows 3.1 was the last of the line for 16 bit windows, which was why MS had to save face and call Chicago completely 32 bit. This message didn't start to change until early 1993 when it became clear from market tests that the general population wouldn't accept NT's lack of compatibility and huge system requirements. It's no coincidence that work on Chicago began about the time of NT's release.
I worked for one of the major OEM's at that time. We were told the exact same message. Prepare for NT to take over.
It didn't happen.
No, the money won't vanish. It'll be wasted on inefficiency. Having a single dominant standard makes program development and testing easier and more efficient. Having to support a large number of divergant standards will make software development harder, especially for the smaller companies. This is bad for nerds trying to start up their own software companies. Development costs will go up. Thus, cost of products will go up. Consumers will buy fewer due to higher prices. The whole economy will pay.
Nothing about the current system is broke. Don't "fix" it. Nerds are in high demand developing software. As long as Linux doesn't destroy the whole industry by getting everyone to think that software should be free and putting programmers out of business, life will continue to be good.
Yes, the fragmentation of Unix has increased Unix's chances of survival, because having more things called "Unix" makes it more likely that one will survive to keep the name going.
But throwing all personal familiarity biases aside, has Unix's survival been a good thing? Is this OS really the greatest be-all of Operating Systems? I remain unconvinced. Unix was picked up by a lot of different vendors primarily because it was cheap. AT&T wasn't allowed to be in the computer business (Government interference) and thus they gave it out for cheap. If AT&T had been a normal computer vendor, with Unix their proprietary OS, would Unix have survived?
This is an interesting question, because this thread is about whether another Government intervention (MS breakup) would be a good thing in the current environment -- an environment where MS is trying to extend it's consumer reach into big businesses where Unix is currently predominant due to an earlier Government intervention.
I can't outright begin this by saying that Microsoft's splitting up would without any doubt be beneficial to consumers. It is possible, though unlikely, that it would hurt consumers.
....
A quick breakdown of basic economic theory is in order -- Consumer "benefits" (crudely measured) can be considered in the following way. Let us say your are person A. You want to buy Microsoft 98. Surely you would be willing to pay more for your first copy of windows than your 10th -- but you always pay the same price (Microsoft has no way of knowing whether you own 1 or 10 or 100 copies of windows, though it would love to know). So you pay X dollars ($209 I think) for Windows 98. X, (in theory), should be equal to the infra-marginal cost of producing Windows 98 given the total amount consumers buy. So since your were willing to pay X dollars for unit 1, but you only paid $209 (only..) you "saved" X-$209 on that unit. So "consumers" get some kind of "good price" on that particular unit.
However here comes in the sneaky bit. Microsoft wants to be able to charge you more than $209 for your first copy of Windows 98 and a little less for your second copy and so on. However it has no way of knowing how many copies you have right? So it has no way of doing this.
But let us look at another possibility. Let us say that person A really really needs microsoft windows98 cause oh my its just so feature laden. Person B needs it for games. Certainly Person A values microsoft 98 more than B (were assuming Person B is not really nutty and can't live without games). Certainly, Microsoft could charge A more than B. (Ok, if you loose me here, sorry, I really need graphs for this but here goes).
If it charges a price that would allow A to buy, then B wouldn't buy any (Its not worht it), if it charges B's price, then both will buy, but it could do better if it could charge A a certain price and B another price... But it can't do this (at least not easily, how do you know what A is willing to pay, and what B is willing to pay? And how do you know there isnt a person C ? etc)
This is where vertical integration comes into play -- integration of two seemingly seperate markets.. Look at netscape and IE. Most people, a year ago, would have said -- hey IE is seperate from Windows98. Netscape is seperate. They are seperate goods. Now what if market research showed that Person A is someone who uses the machine for work? (Certainly someone who uses windows98 for work has more use than someone who plays at home ? ). Now lets say that Microsoft also notices a BIG increase in use of the internet, in particular intranets get to be pretty popular.
So microsoft notices, damn -
hmm this is gonna get too long..
I might write up a paper on this and publish it.
If your interested in it
email me at : vcdman(at)bantu.com
.. if i get enuf emails, I'll write up something refuting that article.
When the microcomputer industry developed in the late 70s, there were many competing OSs and applications. It quickly became clear that compatibility was important, even fundamental, to users. The industry realized that owning and controlling the standards that provided compatibility was an effective way to succeed.
Microso~1 did it best--other companies tried to make Excel and Word compatible formats, but Microso~1 integrated and morphed the "standards" quickly enough to keep them forever behind.
The Internet is killing Microso~1. MS can't control the standards, allowing other OSs, such as Linux, applications (Netscape), and languages (Java), to come back onto the playing field.
In the case, the DOJ and MS's defense-by-self-immolation has shown MS's strong-arm tactics and bullying. The only remedies that matter will be those that prevent MS from owning the web:
1) No folding Explorer into the OS.
As long as you can run other browsers on the Win OS, Microso~1 is dead. As the web becomes more central to applications and information, the OS matters less and less. (True of Linux, too!)
And frankly, I doubt that remedy even matters. The Internet is too large and made of too many open standards for MS to have a chance to own it all. _Everything_ will gradually go open source as everyone realizes that the way to maintain compatibility is open-source, not sole-source.
The DOJ case is just the end of an expensive lesson we spent the last 20 years learning.
Those USD 30 billion would presumably be used for something.
It would mean more jobs, which translates into more money in taxes to the government, and less money spent on welfare, for instance. Of course, unless the baby Microsofts would magically manage to waste 30 billion without causing any new jobs to be created.
They also seem to fail to consider that Microsoft has one of the highest margins in the business.
I find it highly improbable that splitting up Microsoft would increase cost by so much that they'd have to raise prices... Remember, we're talking about a company that manage to get margins close to 50%, while most other hardware and software companies lie in the 10% - 15% range...
Sure, profits might go down in the short run, but with the treat from OS's like Linux, the baby Microsofts wouldn't be able to afford rising prices.
And if the profits would go down, it would be as a direct result of those companies spending more money on R&D and marketing that again create jobs and thus is another benefit of the breakup to the consumer.
As for creating added cost for other companies... Did they consider that if Microsoft is split up, the baby Microsofts might have to consider standarizing the Win32 API? If they don't, yes, it would cost other companies more to support.
But if they don't, then they have proven that the very corporate culture of Microsoft is too perverted to be allowed to live on - if they want to fracture the market while everyone else is working on standarization, they deserve to die.
Isn't this just FUD? So what if people have to adapt their software, everyone must constantly adapt. Why do people constantly want to slow down evolution just because they are too lazy to catch up? Just think of it as a very big (but for once useful) bug fix ^H^H .. service pack.. ^H^H^H "new features for a better Internet experience"! ;)
On the other hand, this is a Good Thing for Linux, as people finally realize how expensive it is to change monopolistic proprietary software.
Actually, I've heard a mixture of both ideas. In general it seems that splitting up the company into 3 companies with the same IP is more likely than the 3 division method. The problem with the 3 division method is that it really would not stop the new companies from collaborating with each other in order to optimize their products to work together. The other method would at least impose some element of competition.
I think a bigger issue is that regardless of how they might decide to break MS up structurely, how will they actually go about implementing it? Its not like MS actually has several divisional/regional offices that you can separate. Nearly all of the heavy work is handlded in Redmond (I've seen the campus, its huge). How exactly to you divide something like that up so that it makes sense? With AT&T, they could at least divide the company up into the regionals.
There have been a lot of comments from the Linux community regarding business models, that Microsoft can't compete with Linux because we're on different playing fields, etc. It's obvious by now that Microsoft aren't interested in competition, i.e. winning by providing a better value than their competitors. Instead, they seem to react to any threat to their market dominance by striking a Faustian bargain with the competitor then calling in their chips, draining the competitor's resources in a Vaporware arms race (the Borland vs. Microsoft OOP war?) or failing those, making their software incompatible with the competitor's products, and/or spreading mis-information about the threat.
Since it would be virtually impossible for Microsoft to "own" Linux, we can only assume they've already defaulted to FUD. The FUD strategy makes the "playing field" issue almost insignificant--Microsoft's marketing department could probably kill Brand X dishwashing liquid if Mr. Gates thought he would benefit. I haven't wanted to consider the tactics Microsoft might resort to in an attempt to supress Linux, but I think we've gotten a look at a few pages from their playbook already:
While Microsoft's representatives continue to claim that Linux is only a toy and that they're not worried about it, they've already started the FUD machine rolling. I wish Red Hat and some of the other "heavyweights" would pick up the ball and fight back with some real benchmarks. Why not duplicate the Mindcrafty benchmarks at IBM's labs, with hands-on assistance from a couple recognized NT performance-tuning experts, Linus and Alan on-site?
slashdot broke my sig
Stuff like this, which seems to suggest that the money will vanish from the face of the earth instead of actually creating new jobs, pisses me off something royal.
Besides, $30,000,000,000 seems like a pretty fair price to pay to get some competition back into the world of computer software, instead of just having one company take over any sector they'd like on a whim. Result: we get better technology and more jobs. Hell, it's a sort of income redistribution for nerds: Getting it out of the hands of the pointy-hairs and the corporations and forking it over to us.
We shoulda done this years ago.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The small shop I work at (as a Mac tech, moving in the direction of being able to handle Linux professionally) is a VAR, and we sell PCs. ;) ) and we will try to get a 'luserfriendly' Linux install happening, even if the memory and disk constraints force us to have console only.
