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Microsoft Adresses World
at0m writes "Microsoft has posted their side of the story on the website. They emphasize that this is not the final ruling and there will be many more trials in the future, etc, etc. It claims that "company will continue to defend the principle of innovation." In addition, Bill Gates has made a statement regarding the whole issue. He says that they "respectfully disagree" with the court's decision. Kinda makes me sick. "
Microsoft is not on trial. They are being sued. By your own government.
In the US civil penalties in the law are common. In order to enforce these laws the government must be able to bring civil actions.
Common law countries like the US do not have the clear distinction between private and public law that civil law countries like France do. All in all I would rather live in a common law country because of the emphasis on precedence rather than having everything rigidly codified.
It's about crybaby's who have crap to offer as alternatives, are lousy in buisness and want the
government to step in and make it easier to sell their crappy worthless products.
Tell that to Stac. Microsoft had to pay a $100 Million fine for outright technology theft.
Microsoft out performed everyone else. They won.
Microsoft did win. However they have also shown that they did not play by the rules. There is a difference between winning at any cost, and winning within the legal boundaries of a society.
But he is in fact responsible for the fact that the computer and internet industry as a whole is so vibrant and competitive.
I think that the facts show otherwise. The computer industry is most vibrant and competitive in areas where Microsoft has no influence at all. Take a look at how competitive the box makers are. Contrast that to the Office suite market. Compare the price trends in the hardware segment vs. the Office suite segment. Now tell me that the influence of Microsoft has led to the Office suite market to be vibrant and competitive.
The fact is that the computer industry is least vibrant and competitive where Microsoft is strongest.
Microsoft had very little influence on the genesis of the Internet and it's rapid growth. Even Microsoft itself admits that they were very late to appeciate the importance of the internet.
I agree with Libertarian values, but their application to situations like this often leave much to be desired. I'm glad somebody is pointing out the lack of real-world predictions which can be made by neo-classical economics.
MillMan is wrong when he suggests real-world economics NEVER tend toward stability. The assumption the neo-classical school makes is that all markets reach a point of diminishing returns. That actually happens in some areas -- gold mining, farming, or any area where making more and more becomes less efficient (usually because poorer land or mines have to be used as you expand).
But he is absolutely right in suggesting such examples are very rare. And they are becoming more rare in the information economy. Metcalfe's Law ("The value of any network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes") also applies to networked economies, which are becoming more plentiful.
Networked economies occur in any industry where the value of the product increases with the number sold. Consider the salesman who had to sell the first telephone, "Gee, you can call... Well, you can't call anyone now. But as soon as somebody else buys one, you can call them."
More and more things are turning into networked economies: faxes (at first they were sold in pairs, so businesses could put them in two of their offices); package delivery (if you can't guarantee delivery to many places, you aren't worth much); the Internet; operating systems; videotape formats (the more people who buy your format, the more stores will want to stock your format, which means the more people will want to buy your format).
In such environments, the neo-classical prediction that markets will tend to stabilize in support of the best, least-expensive product almost never come true. Still, neo-classical theorists still cling to this belief. In order to satisfy this will to believe, they have to believe that Windows must be the best product.
Look at the predictions which this economic theory has made: Bangladesh will stop producing too many children and become a developed country in a few years after they adopted a free market economy. The Russian people will be better off economically when Communism falls. The percentage of the price of a new computer which goes to pay for the operating system will decline over time ($15 of $4,000 IBM PC in 1982; $65-$95 of an $800 computer today). Beta will beat out VHS. The list goes on and on.
Why do these economists cling to such a useless theory? When the system is forced to equilibrium by decreasing returns, you get linear equations. When you admit we often have increasing returns, you get non-linear equations. Economists have long wanted to make their discipline more scientific. They can't do this when they can't solve the equations. We know how to solve the linear equations; we don't know how to solve the equations generated by increasing returns.
Economists have long made the assumptions they needed to be able to solve their equations. Who cares if they're inaccurate assumptions? Well, the banks care -- the banks who loaned trillions to the Third World because their economists' predictions said the Third World nations would be able to pay them back.
There's nothing wrong with Libertarian values, but Libertarians who assume that government is always an enemy of freedom and the corporations are always friends of freedom are betraying those values. They are also abdicating the responsibility of liberty-seekers: to evaluate all potential coercers fairly and accurately.
Interestingly, neural nets and other recent developments are looking very promising in solving the equations we need to accurately model the real world and its economics.