We are currently trying to fill a gap by making PCs (with little but the PC, keyboard and mouse and RAM and HD inside) available for under three hundred dollars. Supply your own monitor and whatever else you want. It looks like we should be able to do this fairly effectively....
The Microsoft tax (reckoned as cost TO US) is MORE THAN HALF the cost of the PC, and that's for a minimal legal version of Win95 only...
We are going to look into Linux for these insanely cheap ol' PC boxes (486es they are, it's all about lowest possible cost and _our_ ability to set them up in useful condition for uneducated buyers who only want to type letters etc). Using Linux would _halve_ our cost, and we figure we can knock a _hundred_ dollars off the cost of the PC making it under _two_ hundred dollars- and sell them with the understanding that we can't turn people into linux users by waving a magic wand. We can and will, however, figure out a way to install linux onto such minimal boxes, with whatever we can come up with for functionality. Probably be console only (we got 8M of ram to work with, that's it! And a couple hundred megs of HD).
I have no idea if this is going to work, or if any price-sensitive customers will go for Linux. I just know that the MS tax is OVER HALF of our cost for a physical box- and this is ludicrous, and whether or not people have the cojones to buy them we WILL be offering linux because we're trying to get computing into the hands of people who can't afford it, and it's just ludicrous that MORE THAN HALF our cost is MS tax. Does that seem reasonable? It's the end result of what's been happening. Who knew? And this is for an older version of Win95 that is much deprecated- in other words, it's a very inadequate offering considering it's more than doubling the cost of the PC.
With that in mind, seeing as we're going to be selling some with Windows anyway, I see _no_ reason we (the shop) shouldn't get to pick among different Windows vendors for this very obsolete product. _Why_ shouldn't we get to pay $30 or so like Compaq, considering that we only want an older version anyway? Hell, man, you can download MacOS 7.5 for _nothing_, and buy system 8.1 for thirty bucks _legally_, and of course you can make your own Linux distribution all you want. It's only _Windows_ that can still demand a monopolistic price from little guys like us- and from Compaq, any time they start acting like they're running the show- and that sort of thing is what got us in this mess that we're still utterly in, every time we pay MS more than the cost of the hardware just to get a PC with Windows to customers.
Well *ahem* screw that! It would be a sick joke if it wasn't real. The instant I figured out what we the shop were doing and what that _meant_, what we were paying as a grassroots VAR, I went 'LINUX!'. We will advertise it prominently and will discount _more_ than the Windows tax is even costing us (in efforts to be able to claim a startlingly low starting price
It's just outrageous. And MS can't punish us much more than they already are- we're getting no breaks whatsover on VAR pricing. We're almost buying _retail_ for crying out loud. It bites.
These guys are blowing smoke up your Congressional representative's you-know-what.
All of the remedies that the DoJ are investigating that involve breaking up Microsoft involve keeping operating systems intact. The argument is that while a monopoly in the OS market may be a beneficial standard, Microsoft is using that monopoly to stifle competition in other areas; namely in Internet applications, office productivity, etc. In other words, these folks are throwing us a red herring.
In any case, even if the DoJ was examining the possibility of breaking up Microsoft along lines that would split the OS market, there is a good argument that this would benefit customers. Not too long ago, people were raising fears that breaking up Ma Bell's monopoly would end up costing consumers trillions more in long distance services. Instead, long distance carriers are now fighting to offer long distance at 5 to 10 cents a minute, which (when adjusted for inflation) is much lower than what we were paying in the 70s.
I wonder if they take into consideration the cost of Windows support incured by businesses. Crashes, dll conflicts, viruses, incompatabilies, required hardware upgrades, etc etc. That alone costs many many millions of dollars in support and consulting hours.
Most likely this is just another report Microsoft has paid someone to produce. It doesn't mean squat.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Posted by Neid:
I wonder what these jokers would have said about the breakup of AT&T. It shows a certain lack of imagination as to what a world without a unified Microsoft would be like. I believe Microsoft will benefit from the breakup as well. They have stagnated as a company and could use a shakeup.
Posted by sirtwist:
This is my first post, so it'll be short and sweet... Let's assume that MS does get broken up into three pieces. Who's to say that they'd all go right back into the OS business? Wouldn't it be smart to take something like the Office suite and run? There's still a lot of money in that.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Ok, I'll admit that this might seem like splitting hairs, but there is a fundemental difference here.
I the case of Unix, the split within the product base has resulted in fierce competition. The various innovations that have been tried have been ruthlessly tested by the market place. This type of "darwinian selection" rapidly culls bozo features from the OS/application base.
In the case of M$ ( or any propriatory system ), their "innovation" is a matter of marketing hype. The nifty ( but essentially useless chrome ) that is served up to the user base is ( via M$'s monopolistic marketing practices ) essentially kept in a protective "hot-house". The result of this has been a steady accumulation of mis-features that have to be supported for the sak of backward compatibility.
So while the two processes may appear to be superficially similiar, they are radically different. Unix functions in the "tooth and claw" realm of the software jungle, while M$ functions in the evolutionary detente of an isolated ecosystem.
Ok, I know I'm really sreatching the analogy, but that's the way that I see it. Like the Dodo, M$ has evolved to survive in an eco-niche where there are no signifigant predators. It's given up flight and settled down, content that no one can force it out.
To me, this is the fundemental difference. Unix's ( like Linux ) evolve dynamically to meet changing conditions. Propriatory systems are driven by the "vision" of a small group of individuals. That works, but only as long as that "vision" remains congruent with reality.
Where it fails is when this small group of "visionaries" start to believe their own propaganda and start telling the consumer base what they are going to get, rather than asking them what they want.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Oh, come on. There was a *book* about this subject: Undocumented Windows," by Andrew Schulman (sorry, I don't have the ISBN). It's a settled issue: Microsoft, at least in the past, has used undocumented APIs.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
I tend to agree with you that breaking up Microsoft and open sourcing the Windows code is not the solution, albeit not for all the same reasons. We even mostly agree on a possible solution as you have outlined. I do have some concerns about your proposed solution though.
Requiring MS APIs to be open and documented is great, but does not IMO go far enough. Even if they have to fully document new APIs when they are released, they still have the advantage of releasing them at their own discretion. They can easily wait until they have compatible applications before releasing the new APIs. This would give them the substantial advantage of being first to market with their new apps. The other software companies could be months behind in development because of this. There needs to be a way to give everyone access to all APIs as they are being developed or modified. Microsoft would have to keep the information about them very current.
You were correct that the consent decree prohibited "per-processor licensing." Unfortunately Microsoft sidestepped the letter of that law by implementing "per-machine licensing." It's really a rather blatant violation of the consent decree, but they got away with it. Another reason they should be punished I would say.
Something would have to be done about them integrating anything and everything into Windows to kill off competition. IMO, this is the toughest issue. I can see both sides of it and how it could be abused by both sides. In the end, it comes down to who you trust to make the right decision. As I just pointed out though, due to their lack of integrity in abiding by the consent decree, I wouldn't trust them at all with making the right decision. I've also considered that if enough other measures are taken, preventing integration might not be necessary.
The last thing I'm concerned about is the whole Halloween problem. Microsoft plans to "de-commoditize" the OS by using the old embrace-and-extend method of corrupting open protocols and formats into proprietary shadows of what they were. This cannot be allowed to happen. I think this is one of the most damning things they've written because it allows us to see that they don't plan to win their battles by making the best products at the best price. They plan to leverage their marketshare in order to force consumers into using their proprietary formats and protocols. This would effectively shut out competition almost entirely. Combine it with legislation prohibiting reverse-engineering and you have a total lock-out. Something should be included in any solution to block this sort of tactic by Microsoft.
I like the idea of a large fine. It is well deserved. I also like the idea of using it to fund the development of competing products. It may help restore some real competition someday. Perhaps setting up some sort of trust. The money could be invested and managed so that it will be around for a while. Then the only question is who could be trusted to manage such a thing.
That's about all I have to say. Now I can sit back and watch it get picked apart :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Right. Windows NT on AXP does run in a 32-bit mode. And yes, 64-bit Windows will be a separate creature entirely. So far, the only platform M$ seems to have any interest in targeting with Win64 is the IA64 (Merced, McKinley, et al) line. (which, of course, isn't available yet, and the time to availability is still indeterminate.) They are still very stuck on IA32 (ix86), and the switch to Win64 will be painful, if the switch from 16-bit to 32-bit is any indication. (Or maybe twice as bad - we ARE adding twice as many bits this time! ;)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Umm, the breakup wouldn't duplicate the company into 3 exact copies. (Besides, there's not enough room in this world for one Microsoft, let alone 3!) They'd be dividing on product lines somehow - like OSes/applications/Internet technology or some other set of logical dividing lines. And I think this would help consumers, not harm them - it'd give them some choice. It'd make it pretty much necessary for Windows' APIs to be open, unlike they are now (sort of open, but more open if you have lots of moolah to give to M$). As someone else noted earlier, monopoly in itself is NOT illegal - it's misuse of monopoly power (esp. like to gain monopolies in other areas) that's illegal.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Well, I think it'd be more difficult for the separate entities to do what they do now (use undocumented APIs to make only Microsoft's software work best on the platform). At least then, everyone would be on equal footing, instead of what we've got now. Right now, it's too easy for Microsoft to be sneaky, so that they can "beat" (beat? not much of a contest when you own the platform) the competition.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Microsoft bought QDOS ("Quick-and-Dirty OS", from what I've heard) from Seattle Software, who wrote a clone of the CP/M OS (which itself was a bare-bones clone of UNIX). It wasn't so much stolen from DRI as it was from Seattle Software (the owner of which sometime later took Microsoft to court). And yes, IBM DOS and MS-DOS were virtually the same (a few different filenames and utilities, but otherwise indistinguishable). And yes, for the crappy OS that Windows 98 is, I think $100 is too much (mind you, that's the UPGRADE cost - an original install copy - about impossible to find on store shelves - is in the US$200-US$250 range).
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Of course it's going to cost a little more in the short term, but in the long term increased competition will surely drive costs down. This is why Microsoft has been able to maintain its monopoly - because people give far more weight to short term costs than they should when long term costs are also critical. Long term costs will decrease if there are viable competitors to Windows because some of those competitors are bound to be more stable and elegant to code for thus actually saving programming time and development costs.
Then again, this did come from the always unbiased ZDNet so it must be true and I'm probably thinking ahead too much.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
The analysis assUmes a breakup where 3 corperations sell competing versions of windows. Most of the ideas I've heard on a split would have an OS company, a business software company, and a home software company. That scenerio makes the whole study moot.
One thing that wasn't pointed out in the study, but would be equally valid, how much does MS cost the consumer today by failing to unify NT and WindowsXX as they have promised to do?
As others have said, AT&T gave us the same FUD. Somehow, LD rates are at an all time low, and the local phone bill has kept pace with normal inflation.
My assumption has been that forcing MS to license the windows source or breaking them up would be awful for consumers, not because of costs (it would surely cost more to keep MS as they are now, I doubt it would cost $30bil to break them up though) but because the baby bills or licensers would have no insentive to break compatiblity with windows and windows wouldn't improve as rapidly as it has in the past.
The extreme version of the other side of that argument is that each licenser or babybill would diverge from the rest and cause market confusion. The only way I would see that happening is if one of them had somehow gained a majority of the market or something and could then start dictating what the other bills and licensers had to do. All things being equal, there is no clear reason to do anything to break compatibility with the other versions of windows. The way the splintering would happen would be in the add-on APIs and middleware market and there is already heated competition there, but MS has a huge leg up on their competitors.
Why limit the use of settlement money to
operating systems on X86? Why not attack both
monopolies at the same time?
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Actually, the Cato Institute is not a right-wing group, but rather a libertarian group. Not to repeat what everyone's probably already heard a few times by now, but libertarianism combines economic conservatism with social liberalism: supporting limited government which keeps its hands off both the economy and people's private lives.
This should be distinguished from the right-wing (across-the-board conservative or Republican) viewpoint, which supports government meddling in "morals" issues. Republicans support prayer in schools, the War on (Some) Drugs, and immigration restrictions (just for instance), all of which Libertarians oppose.
In fact, the Republican Party supports far more government meddling in the economy than Libertarians do. Republicans support increased government spending on the military-industrial complex, as well as on corporate welfare. Libertarians oppose both: the government should, we claim, neither help (as the Republicans would have) nor oppose (as Democrats and Socialists would have) corporations, except in cases where corporations violate individual rights. (For instance, Libertarians oppose the use of violence to support corporate interests (e.g. union-busting, colonialist wars (the Gulf War, e.g.), and so forth.)
Well that'd make NO sense.. Why would they break into 3 different 'versions' of Windows? I was thinking that they meant breaking Microsoft into 3 parts.
1) Operating Systems
2) Applications
3) Services
Am I wrong here?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Bingo!
There were a lot of hoodlums out there, but Al Capone was targeted because he was so successful. Poor Al, he was competing in a nearly pure capitalist environment and the big bad governement comes in and seizes his assets and destroys his livelihood. If we had just left him alone, the price of gin would probably be much cheaper now.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
The "fragmentation" of Unix has allowed Unix to survive when almost all other operation systems that were around in the late 70's have died.
Think about it. How many OSes can trace their roots to something based in the 70's/early 80's and are still at all healthy today? Well, MS-DOS->Windows, Unix, OS/MFT->OS/MVS->?, System-3->System-36/38->AS/400, VM/CMS and that is about it.
You might try arguing VMS, but it is basically dead and you really can't claim that it continues on in WinNT because while there is a developer chain, there is no code from VMS in WinNT. You could also argue that MPE has survived, but I don't think you would call it healthy.
In the early days, Unix wasn't supported by any major vendor, and most vendors actively fought it. DEC labeled Unix as "snake oil", IBM didn't start supporting Unix until very late with the IBM RT, HP dabbled in it, but they really preferred that you used one of their other operating systems. Apollo laughed at Unix and said it was a passing phase, workstations needed an OS that wasn't designed for teletypes.
Today, you can run Unix on the vast majority of computers out there, something that no other operating system can come close to claiming.
I'm not going to claim that the infighting hasn't cost Unix dearly, it has.
However, thanks to the fragementation, Unix can't be kill just because one company goes belly up or decides to make a "strategic switch" to another OS. AT&T tried to get into the computer market in a big way, and then decided to back out, but that didn't kill Unix. Microsoft decided to push Unix (in the form of Xenix), but then got into a spat with AT&T and sold it off to it's largest VAR (SCO), but that didn't kill Unix either.
Linux and the *BSD versions of Unix are in a even stronger position to survive. When 386BSD stopped being developed, other people picked it up from where it left off and spawned FreeBSD and NetBSD. When SLS stopped being updated, Slackware picked it up. If Redhat dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, no source code would be lost forever the way RSTS has been lost.
Unix isn't the best OS out there. It isn't the best financed. It certainly isn't the best marketed. The fragmented Unix market is the only thing that has kept Unix alive.
Can you honestly say the last 30 years of infighting was a good thing?
YES.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
And guess which API microsoft is trying to squash? OpenGL of course. Their replacement - DirectX only runs on Win 95/98 (and NT to some extent).
I usually disagree with the Cato Institute, but every so often, their views will mesh with mine. The anti CDA essay NEW AGE COMSTOCKERY: EXON VS. THE INTERNET is a good example.
As usual, RMS hit the nail on the head with his proposal to force Microsoft to reveal/document all internal interfaces and binary file formats in their products - enabling the creation of compatibile competing products, open source or not. Companies (and open-source projects) can still complete on features (even Microsoft) but on a level playing field.
This achieves the nearly same effect in the marketplace as a breakup, without the incentive for the Microsoft (or "baby Bills") to fork their code base (more than it already is, that is).
Who knows, it might also be considered a precedent for how all SW companies should behave (but to make it a universal rule would require legislation). Imagine, a world where software connector conspiracies are illegal!
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
So how does this really differ than trying to deal with the three main versions of Windows (95/98, NT, CE) now? By breaking up MS along these lines doesn't really change the problems:
By breaking MS into 3 OS companies along the existing different Windows platforms, they would still be able to do what they are doing now. MS got to where it is at by controlling the APIs and bundling. Third party developers are always playing catch up with the APIs and the threat that MS will bundle its competing product with the OS.
When I hear people talking about breaking MS up, they are talking about breaking it up along functional lines: an OS company, an user application company, a server app company, etc. That would still keep Windows as it is, but it would make them publish all the APIs, put their app developers on a level playing field with other software companies, and restrict bundling of these apps with the OS. If MS it to be broken up, that is how should be done, IMHO.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
MS is irrelevant. They have no bearing on the future.
The future is Linux, whether MS stays as a monolith or is broken up is completely irrelevant.
MS is a dinosaur.
Deleted
Just look at all that has went on in the DOJ trial to date and see what's been filed in the Caldera trial to see that. They violated the law (surprise, surprise) and now they've got to pay. It's as simple as that. Now, I don't exactly agree with the original poster's philosophy- but you, are off way out in left field when the hit was a bunt to first.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Do my taxes go to Microsoft instead of the US gov't now?
That would just make all kinds of sense..
still waiting for my tax return,
-- haaz.
cost us 30 billion dollars!?!? Oh *no* that's just too damn much money, maybe we'd better just leave MicroSoft alone huh? Good god, is this the sort of response that article is supposed to engender? Puh*leeze* - I haven't read anything so insulting to my intelligence in ages. It sounds a lot like the tripe the cable companies are spewing now that deregulation and an end to their monopolies are looming. Suppose you had an employee who came to you and stated: "I must have a raise, see I have a wife and 3 kids" - what would your response be? Mine would be "Well that is an interesting bit of information, but I think we'll continue to give raises based upon merit, thanks". If it is indeed true that 30 billion will be the cost of remedying MicroSoft's lawlessness than so be it. I personally think it is exceedingly unlikely to be that high, in fact I think the cost will actually be negative since more competition will surely be the result and more competition will result in lower prices and better product quality. Surely you all remember AT&T's ceaseless whining about the horrible results that would come of breaking up of their monopoly - yah it sure has been awful, I just absolutely *hate* paying these reasonable, low long distance rates. I suppose you can't blame a company for wanting to preserve their monopolist status - it is a very lucrative position to be in. Bottom line? quit whining and take your medicine, you did bring this upon yourselves after all.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
In the words of Sam Kinison, in the Rodney Dangerfield film, "Back to School",
"Good Answer!"