Not surprisingly the banks who have a lot of Third World loans are the ones who are paying for much of this research.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Wow. OK, I'll bite.
Your main point above is :
Capitalsim is a paradox. Unbounded it NEVER reaches any kind of competitive equilibrium! What evidence makes you think that it does? I'd sure like to see some.
I don't really want to talk about "capitalism", but instead free markets and equilibrium prices. I agree that it is hard to come up with markets that work very close to purely effecient (maybe the US credit market would be a good example), but the reason for the innefficiencies are generally externalities granted through law (patents, trade barriers, favorable zoning law, etc.)
Thats the core of the thinking at least. What you really want to do to validate your quest for proof isn't to find markets that clear at true equilibrium, but study instead the effect of externalities on markets, and see if they give secondary evidence of true efficiency being kept away by interventionary forces.
For example, if we all start paying less for our clothing (here in the united states) after the Multi-Fibre Agreement expires, that would indicate that markets do in fact move towards equilibrium.
Showing statistical proof has probably been done, but it is a lot easier for me to give you examples of externalities breaking markets or forming monopolies than it is for me to show you an industry that has remained untouched by politics. =)
*shrug* Good luck in your research. I see enough evidence for myself of this every day . =)
Pax -- Ob
And you idiots didnt even spell "Addresses" correctly.
You Linux people are really stupid and obsessive.
Want help with your ethernet problem?
I think RMS's demands are not only reasonable, but good ideas as well. I know I'd support them: they can only help OSS. And since software patents, in general, totally suck, demand #2 would be so, so awesome. I wish more companies would do this voluntarily. (Does anyone know of any that do?)
Interestingly, one of Sun's demands (a link is posted elsewhere) matches demand #1. Probably very popular (and the WINE and SAMBA people would love it).
And the suggestions given by RMS would benefit not only (as he says) GNU/Linux, but also *BSD (*nix in general, really), BeOS, MacOS, (and others!) and the developers of apps for all of those OSes. This means better sw for all involved, since less effort to port => more sw ported => more options => less likely to be stuck with crap b/c it's the only thing for the platform.
So, good all around, I'd say
If you apply this argument to Microsoft, you would be saying that Windows should be our National Operating system, and that it should be regulated in the name of fairness.
I don't think I need to elaborate as to why that bugs the heck out of me. Bill Gates might even want that particular outcome!
D
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I dont nkow what you mean by crushed, but ig you mean 'buy out' - wake up, thats what business is all about!
Are you a troll or are you really this ignorant?
The "buy out" tactic is the lighter side of Microsoft. If what you're doing is REALLY good they'll just toss out a press release about how Microsoft will be releasing an "innovative" product EXACTLY LIKE YOURS "real soon now" and then sit back and watch you try to secure venture capital or market share or $10 for gas money.
Who wants to fund a startup in a field that Microsoft just said they will "enter" (MS-press-release-speak for "dominate")?
Who wants to tell their boss to buy a product from a company that has just been marked for death in this fashion?
Hey folks, You shouldn't be offended with Judge Jackson's "Linux = fringe" nor the "Mac isn't economically viable alternative" comments in the DoJ case. In order for Judge Jackson to take out Microsoft, he cannot give the Appeals Courts one square inch of doubt to manoeuvre in. Just keep on proliferating quietly in the knowledge that such comments must necessarily be suffered now and are but a means to a highly desirable end, i.e.: the end of Microsoft and the beginning of innovation and competition.
Would like to, but MS in their overpowering desire to benefit consumers has made it impossible to vote if you choose to use Netscape!!!
Ignore it?
It's still there. It's still taking up memory and system resources and hard drive space that you payed for.
It's still on everybody else's desktop -- including the people who use their computers as tools isntead of toys and "just want to get it done". These people don't understand that every time they hit a page with IE they are strengthening Microsoft's grip on the web by a very small but measurable amount.
Web pages that are only compatable with IE are slowly gaining a foothold. They start with niches -- certain state governments (because they don't have to compete, really). Then internal business networks (WAL*MART for instance).
Microsoft has many plans afoot to make sure anything non-Microsoft is eventually destroyed. The takeover of the web will not happen overnight but it will happen if non-Microsoft operating systems and browsers continue to be marginalized by actions such as Microsoft's "donations" to the public schools and universities. These "donations" are dependent on contracts which prohibit the purchase of non-Microsoft products.