"I could really use a study that says a breakup of Micros~1 would hurt consumers."
"I could really use a study that says linux is slower than NT."
"I could REALLY usea study that sys consumer love Micros~1."
- Bill_Ga~1
You get the idea.
Then all the toadies and stooges run in all directions, money in hand, trying to find one.
support gun control: take guns from cops
One point that I greatly disagreed with was that software will cost more. At the moment, free software has moved into a position to be a clear competitor to MS products. If a MS breakup occurred, more software would be developed for these platforms, making platforms with inexpensive, well developed, effective software. Obviously this breakup would cost MS money, they would be forced to actually produce good products instead of well integrated, buggy software. If MS has to spend $30 billion, so be it. They have the money from all the years MS has exploited computer users.
One other point that was truly ludicrous was that by breaking up MS, the Justice Department would be punishing them for being too successful. Rather, this would be punishment for destroying competition and exploiting customers.
MS has hurt the computer industry for too long. The computer industry should have the opportunity to use the best product, instead of being forced to use software from one company because of that company's monopoly position. Breaking up MS and opening Windows source code is the necessary measure.
--
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
Gregory J. Barlow
fight bloat. use blackbox.
No, lack of extreme remedies would reward MS for being corrupt.
I mean, the Mafia's "successful" too. How exactly does "being successful" justify any and all means to get there? Where on earth did that twisted concept ever come from? To me, the Mafia and Microsoft are perfect examples of why an unrestrained free market doesn't work.
James
Hmm, I haven't programmed much sound, but what makes it so hard? It seems like you could have a thread that you pass any sound to (possibly in an optimal format), and the thread mixes in whatever sounds requests it gets real-time, and outputs to sound card/speakers. You still need to write the mixing code for that thread, but it seems straightforward, and general enough that you could use it in most apps.
But I'm probably missing something, I have little experience....
James
"...our most important application is a finance package that's been built on top of Lotus by a third-party vendor. We've been religiously upgrading that package over the years."
And now that vendor is rewarding you for those years of good customership by abandoning you. They may not be happy about having to do so, but forced to financially; demand for the Lotus version of their product may no longer be great enough to for them to cover the costs of updating and improving it. Apparently there is sufficient demand for the Excel version of their product to allow them to concentrate on it and make enough to stay in business. Can't fault 'em for wanting to survive and prosper.
But if your company had the source code (and possibly the source code for Lotus as well), they could hire people to do for them what the original company no longer is willing or able to do. It may or may not be financially feasible, but at least they'd have the option. Since your company doesn't have that option is there any chance of getting Lotus to acquire the rights to the Lotus version of that program and produce the Lotus version themselves as an incentive for customers to stay with Lotus?
(It occurs to me to wonder if the only way MS will let that third-party vendor market a version for Excel is if they abandon the Lotus version.)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
their own variants of windows. Many apps need 'tuning' to run properly under NT and the W2K betas have serious problems running apps that are well behaved under 95, 98 and NT. What costs will be associated with the splintering or diluting of windows by MS themselves?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
because I read where the M$ monopoly was costing the consumer $50 Billion .....
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Stamping out polio probably cost $30 billion. That doesn't make it bad to do.
With the debacle of the MindCraft Windows NT tests fresh in everybody's mind, I am surprised that you would not see through this ploy. Leibowitz presents the worst-case scenerio and then draws conclusions like it is a likely outcome. Leibowitz also ignores moderating influences and past costs.
And quit saying that Microsoft is being punished for being successful. They deserve to be punished because they used their monopoly position in the computer OS market to leverage monopolies in other markets. This is *illegal* under U. S. anti-trust laws.
As a long time software developer I've watched markets and opportunities dwindle under the repressive Microsoft regime. At the same time software quality and reliability has plummeted and innovation has been stifled. I suggest that somebody sponsor a study of how much this has cost computer users over the past three decades.
I suggest that what we have lost is not just the competition, quality and innnovation in an industry, we have also lost billions and billions of dollars to merely prop up Bill Gates' monopoly. How many clever, independant software developers could that money have funded? So Mr. Leibowitz's $30 billion is a mere pittance compared to what Microsoft's monopoly has already cost. If it costs a worst-case $30 billion to repair the damage, so be it.
The horizontal break-up of Microsoft into three or even four baby-Bills is, in effect, a death penalty to Microsoft. In my opinion, this is the only way to restore competition. For the untold billions wasted on smothering competition and innovation, and for the murder of an untold number of what would otherwise have been productive and innovative software development enterprises, Microsoft richly deserves the death penalty. It's time to put an end to it. Break 'em up.
Thank you for an opportunity to comment.
Sincerely,
Arne W. Flones
Long Ship Software A Microsoft free developer
Did all of these different versions of DOS run DOS programs? Yes. In fact Caldera has a finding of fact that quotes Microsoft e-mail on this very point, much to the chagrin of Bill Gates.
Was there some sort of consortium set up to administer API's? Not that I know of.
Did this competition cost consumers and the economy? Actually that same Caldera finding of fact has an e-mail from Bill Gates mentioning that he would charge an extra US$30 or US$40 per copy of MS-DOS if it were not for DR-DOS.
So if you calculate the extra burden on the economy from every copy of Windows being US$30 to US$40 too expensive, plus the drag on the economy from so many brilliant minds being lured to work for over-inflated stock options rather than working on other potentially more productive software projects, then US$30Billion doesn't sound so bad.
And if competition scares you, GPL the whole mess. There are too many Windows coders for the code base to "stagnate". Perhaps you wouldn't see the inclusion of voice recognition in the OS, but you finally would see prompt bug and security fixes. And any monkey business with previously unpublished APIs and code breaks within published APIs would be fixed.
And yes such things do exist. Go find Bret Glass's article from last year where he published code demonstrating that Microsoft never removed, just disabled, the infamous DR-DOS message.
Some more of my thoughts on possible solutions to Microsoft v. DoJ.
I don't think so. They're a long-standing Usenet tradition. I'd hate to see all my favorite Usenet-isms go away in the World of the Web.
--Joe
--
Program Intellivision!
You make a good point about the Cato Institute being a libertatian group. I believe that my extreme displeasure with their various "scientific" analyses has blinded me to their true roots. After reading your post, I did what I call the P.J. O'Rouke test; Is O'Rouke more of a libertarian or a right-wing extremist? I must therefore stand corrected.
I guess this labels me as a liberal; i.e., anybody else is a right-wing nut.:)
Nonetheless, I still have a difficult time believing anything that comes out of the Cato Institute. Their various opinions on global warming, ozone depletion, environmental damage, health risk of smoking, etc... has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Thanks a lot for this info! I was totally perplexed when I read the zd article and could not figure out how the OS market would be balkanized. As many ppl have recommended, the nature breakup of MS would be along the lines of the OS (e.g., Windows/NT), applications (e.g., Office), and services (e.g., MSN). If this occured, there would not be a balkanization of the OS as it would reside in only one group.
A more likely scenario would open marketplace with stronger competition in all aspects of software development. Consumers would then eventually benefit from a decrease in costs driven down by real competition.
Finally, MS currently makes a yearly profit of around $6(?) billion on sales of about $16(?) billion. (Note: Last quarter MS earnings were $1.9B on revenue of $4.3B). This is an obscenely high profit margin that is ultimately paid for by the consumer. I bet the good professor did not factor in a reduction in the profit margin to a level commensurate with the rest of the software industry.
The Cato Institute makes Ronald Reagan look like a card carrying member of the ACLU. They actually critized Ronnie when he was President, because he did not strongly push the far right wing economic agenda that they supported. FYI, the other organization to be wary of is the Heritage Foundation.
The Cato Institute (CI) has been a bane for hard-working honest scientists in this country. Their modus operandi (operating procedure) is to enlist the aid of a handful of scientists/mercenaries who get paid to support the views of the CI. They are fully aware that the standard scientific method is one that is generally cautious. Scientific discourse is one of give and take accentuated by meaningful debate. The CI then uses this caution and debate as a sign of waffling and indecision. If 95 out of 100 scientists agree on a particular conclusion, the CI will merely point to the 5 dissenters as proof that there is not overall agreement. Unfortunately, many politicans who are trained as lawyers not scientists, would then agree that there is still doubt. After all, to be found guilty in a trial, *all* the jurors must agree.
Mindcraft has issued a press release stating that had they been asked they could have cococted a MUCH higher number. "We are disappointed by this lack of imagination and restrain shown by ACT, our Fiercly Unimpeeded Detailing (FUD) methodology would have yielded much more useful data for the defendant" claims Mindcraft
Help fight continental drift.
That's the claim of a two pro-Microsoft trade associations. The Association For Competitive Technology (ACT) and The ASCII Group Inc., an industry association of resellers, are meeting today with more than 30 congressional offices to discuss the potential costs to consumers..."
Are we suprised? No. But to do something - we need to know what their points are so we can debunk them. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Borg seem to be adapting - they're not going public with what they're saying to our representatives. Thus, we cannot issue a rebuttal. Does anyone know if this will be appearing in the congressional reports?
--
One COULD argue that the rift would hit Computer manufacturers, and it would drive up hardware prices, so that COULD be an issue. Microsoft can simply say "Oh no, we need to pay for this mess. Let's charge each OEM an extra $50 for each package. No use hoping, this is probably going to be one of the effects.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I don't see a new 30 billion dollar market for software development as a bad thing, especially in light of the fact that, outside of a few domains, the mainstream desktop development sphere has been sort of moribund. The current environment is also very favorable to open source, and I think a lot of that $30 billion would be spent on open source projects.