What do you call it when a drug dealer gives a kid his first hit for free? A "donation"?
When you see this happening do you IGNORE IT?
The basic argument is that we have a choice, and generally government is the lead actor in taking it away.
For instance, in the late 70s, the United States was grinding out crummy cars by the millions. The Japanese came in and made cars that were both higher quality and better suited to the economic conditions of the time.
This gave us a choice we didn't have before: Between large, inefficient and bloated automakers and producers of sleek, small and well-made cars. Understandably, we voted with our dollars and made a Japanese guy named Honda pretty well off.
The US government acted quickly, to deprive us of that choice. Acting on massive lobbying by US automakers, our government passed laws preventing more than a certain number of Japanese cars from entering our country.
This gives you a good idea of the positions of the two entitites. What power Ford has stems exactly from how many cars it can sell. If nobody likes their cars, Ford will fail. That's the power we all have, and we can exercise it as individuals; I can choose to buy - or not to buy - a Ford car. Best of all, if I don't want a Ford at all, I can go down to my pals at Mercedes-Benz and pick up a nice shiny S500.
The power our government has comes from how much money it can extract from its citizens. Unless we want to go to the extremely drastic step of leaving the country, which most of us would have an extremely hard time doing, we are stuck paying taxes. It doesn't matter if we disapprove of the government. It doesn't matter that we might want to pay government for some things but not others. We have to sit there and take the whole package, for good or for ill. We have to support both the governmental products we like and those we detest.
So you can see our relationship with the government is very different from that of a corporation. Corporations are free to do as they please, because they have a clear purpose - to satisfy us well enough so we'll keep buying from them.
We have to have checks on governmental power, because otherwise it can grow to unlimited proportions.
Hope that helped.
I was going to explain something of how this applies to Microsoft, but I fear my brain's too fuzzy to get it right, so I'll close. If you want more, reply to this message or email me.
D
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Ignorance of the law is not an excuse.
It wasn't an excuse when I exited an intersection just as the light turned from yellow to red and it's not an excuse in this case either.
The anti-trust laws are vague to keep companies like MS from weaseling their way out of judgements like the one they are about to be slapped with.
The fact that I couldn't SEE the light as it turned from yellow to red -- nor had any way of knowing how long the yellow light would last when I entered the intersection -- did not reduce my fine.
Is it fair that I am fined as much as someone who drives straight through a red light while traffic is rushing through the intersection?
: Your average consumer will not be buying it to
;)
: replace their aging Win9x OS.
Are you on crack?!
Microsoft is marketing Windows 2000 as a replacement OS for 98. I work at a software developer, and the support staff get roughly 5 to 10 emails a day from users asking if our game will run under Windows 2000.
Regardless of whether you and I know that Microsoft has backed away from making 2000 work with everything, there are millions upon millions of consumers out there who think that Win2000 is just another upgrade, entirely based on statements coming out of Redmond. I predict that next year is going to be a serious pain in the as* for support reps... and me, since they send stuff my way if they can't figure it out.
Regardless, back to the point of the message - the price of Windows 3.x to Windows 98 is a major hike - 3.x was what, around $100 to purchase NEW. Now you can't even upgrade to 98 for less than that.
The point here is that Microsoft is telling half truths, and the sad thing is that, like Win2000, a lot of people are going to fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
Moof!
Bill Gates doesn't really care. If Microsoft gets broken up, he still has the same percent share of the Baby MS' that he does in the big one. The move will foster competition, stock will go up, and he'll make *more* money.
This kind of branching creates a huge support nightmare, which drives up product support costs and therefore will make the products themselves more expensive.
Now if only a fraction of customers (in this case none of the OEM-channels, though what they could remember changed mysteriously when it looked as if they could milk MS for some money) ask for such a version, it would be the right decision in the interest of the consumer to deny such a request, because that would increase the overall product purchase price for the greater number of customers.
One of the big problems with the findings of facts is that a lot of the statements in there are obviously wrong to anyone with a bit of economic sense who has been in the industry for a while. I would encourage anyone to closely examine the arguments presented. They often assume a malicious intend on behalf of ms, then apply this in hindsight to an action taken by ms and stipulate that this interpretation therefore proves that this intent was present, without examining other plausible motivations. Pure circular logic.
As a sidenote, I am really shocked about how even slashdot readers, who I thought above this in general, tend to disregard these logical shortcomings, just because they agree with the outcome.
This entire upheaval is more about lots of people who cannot shake themselves lose from their preconceived black-white view patting themselves on the backs self-rightously, about a number of lawyers happily ripping of the american tax payer, and last but not least about microsofts (very lively) competitors being surprised how they can abuse the justice system if they fail in the marketplace.
This trial sets a dangerous precedent, but not because of the reasons cited so far, but rather since it shows how the justice system can be abused by the parties involved to pursue their own interests. Even if MS is a monopoly, and even if they have misused the powers they gained by being a monopoly - I'd rather see them come out of this unscathed, then to see them judged based on the kind of construed "facts" represented by the recently published findings.
Overall, I am as disgusted as I was with the Starr/Lewinsky scandal.
Hey, hey, easy now....:)
...I know CP/M was Digital Research, but the hardware card was made by Microsoft, sold under
name Microsoft CP/M Softcard. It contained Z80 processor, some extra RAM and the CP/M OS.
I just re-read my post (WUI - written under the influence), and I can see why you came to the conclusion that I think MS made CP/M - bad sentence structure. Mea Culpa.
I actually have 800XL and I know that that was not MS, so I didn't even mention it in my post. Commodore 64 and TRS-80 did use it. Was it an OS?
Probably not. It could save files to tape, though, print to printers etc., so it had some rudimentary i/o built in.
There are obviously more elaborate ways to describe this than I am going to use, and I welcome them. However, here is my extension of the Pepsi issue which, IMO, takes into account most of the important aspects.
First, assume that Pizza Hut owns 90% of the market for pizza. This is an approximation of Microsoft with Windows-based OS's.
Second, despite what Xn has stated, having pizza is almost a necessity in today's world. I shouldn't have to point this out, large businesses (and, by association, small businesses) rely on computers to do everything. Home use is the only place where it isn't absolutely necessary to have a computer, but even there, the educational benefits of computers to children and the advantages of access to so much information to adults have been proven time and time again.
Third, there is a special property of the computer industry that does not apply to the food industry. If you want a drink, you have to have a pizza to drink it with (programs need an OS to run on, don't they?).
Finally, when people or businesses get together to have some pizza (networking and communications), it is inherently difficult to get two different types of pizza (Pizza Hut and Dominoes, or any other two). There are expenses involved that can be avoided by sticking with the mainstream pizza company (possibly associated with having to tip two pizza delivery guys/gals). Thus, most people stay with Pizza Hut because, let's face it, nobody wants to be the spoilsport at the party who insists on their own type of pizza that almost nobody else wants (I hate to say it, but that's Linux, Macintosh, etc).
Now, the status of the Windows-based web browser market (just for example, the browser wars are one of the most high-profile parts of this case) was that you could order Pizza Hut pizza, and then go to a vending machine and buy a Coke to drink with it. Pepsico then said that all vending machines would offer Pepsi for free, though you still had to go to the vending machine to get it. In response, Coke made the same move, Cokes for free in the vending machines, and there was a healthy level of competition between the two, with both companies improving their drinks greatly over that time.
However, PepsiCo then says that a Pepsi will now be offered for free with every pizza from Pizza Hut. People who get a Pepsi with their pizza (about half) typically rejoice, their lives are made easier. But the people who get Cokes are pretty much screwed. They don't want to get a Pepsi and a Coke, that's just gratuitous. They don't want to throw the Pepsi away and get a Coke, that's a waste of time. And they're not very likely to insist upon getting Dominoes (see above).
Thus, Coke's market share is reduced from about 50% to 20% or less (the people who get different pizza, plus a few die-hard fans of Coke who will throw away the Pepsi). In other words, Pepsi has used their legal monopoly in the pizza industry into an illegal monopoly in the drink industry.
In this example, Coke's reduced market share is not based on product quality or price; in many intances, Coke would have a smaller market share even if it were a better product and both drinks were free. The illegal monopoly, while it may get more people drinking soda in the short run, harms consumers in the long term.
I'm not saying there are no flaws in my logic, but this is how I see it. I welcome a rebuttal.
I am, however, sorry that PepsiCo has, by metaphor, been unjustly turned into a money-grubbing company along the lines of Microsoft. I also feel sorry for browsers like Opera, which I guess would have to be like, Diet Tab or something. :)
Pierce.