That's $30 billion going to third parties, too, spreading the wealth away from the center. That's development occuring in new places, under different auspices. The consumer would benefit from this upsurge in innovation and competition in the medium term - an upsurge that is unlikely in a market dominated by a single, anticompetitive player.
I believe that Microsoft owns 10 per cent of Vision, and I know that Bill Gates sits on their Board of Directors.
Um, what is "the market" made of, animatronic robots?
"The market" is an abstraction of human economic behaviour. It isn't an entity in itself.
Bill Gates is worth what? 50+ some billion? Where did he make that money from? True some came from investments, but much of it was made on the backs of consumers. And that's just Gate's dough. That isn't counting the other MS million and billionaires, not to mention the profits of MS itself.
;-)
So if the 30 billion figure is true, it looks like breaking up MS will cost less than keeping it together! It will save us money! What's the problem?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
That's because standards were set.
You used to not be able to buy a telephone, you had to lease it from AT&T. They were usually hardwired into your wall. The modular phone jack didn't exist.
Before the AT&T breakup, standards were forced so that you could go buy phones and phone equipment from different suppliers.
That's a reason why early modems had acoustic couplers-- because the modular jack was just coming into use!
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Whoever said this should have his mouth stapled shut, because only more idiotic things will come out.
AT&T had similar FUD going on about it when it was about to break up. Breaking up market reigns doesn't cost money to the consumer, it makes money for the consumer. In this case, market fragmentation would create more competition, which, in turn would cause more innovation for less money. Heck, how many distro's does Linux have? How much does Linux cost?
Exactly.
Your post echoes a sentiment I've heard expressed frequently in these discussions: Why should Microsoft, the paragon of American hi-tech success, be punished for nothing more than being wildly successful?
The answer is - it shouldn't and it isn't. The control of monopolies is fundamentally necessary to achieve economic efficiency in a capitalist system. It's not a question of the monopolist being "bad" - it's a limitation of how much a free market can do for you.
The basic idea behind a free market system is to create a playing field with a carefully crafted set of rules such that if everyone does nothing but pursue their own greedy self-interest, the market operates efficiently. Recent political rhetoric has become confused between the cause and the effect. The goal is economic efficiency and prosperity. The means of achieving that goal is the free market. But in cases where the free market fails to achieve that goal, intervention is not only acceptable but necessary.
The reason a monopoly is inefficient is that monopolists' self-interest leads them to produce too few goods; market demand will then cause these goods to be sold at too high prices. I won't go into the details; look at any microeconomics textbook. But the goal of government regulation has to be to get the monopolist to produce more of the good, so that prices drop to the economically efficient level. This can be accomplished in various ways: Allowing the monopoly to continue but regulating their price, like in local telephone service; Allowing competitors to enter the market and preventing the monopolist from destroying them, like in long distance telephone service; Breaking up the monopoly itself into smaller competing firms, like with Standard Oil. Presumably there are other ways as well.
The problem is, it's hard to see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist. Are they producing too few goods and charging too high prices? Depends on how you look at it, I guess, but there isn't any clear price gouging going on. If you can't see Microsoft as a traditional monopolist, but you still want to take action against them, you have to invent some new definition of the term 'monopoly' that's different from "a supplier who produces all goods in a market." Once you start redefining terms, it's anyone's business.
But classic economics is not quite done in yet. Remember, you can calculate what the economically efficient price is supposed to be in a market. On the supply side, the condition necessary for economic efficiency is that price equals marginal cost. "Marginal cost" means the additional cost involved in producing the final unit of output. In the case of shrink-wrapped software, and ignoring technical support for the moment (since at most software firms it is now charged for separately anyway), marginal cost equals the reproduction and materials costs of the CDs, manuals, and box--about $10 to $20 for most software. Therefore, practically all software should cost $10 to $20. The free market would establish a price in this range for all software, and any software that costs more than this must be benefiting from some kind of monopoly power--otherwise consumers would not pay the higher prices.
It's easy to see where this monopoly power comes from: Copyright and, to a lesser extent, patent law. Without copyright and patent protections, software *would* sell for the cost of materials--because even if the company that produced it wanted to charge more, someone else would make copies and sell them for less. Traditionally, copyright and patent protections have been defended on the grounds that in their absence, there would be no incentive for people to invent things or develop new products. This is probably true. The free software movement has proved that under some limited circumstances, it doesn't *have* to be true--but, as has been pointed out, most free software authors also have day jobs, many of which are paid for by revenues generated by copyright and patent monopolies.
The issues become confusing at this point, but at least we can focus on what they actually are. The Microsoft trial should be seen not as reward or punishment for one particular company, but as a fine-tuning of the ways in which copyright and patent law should be applied to the software world. In this sense, the Microsoft trial is likely to set precedents that will shape the software industry for decades, free and commercial alike. The free software community needs to get past the immediate anti-Microsoft knee jerk and recognize that there is a real debate needed on the role of intellectual property in the world we want to create--bearing in mind both that copyright law forms the underpinnings of the free software world (via the GPL, etc), and that whatever Microsoft is going through right now, *we* may have to go through something similar if *our* operating system ever gains an 80% unit share.
-Graham
>Win64 doesn't exist yet
Yes it does. It's WinNT for alphas.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
Is anyone really suprised by this. I'm sure it will be the lead story on the news though. Bring on the FUD. The solution though is clear, if Microsoft wants to break up into three companies that each make their own OS, (what drugs is this guy on?) each with their own set of standards, then I guess it will be cheaper to develop for Linux. We'd better contact all those executives they contacted and tell them ;)
Since MS is keeping $20,000,000,000 under some very large matress that looks more and more like it was gained from illegal business practices, it seems fair to let them help clean up after their own mess.
/. a bandwidth grant as it's first official act), I'd let them walk right now.
Or let's go easy on them. For just $2 billion divided evenly between FSF and the Torvalds foundation (which will give
IT'S ALREADY BALKANIZED!!! There are DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, NT 3.5, NT 4, NT-Whenever, and so on. Hell, within the panoply of MS pseudo OS products, there is balkanization already.
Instead of the Cato Institute, next time try the Green Hornet Institute.
Everyone one knows their views were diametrically opposed... though there is no doubt that Bruce Lee's cool factor was MUCH higher...
it should also be noted that in the next 3-5 years, users will no longer even look at a desktop (or want to). a large portion of the resistive comfort-me mindset will be transferred from visual appeal to other areas of comfort (like, can i get this done w/o rebooting and not have to work this weekend). the age of cynical users is upon us. why pay part of that USD 30e9 when they can invest in their own entertainment?
If there was an open standard of all current Win32 APIs, then ANY OS could run all current windows software(with the execption of M$ products that use parts of the API they don't tell others).
Then the only cost to consumers would be the price of another OS. And software companies wouldn't have to pay anything, becuase their current apps would run out of the box on any OS that was "Win32 compliant". The only real cost would be to port the APIs to the other OSes. And Win32 for linux would, of course, be free. =)
What could happen is an OS could be taken to a standards board, and tested. Then if it passes can be stamped with a "Win32 compliant" label.
The only reason there are so many apps for Windows anyway is because of the monoply. It just isn't profitable to code for anything else. An open Win32 standard would level the playing field for everyone.
Microsoft is always coming forward with some new study that shows how it is so much more expensive to do anything they don't want to do... ie: its more expensive to run a 'free' operating system then it is to run NT servers and workstations.
This blows me away that people are buying into this crap but it is just another marketing scheme.
What we really need to do is come up with some published numbers about how much more it would cost a company to 'not' run NT and compare some companies that have run 100% MS products, vs any company running 100% *nix, then create some formula to determine the lost productivity+downtime=etc...
This will help to put an end to at least one of their stories about how it cost more money to do whatever they do not want to do.
The previous two Quake games were some of the most popular in history. Ports to other platforms were inevitable, so I'm sure they saved money by simultaniously developing three versions.
Just understand that Quake is a special case. As any Mac gamer when they get a game that's not a sure-hit.
A similar analogy could be made for WordPerfect - it will do reasonably well on any platform they put it on.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The breakup of AT&T didn't cause peoples telephones to suddenly become incompatible with new versions of telephone service from competing companies. In fact, the hardware the consumer had to purchase was pretty damn cheap even if it had become incompatible (which it didn't).
Actually, for office phone systems (PBXs), it did. These systems are all horriblely proprietary and incompatible. Buy one and you're pretty much locked in. (Back in the AT+T days, I suspect there was only one to buy-er-lease.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The multiple brands of VCR _ARE_ produced by different companies. That does not mean that they are incompatible.
My understanding was that 80% of the VHS mechinisms are produced by Matstushia (sp?), and the VCR vendors only produce the UI and cases.
(Kind of like Intel chipsets and motherboards versus thousands of "computer companies" turning screws.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Don't forget the most important "consumers" for the PC OS market are not home users, hobbyests, schools, unix fans, slashdot readers, and so on. The real consumers are the businesses who collectively made the decision that they want a "standard" desktop OS.
Even thought the average corporation is paying through the nose in technicians and licences for all of those Win 9x desktops, they probably wouldn't choose to go back, because the standardization is saving them money in the long run. (A different definition of "best product".) Would a fractured Windows cost them money? Absolutely.
Of course, now that these company's are seeeing some of their other favorite vendors getting squeezed by illegal monopolistic tactics from Microsoft, maybe there not so sure anymore about a monopoly desktop supplier.
But the fact remains that the most important customer base (corporations) intentionally chose to make Microsoft what they are - a desktop monopoly.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Certainly the Win16 -> Win32 transition cost corporations money, but much less money than a Windows -> Linux/OS2/MacOS transition would have cost. Don't forget that a Win16 line-of-business app from 1992 would run on all PC Windows platforms for the forseeable future.
The cost of a mixed Windows base is higher than a standardized desktop, but much lower than a mixed Unix/Macintosh/Windows/OS2 base.
[As for WinCE, I don't see that being supported by businesses at all (possibly in the future as a NC-type device). Win64 doesn't exist yet.]
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Looks like NT already costs way too much. Maybe this will push people to move to Samba over NT Server for SMB stuff. It's a good thing for the industry in the long run.
æeee!
This is what I would like to know:
How many $TRILLIONS of otherwise unnecessary expense has it cost the collective computing world to have stardardized around the MS family of OS products, instead of standardizing on a PC OS that was built right in the first place?
How many $TRILLIONS in tech support and upgrades would have been saved if, for example, the IBM PC had used a UNIX kernel with a great GUI? Don't laugh too hard -- the technology was mostly in place even in 1981.
I find that, as a user, I can move back and forth beween no fewer than 4 different versions of UNIX on a regular basis with less difficulty than I experience jumping between Windows NT and Windows 95.
In my experience, all the different flavors of UNIX are like different flavors of frosting all on the same vanilla cake. The substance is always the same.
Perhaps someone who develops for both multiple UNIX versions and Win32 can enlighten us on which is easier to program and support.
and it will cost the consumer OVER $30 billion if it is not split up in the long run
From a March NYT article on possible settlements: Another idea is to break the company into three equal parts, each of which would have complete copies of Microsoft's source code and intellectual property. They then would begin competing with each other. One problem with this idea is deciding which company would get Gates.
The complete article is here.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Just look at the first paragraph of the article. The two companies who make the claim are hugely pro-Microsoft. Like this surprises anyone.
Bowie J. Poag
I always thought that a fractured market brought about competition. But I guess inthis circumstance I could see how I'd be wrong. I wonder how much of these problems they would have if they broke up Windows entirely. And had completly autonomous companies instead of this vague semi-broken up collective
I mean, aside from all that stuff about the proletariat.
One argument the Commies always used is that competition is wastefull. Sure it is. The alternative is worse.
We can have one huge, flawed, anti-competitive company, or we can have a bunch of smaller ones wasting resources. Without competition, there's no way to stop the huge company from wasting our resources at their pleasure, and, eventually, it gets a lot worse than the waste produced by competition.
That's one of the things that makes Linux great. There is no monopoly on the code. When something needs to be done (like, er, write a distribution), there are several different groups willing to do their best. Sure, it's wasteful to create multiple distros, but their competition makes them significantly better.
Duh. We knew this already.
$30 Billion? How much has M$ alread wasted?
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There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Come on, now, did anyone expect Bill to pay? Or that our government, with a perfectly miserable grasp of business realities, would make a smart move?
The only good thing for the Fed gov to do is stop messing with business, as it has NO competence in that arena, as it hastens to prove again and again.
The MS problem will resolve itself shortly, as it collapses under the weight of terminal code bloat, and the inevitable bugginess which proliferates in their inability ever to stop legacy support.
The first MS-DOS was a poor copy of CP/M, and became top-heavy very quickly, necessitating more and more re-writes, added "features" (many stolen badly from unix concepts), and in spite of all, ne ver achieved the facility of DR-DOS, which was a more than worthy competitor.
Win 1.0 was embarrassing; Win2.0 lasted on my PC about 20 minutes. Win 3.0 stayed longer, but was only a part time replacement for DOS in my work, and 3.11 was the only one which actually felt steady. NT is now my home, and the cause of my pain and anguish, both at work and at home.
My next move? BeOS, I hope.
As to breakig up: why bother? The chinks in the Redmond armor are growing daily. Besides, if business is so all-fired happy with Windoze, they can keep merrily rebooting the versions they now run.
--- Bill
Right now, windows isv's price their office suites to be price competetive with MS Office. MS pretty much gets to pick the price they want to charge. If MS had to price Office competively, then Corel and Lotus (if they haven't completely dropped SmartSuite by then) would follow suit.
But right now, WP8 Suite Standard edition is only $299.99 and WP8 Suite Pro edition is $359.99. I know that seems like a lot, but MS Office 97 Standard is $499.99 and Office 97 Pro is $599.99. The point I'm making is that Office is extremely expensive compared to WP and it still sells better...And trust me, it's not due to superiority. The reason (I think) is MS's market power:
Gateway: "Would you mind if we were to bundle WP8?"
Microsoft: "Not at all. But we'll have to increase your Win98 license fee to make up for the lost Office sales."
Gateway: "We'll just stay with Office."
Microsoft: --like Mr. Burns-- "Excellent."
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
Ofcourse, breaking Microsoft up isn't the best solution. Richard Stallman has written ``The Microsoft Antitrust Trial and Free Software'' article in which he suggests three remedies, should Microsoft loose.
Was this claim the product of another Mindcraft investigation?
How many G$ is the MS monopoly already costing us?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't know if anyone's still reading this. If you are, I put a full summary of my notes from the "Which Rememdies? Appraising Microsoft II" conference online. They can be found at http://www.space-dye.com/remedies/. Hope this helps.
I was at the "Which Remedies? Appraising Microsoft II" conference yesterday, at which Liebowitz first introduced the results of his paper.
Liebowitz made the assumption that Microsoft would be split into three entities, each of which developing their own competing version of Windows, without any interoperability standards or agreements. Therefore, when companies introduce new applications, they'd have to port it to three different operating systems. Liebowitz (and, presumably, research assistants) directly contacted executives at a number of large software firms (he didn't say how many firms). He specifically refused to talk to assistants, but rather only to executives. He asked them how much they expected their R&D, tech support, and sales budgets to increase, if they had to support three OSs rather than one.
Liebowitz then multiplied these numbers by overall industry revenue figures. He determined that R&D costs would increase by 78%, technical support costs would rise 46%, and sales and marketing costs would rise by 5-10%. He then decided that his overall projections were too high, so he divided the end result by three. (I'm not making this up!). He finally came to the conclusion that software costs would rise about 6-and-a-half percent, or $30 billion.
He also said that Microsoft was a "temporary natural monopoly," which got a small hoot from the economists in the crowd. He said that in the computer industry, there is "sequential replacement of a dominant firm." First VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, then Excel. First CP/M, then MS-DOS, then Windows, then 32-bit Windows. However, Mark Cooper (Research Director, Consumer Federation of America) rebutted this. Cooper said that there may be sequential replacement of dominant products, but that Microsoft has ended up producing the dominant product in every industry. (i.e. going from MS-DOS to Windows to Windows 95 may reduce the MS-DOS monopoly, but not the Microsoft monopoly as a whole.)
That's pretty much what's interesting about Liebowitz's speech. If anyone wants me to put up the rest of my notes from the conference, let me know.
Personally, I don't like the angle of the ZDnet article. They interviewed two of the three pro-Microsoft panelists at the conference, yet left out any commentary from the other twelve panelists!
Ryan
Sorry to disappoint you, but...
WinNT is 32bit on Alpha AFAIK.
Win64 is a different beast, and it looks like
it will be *entirely* seperate from W2K.
Hmmm.
They factored in support costs, but they based it on the current support costs. Current support costs are high, because much of the hard-core support must come from microsoft and is of high price and low quality. With competition, of course, the Baby Bills would have to bother putting together decent support, or be eaten up by the other guys.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
what the M$(tm)(R)(C) monopoly will cost if it is
allowed to survive.
And can you *really* see developers forking out to
support 3 different flavors of Winbloze(tm)(r)(C)
if the APIs are at all dissimilar?
Hell, many companies that used to support UNIX are
bailing off it in favor of NT(tm)(R)(C), because
just 2 APIs are "too expensive to maintian".
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
This is off topic, but I had to say it because it's starting to irritate me. Aren't all the jokes with "^H^H^H^H^H" all over the place starting to get a bit old? Maybe they were funny the first time, but they're really starting to get stale.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
There's a whole bunch of little subtle things that are needed to be done for sound mixing in a game. Rather than feed sound to the sound card one sample at a time (which would be easy to do mixing this way but use TONS of CPU power) you have to be able to feed larger buffers in but still be able to instantaneously play a sound (like a gunshot, eg.) without waiting for the buffer to finish playing. This takes some thought. Of course, there is Linux's mmap() interface to /dev/dsp (which I admit I haven't looked at, but it looks real nice from what I've seen), but I don't know if such a thing exists on MacOS/Windows. All in all, the code to do FAST realtime mixing is pretty fsck'ing hairy.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I would like to know how much the price Id's Qukae 3 Arena was *inflated* because they developed for three seperate platforms. Mac, Windows, and Linux are probably much farther apart in a programming sense than I would assume three versions of windows would be.