P.S. I am a Papa John's fan myself, hate Dominoes and Pizza Hut, except for the New Yorker.
you're acting like a bunch of spoilt kids.
the real reason here is microsoft employees earn more than you. its jealousy.
first post. mae linng mak etc...
Go ahead. Defend the principle of inovation. But before you do, try innovating for a change, instead of your usual Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
The point: MS has no right to speak of innovation when they haven't done anything truly innovative in the past twenty years.
I think I could've written that press release, based solely on MS's probable take on the issues.
I can't help but to wonder, though, if the DoJ has issued a competing press release. If so, I wonder what their take on the matter would be? :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
or buy out.
Conservative callers ON CSPAN once agin echo the cries of
the ditto heads "People are only jealous of Bill Gates and want to take his hard earned money away from him"
Another one is "the government under Janet Reno are destroying too many compainies with their regulations". This trial is not about regulations, it's about an illegal use of a monopoly power.
>>>please remove "nospam" from email address
...stupid, maybe, but innovative...
I've got to say that Bill Gates is one of the worst public speakers I've ever heard. In he "video" press release that he released yesterday he looked like he was trying not to laugh. The Judge has said that he hurt consumers and stifled innovation, but he still insists that he's helping consumers. Does anyone still believe him?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
My favourite line:
The Court recognized in paragraph 408 of its findings that consumers have benefited from Microsoft's actions
This is, of course, true; making IE a freebie did -- in the shortest of terms -- help the consumer. But what about paragraphs 1 - 407? And 409 - x? There seems to be no quote from any of those.
On a differentish topic: did anyone see Bill delivering his speech on the news? He paused, stumbled... typical nerdly actions, but not the sort of behaviour he normally exhibits (on, say the Paxman interview). So was he rattled or (possibly more likely) playing to the audience?
And after drinking the water, you can use it to douse the flames a few hours later. So you get the best of both worlds :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The computer industry is broken up into two groups.
1. Microsoft, and the ##### of windows users, programers, administrators, small businesses, big businesses, governments, and whom ever else whom happens to use anything that Microsoft makes.
2. All of the above, sans MS(I'm sure some of their employees also fit in this group), *UNIX*(all versions included) users, Mac users, everyother OS users.
One of the only rulings that I could see that would benefit everyone, including MS, is to force MS into giving away every bit of "technology" they have. This means opensource everything.
And the great thing is, Linux has proven that you can make money without keeping secrets.
Chris Gray
/././
No I don't hate Ms, in fact I love them.
But I'm smart enough to know when to use the right tool for the right job. The computer is just a tool, and the OS is an adapter for it. \.\.\
Without computer security, there would be no hackers.
I don't remember the details but I believe that the government invalidated one of the patents that the original ENIAC designers had to enable competition in the very early days of computing. For better or for worse the government has been involved from the very beginning.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
"I am ignorant in grammer thank you 8"
It wouldn't be something I would be proud of. I mean, it's something you use every day.
"assuming that I think computers are life? "
The statement "it's an OS for simpletons"
Windows is not designed to be an OS for a user who wants infinate customiziblity. It's designed for poeple who don't know what they're doing to get some actual work done.
To regard people that use windows as simpletons relegates me to believing that you like another OS better, which is fine, but one that isn't made for a "basic" computer. You demand an "advanced" operating system, which could be anything. BeOS, Linux, Mac, Windows 2000, BSD, TAO? I have no clue. But windows works for many people, and to ask them to relearn everything is unfair if it works.
I mean, my sister has a p60, windows 95 (first service pack), and microsoft works on the thing, THIS IS ALL SHE NEEDS.
I mean, what the hell, I got along fine with a typewriter with a little chip that beeped when I misspelled a word in it's pitifully small 50,000 word dictionary. This doesn't mean that everyone has to, but I understand the concept of scalability and learning curves.
When my little sister wants to upgrade her system, I'll ask her what she wants to do, and if it doesn't change from what she does do, I'll tell her not to bother.
Asking someone to learn something new is, while admirable, annoying at the least. This is why I think I "assumed", probably incorrectly, admittedly, that you thought computers were a big part of life.
For some people, like my sister, right now school and boys are more a part of her life than the products on her computer, and if she wants to do something more with it, maybe I'll put linux on it. But only if she wants it. And she isn't a simpleton. She's comfortable.
Thanks
Dan
"your page is lame!"
Thank you for responding to my site, but I don't know which one. Is it the one with the yellowish colored background or the one with the scribbled background?