Nope. All three versions use standard OpenGL calls, which are exactly the same on all platforms. The only things that had to be changed were mundane, easy things, like setting the video mode and handling mouse/keyboard input. Well, some harder stuff, like networking and sound handling (which can be a BITCH to do realtime mixing), but probably 95% of the code was exactly the same on all platforms.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Another interesting point: higher costs due to multiple incompatible windows? There is the current situation, not a new thing. For example, we currently have:
I guess that doesn't include the bilions of dollars it will cost to MS shareholders.
They should just make MS publish all interfaces, protocols and list prices. That would avoid all the hassle and emasculate the company much more effectively.
I know that I'm currently wrestling with those problems. I have a device with proprietary hardware which runs Win 16, and the development tools create executables which won't run on Win95/98. And the Win 16 TCP stack hangs daily.
I would like to know how much the price Id's Qukae 3 Arena was *inflated* because they developed for three seperate platforms. Mac, Windows, and Linux are probably much farther apart in a programming sense than I would assume three versions of windows would be.
If anything, this might lead to software companies writing more portable code an we may even see more variety of software available for the OS of our choice.
Not breaking up windows in the long run will do more harm than good.
GotMilk?
"Religion, opiate of the masses."
I meant "give them the same chance as MS gets, to write good software to compete", not necessarily that MS uses fully uses their chance and actually writes good software!
Well, the whole splitting MS up, and forcing to sell rights/license te source seems like an odd thing to do. As much as MS annoys me for the reasons mentioned by ksheff above, and others, "Bundling new apps into the OS, hidden APIs in the OS tailored to MS applications etc", dominating a market if done legally and morally is really nothing to be punished for...
:) ), could mean that the drive to make that desktop stuff prettier would wind it up on the road to where windows is now (IMH, albeit malformed, O that's what's gonna happen to Redhat)... Striving for the pretty user market, and running the risk of ever-so-slightly neglecting the important stuff... (Although in MS' case it's "completely neglecting the important stuff...")
If there's one useful thing about Windows, it's being able to bung a lump of hardware in a box, and have it more or less work (Forget just for a sec how hard it may be to write a device driver if the proper low-level info isn't made available to you by MS *G* etc) without much fuss...
Having multiple versions, or descendants of Windows would perhaps run the risk of fragmenting the driver base available, when all that the hardware manufacturers really need is a sporting chance at making something work well, easily, and the software guys need is the same chance at writing good software as MS to give people a choice, and compete equally... We can live with the fact that MS programmers may be more familiar with windows, but only if the cards are face-up.
I personally like having windows available for a desktop if it's needed, because including all that stuff in Linux (although it would be cool
My AU$0.02, cheers.
From what little information the article gives, the premise of this study seems to be that competing versions of Windows would emerge. I would expect that the most likely outcome would be that only one Windows system would exist, either owned by the current M*ft OS group in the form of a separate company, or (in my little dream universe) as open source software.
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This is why I don't post much.
I.e. Microsoft would be split into one company making only operating systems and one or more companies making applications. After that, the company making Word wouldn't be able to compete unfairly to e.g. Corel (making Word Perfect).
The result of this would be that there's still only one Windows-company, but fair competition among the applications. This would then lead to better competition among operating systems (since the companies making the bestselling applications wouldn't give preferential treatment to Windows).
the 1 trillion in lost productivity, lost time to rebooting, cost of code bloat, cost of feature creep, money spent on aspirin, and general anguish and I could go on. Let's do it. This is a bargain.
How much of Ziff-Davis do they own? Or I guess a better question is what percentage of ZD's advertising comes from M$? If anyone knows I like to see it, they seems to always be pushing for M$.
+&x
To me, the Mafia and Microsoft are perfect examples of why an unrestrained free market doesn't work.
These are examples of entities working inside a free market, _outside_ the laws. You can't blame the market when people don't follow the rules, you blame the people.
+&x
Couple points here...
;-)
first and scariest, M$ has recently (last two years) realized that contributing money to elected officials is a great way to get them to listen to you.
from Time last year..
"...bringing the software giant's soft-money gifts to the party to more that $400,000 in the 1997-8 election cycle. Coincidentally, about that time, 10 Republican Senators signed a "Dear Colleague" letter criticizing the Clinton Administration for subjecting the software industry to "needless regulation through overzealous enforcement of antitrust" laws. "We must protect our high-tech indestry's freedom to innovate," said the Oct. 12 letter, copying Microsoft's p.r. machine practically verbatim."
and in this article...
"an industry association of resellers, are meeting today with more than 30 congressional offices to discuss the potential costs to consumers of some of the antitrust remedies suggested by various organizations and individuals."
and some more....
"Estimating the Cost of Breaking Up Microsoft Windows," makes that claim that remedial actions against Microsoft could "'balkanize' an operating system standard that has been the overwhelming choice of business and consumers for their desktop computers."
Choice?! How many of your Moms (the ultimate anti-tech test) made a conscious decision about which OS to put on thier machines? And then to take this "choice" and use it as a reason to accept the status quo? My throat just ain't big enough to swallow this.
And that $30B? Based on what another poster at the conference said, came from calling companies and asking how much it would cost to support 3 separate OSes. That ain't gonna happen, not a chance. The *huge* cost from such a situation would be support. Imagine...three seperate types of BSOD all caused by the same thing...normal use of the OS.
We *need* a standard OS, it just makes things sooo much easier, but I'd sure like an open, stable one, and make it free too!! (sounds like a farfetched wish doesn't it?
+&x
Y'know..this is actually a great way that free software can generate revenue. Create it as a web page and then sell advertising. Capitalize on the fact that most people just deal with ads. You could sell other software or services (I'm thinking streaming music...). The time spent on the site would be amazing. Tons on ad inventory. Hmmm, anyone know some (ad)venture capitalists.......
+&x
Don't have it, but not surprised. Their products are also pushed in their magazine (PC Mag I&II)
+&x
Sounds like they're talking about cloning.
They need to tell the difference between taking a company and splitting the produts apart (break-up the comapny) vs. giving each company the same code, and telling them to go on thier ways (clone).
-- "Well, Hello, Mr. Fancy-pants. I've got news for you pal, you ain't in control but two things right now, Jack and s
Back in the days of extreme unix in-fighting, computers were scarce. They were not something that the average person used or had in their home, at least not systems capable of running unix. Companies used unix and would generally choose one flavor and stick with it. But today there are so many computers out there that competition is a real thing. The best situation would be one where no company was in a position to be able to use one product to lock a consumer into using another product from that same company. This is what you have right now with Microsoft. The company also stifles competition by buying out or simply assasinating other companies that try to compete. Competing standards could persist in the unix world because of its scale and because it was not only software but hardware which differed. But in the PC world multiple standards can only persist if they co-exist because eventually the majority of users are going to choose one standard or another and the others will die out if they are mutually exclusive. Everyone has compatible hardware as well, making it very easy to switch from one standard to another. Breaking up Microsoft would be a very good thing overall because the company's policies and practices hurt consumers. Forcing Microsoft to compete with itself is the first step towards increasing competition and innovation in the industry as a whole.
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Spin doctors never cease to disgust me. If Microsoft were to be broken up, it would not be for the purpose of creating multiple versions of windows. Rather windows itself would be the product of one division, while products like Office would be made by other divisions. Other possible divisions are easy to imagine such as one for development tools such as Visual C++. This is nothing but an attempt by Microsoft to create the impression that breaking them up means breaking windows up. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that they would resort to this kind of spin doctoring, which any child in middle school can see through, shows that they are afraid. Fud is the tools of those who have no better options.
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I know , for one , that I don't think of Linux as a FREEWARE for all concept . The idea is not to have all software become free but to have a free ... ) have been simply blasted out of the industry by Microsoft . ... Let history decide that . There are typically two phases to the natural evolution of somehting . Those who work in corporations may have noticed this during developement of projects . The explosive and the selective phases . Some of us believe that the software world ( and the internet in specific ) is in an explosive phase of new technologies and will someday face a period of selection where users begin to favor some technologies over others . ( the two phases can and do overlap to a great extent ) . This may make the explosive phase SEEM wasteful but it is not . Without the first phase the second would be fruitless .
operating system . Microsoft has used it's power to hold back too many technologies to count . Let's not forget that a number of Nerds that produced a truly superior product ( Netscape , some wonderful vrml subs
You see , on one side there are the users and on the other sider there are the programmers and virtually all of the programmers are forced to jump through whatever hoops Microsoft has put between the two groups . In systems analysis we sometimes refer to this situation as a bottleneck
. This has slowed developement and killed some really good ideas as well as restricted developement to less flexible/usable DOS standards ( really there has been no reason for this for 5 or more years ) . For those of us who have programmed to Unix for a while , it is all too easy to imagine where things could be today if we had a single FREE ( that is unrestrictd ) operating system to write to .
As for money wasted
Liebowitz initially oversimplifies the problem by selecting a worst-case scenario (for MS) where Microsoft is broken up into three companies, each producing Windows. There are various other reasonable possibilites for breaking up Microsoft.
But what totally invalidates his argument is the the assumption that the different versions of Windows would immediately become so different that they would require vastly greater development resources by software companies. He concludes, through an unscientific survey, that the breakup would cost consumers $30 billion.