I was wondering what could be done to make the page(s) better. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Dan
I know all too many bright and intelligent people who use Windows for the sole reason that all of their neighbors do.
:)
That's a bad thing? Surely that's one of the best reasons to use Windows, and I personally can't really find any fault with that line of reasoning. If everyone else is using Windows and is passing around all their info in propietary MS Office formats, and they're partularly resistant to change, and there's a lot of them, then why not use Windows if (in that respect) it'll make your life easier?
Being bright enough to be truly individualistic (IMO) means not being non-conformist for the sake of being non-conformist, but being non-conformist when it suits you because the particular non-conformist attitude you've taken is a more logical than the course of action taken by sheep.
However, if the sheep happen to be doing the right thing, there's not point making life more difficult for yourself by doing something different for the sake of it. Similarly, if they're not doing the right thing, but swimming against the tide is just too much work for the benefit you expect to get out of it, go with the flow, man.
If it makes my life easier to use Windows for general desktop tomfoolery becuase 'everyone else is doing it', and what I do happens to not produce hourly BSODs, then I'll choose Windows for that very reason.
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
I most certainly am not saying that Windows should be the official OS...Only that with a strong government presence, monopolies don't have to lead to price gouging, poor service, etc. It is clear that the DOJ case is moving to rectify the situation right now.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
The problem doesn't lie in the breaking up of Ma Bell. The problem is that it wasn't done correctly. Sure, these fish may have been smaller, but they didn't need to be big; they each had their own little pond. No competition was introduced, and that is the way to fix a monopoly.
--
Doesn't anyone realize that the camel's nose is in the tent now?
Aren't you forgetting the IBM anti-trust action and settlements? Or various actions of the FTC going after companies making false market practices? Or what has been going on with the FTC and data communications?
This is not the first case where the government has gotten involved in the computer industry by a long shot.
I run Windows NT. Specifically, what are the "restrictive aspects ubiquitous in DOS" that I may suffer from? I'm trying to think of something that would impact my day-to-day work (i.e. would affect me more than once a month or so), and I can't think of any DOS artifact in Windows NT that fits the bill.
Surely some of you OS experts out there can answer this for me. Thanks.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
I agree! But I think this:
.
Setting aside possible illegalities like surreptiously licensing software and then squashing the author's company . .
may be a lot to set aside. Yesterday was doubly sad. The DoJ is winning the trial, and the free market is a bit worse off for it. But what you set aside is being ignored, and we're a bit worse off for that too.
Today's NY Times article says that releasing the finding of fact ahead of the verdict is unusual and clever move by Judge Jackson. It also says that an appeals process will occur after the next election, when the new president can appoint a new head of the Justice Department's antitrust division. So, which canidate is in Microsoft's corner? Do you think soft money will make the findings of fact irrelevant?
Borrow it from Cops.
"Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you..."
To Mr. Gates: You lose!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Ummmm SOrry to inform you that your facts are totally false if you believe MS was the first one. Neither MS or Apple were the first ones. They both "embraced" XEROX's technology.... Do a litle bit of reading first...
This message was constructed on a 100% Microsoft computer
Now be honest there. My computer here is running Windows 98SE, I am using IE5 to type this, and it has Office 2000 integrated with it for editing and spellchecking, etc. And I got rid of the "sound card problem" awhile back by installing Microsoft's cool USB-interface speakers. But I am willing to recognize there are parts of the system that are non-Microsoft, and I am glad for it. Adobe makes many fine products, which are included in my computer. Micrografx makes fine image editing software at a low price. And I have a Logitech keyboard beside my Microsoft Wheel Mouse. (I am thinking of trying out one of the new Microsoft keyboards that isn't "heat damaged" (they call it "ergonomic for some reason).
On my NT machine over there I have Interix installed. Do you know that Microsoft now owns Interix? Do you know that Interix is a compliant and certified Posix API (something Linux only wishes it could be!). Did you know that the Interix package includes GCC? Yes! Microsoft is now in the business of distributing a version of GCC to run on Windows NT (both i386 and Alpha releases).
Anyway, no machine is 100% Microsoft, unless it has gaping holes in it, because contrary to public opinion Microsoft doesn't have a product line that encompasses the entire Personal Computer Market.
Just felt a need to remind you.
How about Unix? It was cheaply liscenced to universities as fallout from the big AT&T breakup....
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
Wagon?
Go sit on the cracker barrel, parrot!