Such a scenario is totally unrealisic; it is clear that market forces would prevent severe fragmentation. If one company tried to create an "incompatible" version of Windows, there would be few applications for it, and no one would buy it. What company would write software for a platform that caused it to lose money? Competition would prevent the segmentation that Liebowitz predicts. For example, why has Linux, which is distbributed by a variety of companies, not broken into incompatible factions?
Liebowitz apparently provides no evidence to suggest that Windows would become segmented into incompatible versions.
Furthermore, he ignores the positive effects of the breakup. The benefits of competition would certainly drive down the price of Windows, and thus actually save money for consumers.
Considering the fact that Liebowitz's study was funded by "pro-Microsoft" organizations, a few small errors wouldn't be suprising. But his basic posulations are flawed, leading to a confusion of the facts. Coming from a MS supporter this "study" therefore appears to be nothing but (to use an over-used term) FUD.
>What if>What if every brand of VCR required a different >tape format?
The multiple brands of VCR _ARE_ produced by different companies. That does not mean that they are incompatible.
MS could licensce the API's to other corps so they could produce %100 compatible systems. I believe most other industries
work this way ( e.g. VCR ).
MS wants to bundle apps such as IE and MSOffice with '98. This would form a complete system of which the Operating
system would only be part.
Each vendor could bundle different applications on top of the same OS. MS could bundle it with IE and Office, but corel
could have one with Netscape & Office say.
Anyone who wanted could buy the version with IE _and_ _Office_ bundled, making it even easier for MS's loyal customers.
Netscape could also complete on a level playing field, if they wished.
The only 'problem' I can see with this sort of breakup is that this makes it harder for MS to use their OS monoploy to
discourage competition in other fields, such as Browsers. OTOH under US law this is considered the ideal situation, not a
'problem'.
We use GNU/SunOS.
Dear all, I have read the article. I think it's basically peoples own fault. That is for a lot of microsoft applications. I mena it's really dum to buy a product that doesn't have an openstandard like exchange. Who in his right mind would by a car that he only can fill up at one petrol station? If you want te be even more dependant on Microsoft read this article. And i than would advice you to buy this type of PC. And come crying if nothing works when microsoft quites or what ever. http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/pe trel/990405np.htm I think fair compition is the best thing. And people should wake up and choose for open standard. That means that you can always switch.
Dear all,
e trel/990405np.htm
I have read the article. I think it's basically peoples own fault. That is for a lot of microsoft applications. I mean it's really dum to buy a product that doesn't have an openstandard like for instance exchange. Who in his right mind would by a car that he only can fill up at one petrol station?
If you want te be even more dependant on Microsoft read this article. And i than would advice you to buy this type of PC. And come crying if nothing works when microsoft quites or what ever. http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/p
I think fair compition is the best thing. And people should wake up and choose for open standard. That means that you can always switch.
"...Besides costing PC software vendors nearly $30 billion more in development, marketing and support costs required to adapt their software to 'new Windows descendants,'..."
As opposed to the billions vendors spent adapting to the unending mutations of the Windows platform? Windows 3.x, Win95/98, WinNT 3.1/3.51/4.0, WinCE, W2k, all imposed on vendors without their choice, costing them billions in development costs, all paid for by we the consumers. My point is not that Microsoft can't change their OS, just that adapting to future Windows mutations is inevitable as long as Windows dominates the desktop, regardless of how the company/companies that produce it are arranged.
Liebowitz has authored other studies and papers defending Microsoft's position. "Dismal Science Fictions: Network Effects, Microsoft and Antitrust Speculation," co-authored by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis and published last year by the Cato Institute, examined lock-in, antitrust, and the link between quality and software market share, refuting arguments that Microsoft's lock-in position allows it to engage in exclusionary or predatory business practices. The Cato paper was a preview of a book, tentatively titled "Technology, Innovation and Market Competition," due out this year.
Anyone who watches C-SPAN with any kind of regularity knows that the CATO Institute is an incredibly right wing organization. I once saw them actually defending global warming - the reasoning was that winter costs our economy more than the greenhouse effect.
The real reason behind all of this is that they're rabidly against any kind of government intervention in the economy, be it to stop companies polluting the air or monopolizing software.
If you start off with this kind of an ideological assumption, you can prove virtually anything - pigs can fly, global warming is good, and Microsoft is not a monopoly. The only thing you have to do to write these surveys is fit the facts to what you and your friends at the CATO Institute have been believing all along - capitalism is best left unchecked.
Even if you agree with their ideology (and I obviously don't), is this a way to do independent research?
It seems to me that this report does not take the effects of competition into account. Write now (at least for MS) office suites are a cash cow. If they no longer held a monopoly, they would have to price their office suite more competitively.
Right now, windows isv's price their office suites to be price competetive with MS Office. MS pretty much gets to pick the price they want to charge. If MS had to price Office competively, then Corel and Lotus (if they haven't completely dropped SmartSuite by then) would follow suit. The end result is that consumers would be paying lower costs, most likely more deal's like Corel's WP for Linux where its free for personal use, but businesses have to pay.
Besides, all that would need to happen is for MS to follow their standard win32 api, and porting between different versions of windows is easy, right? MUHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I predict that if MS was broken up with multiple baby Bills providing multiple versions of Windows, ISV's will start supporting real standards like CORBA instead of OLE and DCOM and with the help of toolkits that abstract the GUI like wxWindows, will have minimal increase of costs for pretty extensive cross-platform development.
How surprising that some company who dependes completely on Office is defending Microsoft monopoly, isn't it? :)
This is all right, but what happend with serious journalism -- e.g. giving space for all conflicting opinions? as it stands it's only pro-MS testimonials.
> There is the current situation, not a new thing. For example, we currently have:
>
> Win16 (still used by some businesses)
> Win95/98
> Win NT, 32-bit
If only it were that simple. More realistic is something like:
Windows 3.10 (16-bit pure)
Windows 3.11 and WfW 3.11 (16-bit with Win32s)
Windows NT 3.51 (32-bit, old Gui, sometimes with upgrades)
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98
(The available functions of the last three still vary depending on what service-packs and which version of IE are installed.)
This give our hotline serious headaches, as we don't have the luxury to force our customer to upgrade their OS just as Microsoft does.
The best thing happening with the split is a slowdown in development and standards that don't change on a daily base.
Confused and fed up with MICROS~1 standards of the day
johi
Yeah basically you can do it like that.... the devil rears it's head when you start overflowing the individual samples (clipping!)....
My app managed to decompress/mix together/play/provide UI for up to 6 audio streams on a PII 266....
You'd think if Billy were a nice guy he'd pay for it himself. Subsidize the costs out of his own pocket... but that would be too much to hope for.
Then again, instead of paying higher costs, this would give people an opportunity to consider a different OS.
The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
Why don't we take another approach to the
unrealistic $30B estimate?
Low quality software (aka win32) causes eventual
crashes, wiping out some work.
This is a very superficial estimate, but the
estimate presented in the article is *also*
very superficial.
Suppose there are 100 M windows users around the
globe.
Suppose every day 1% experiences some kind of
serious data loss. 1 M users.
Suppose every user who experienced data loss, lost
an average of 2 hours of work.
We have 2 M hours of lost work everyday.
If every worked hour costs an average of $20, we
have a $40 M loss everyday, due to the instable nature of win32 products.
The total estimated loss is $14.5 B/year.
What do you think?
If this study were bought and paid for by Microsoft, it wouldn't be the first time. Still, the only people who would benefit from a breakup are Microsoft's competitors. Consumers wouldn't benefit in aggregate. Many companies want a vertically-owned system, from OS to Office to SQL to Exchange. Microsoft provides it. So let 'em. For those who don't want that, there's already Linux and a zillion Unix variants. There's no way to structure an intellectual property based industry to work the way free software does, no matter how hard they try.
One Microsoft is enough, one Windows product line is already more than most support techs can handle. Forget 'em, or maybe make 'em publish certain interface specs, and get on with life.
They need to make a Legal definition of "Computer Operating System." Something simple. for instance, the Linux Kernel could be considered an operating system.
They must make this definition dynamic so it can be updated easily with time. But not too easy, we know how money and politics work.
Any company that develops a Computer Operating System for profit cannot develop code that extends beyond the scope of the legal definition.
Microsoft would, of course, be given a time frame for the implimentation of this business model. If they extend beyond this time frame, the government would have the right to step in and do the splitting themselves.
It will cost money to adjust hardware to the new companies...but WHY NOT MAKE THE HARDWARE INDEPENDENT!!! LIKE IT USED TO!!! Make Microsoft's little divisions make their software change, not make the hardware change to the OS.
A simple comment:
DON'T BUY IT!
With all microbrains bugs and faults why on earth does anyone use it???? Do they, that huge demonic corporation, really believe that us innocent but unbelievably clever intellects would even think of using such a crabby thing that bears the name of "Mircosoft".
With all due respect Mr Gates, if you are as brainy and clever as we all imagine you once were, why not create such a OS that has NO bugs in and has been tested well enough and scrap microsoft before it falls any further into disrepair?????
Kindest Regards
R A Reader (Miss)
Who said that after the break-up the wincrap will be the market leader?
oh, it's gonna cost too much money to restructure the economy of microsoft...
oh, we're punishing microsoft for having a successful system...
if we end slavery it will hurt all americans..
what about the billions of dollars in new companies, new technologies, new innovations that ms has quietly stamped out? are these dollars irrelevant? what about the inflated prices consumers have been forced to pay? where is this cost considered?
i think we all know who is paying our author's rent...