Sit there and squawk a little.
should be that what they did to IBM, Apple, Netscape, RealNetworks, etc be done to THEM!!!
I'm reading the findings of fact, and the whole thing is pretty sickening. Even more so than I originally thought.
What would be more fitting than to PROHIBIT microsoft from bundling any type of office product (including wordpad and IE) in their OS, and FORCE them to include Lotus SmartSuite, RealPlayer, Netscape Navigator, Quicktime...and PAY for each license!
I think that would be fair punishment. Of course, people could still download the MS product versions from their website for free...or go to the store and purchase them separately.
They have done this to other companies for years. It's time for them to be punished by the government as they have punished those other companies.
No, that's not what's going on at all....
Assume for the moment that 90% of the world bought & consumed Pizza Hut pizza. This gives Pizza Hut a very real (although legal) monopoly.
Now, all of a sudden, PepsiCo (who owns Pepsi and Pizza Hut) decides that along with every pizza, the user has to receive a bottle of Pepsi.
The Pepsi is not free... despite whatever marketing gimicks they use. Pizza Hut is spending the money you gave them, to give you pepsi. You bought the Pepsi, and there was no way to buy the pizza without it...
Going back to the assumption that 90% of the consumers in the world buy Pizza Hut pizza, what reason could ANYONE have to buy Coke? Coke gets pushed out of the market, PepsiCo extends it's monopoly from pizza to cola.
(Don't get me wrong here... I love a downing a Pizza Hut pizza with inches of meat, and drowning it in Pepsi or Dr. Pepper... this is just a more accurate metaphor)
What requireing Microsoft to include Netscape with its software packages is akin to this: If Pizza Hut was going to force people to buy cola, they should at LEAST give the user the option of taking a competitor's product.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
MS's popularity isn't some manifest destiny. Its market stronghold has a lot to do with the ignorace of end-users and its legal + illegal market practices. Both of which are responsible for each other.
Most windows users agree, "OS? Huh? Computers run on Windows."
If we can get the source to Internet Explorer that would go a long way to evening things out. Stallman is right - no closed, proprietary standards but no other consent decree has stuck. With the way Mozilla is going, its very possible that in a few years, IE will be the only "modern browser" We need the source code to make sure the web does not become Windows only.
Quite simply, your definition of "free market" differs from mine. I don't think the market was free to choose the best product when Microsoft went to great lengths to see that: 1) Potential competitors cancel plans to develop alternatives and 2) When alternatives do exist, potential customers have reason not to use them, regardless of their appeal.
I consider myself Libertarian in many respects, but this isn't one of them: I don't believe that a market is free just because there is no government intervention. It usually is, but if one company becomes a monopoly and uses its influence to decide what choices are available, then that's no better than letting the government make the decisions.
I hope that the penalty goes towards preventing Microsoft's use of such tactics in the future, without, as you say, letting the government "do the thinking for me." Then customers can choose products solely on the basis of their quality, and the market really will be free.
Focus on the bundling and quality, not price. Arguably, Netscape is not that much better of a browser than IE; hence, the inclusion of IE at no extra cost of effort for the Windows user means that there's little incentive to go for Netscape -- whereas the various Paint-type applets are vastly inferior to, say, FractalDesigner or PhotoShop, and Wordpad is nothing compared to Emacs.
gcc and Emacs/vim are included in Linux distributions, but people still buy commercial IDEs, despite the additional cost.
If Netscape really were a vastly superior browser compared to IE, then perhaps consumers would be willing to go the extra mile in both time and money, just as they are able and willing to replace numerous other free products; on Windows/x86, the former is NOT the case. In the case of many non-Windows/x86 platforms, it _is_ because IE is simply absent.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I've never once thought I wish I had IE when Netscape ran out of ram or crashed. That's when I fire up Lynx, or if I want a really lightweight graphical browser, KFM (it really does a good job). IE is hardly an efficient browser!
They're playing the part of "Hordes of Peasants" at the moment.
Don't worry, there are and will be fat-cats at the top of the GNU kingdom. No self-proclaimed meritocracy ever gets by on merit alone.
Don't throw away your copy of whatever the name of the "Who" song is that goes "We won't be fooled again" because it'll be appropriate again before long. (Rob, chime in here...)
A) Netscape, thanks to the AOL merger, is still alive and well. In fact, you could easily argue that their radical, open-source change in business model (innovation, anyone?) was a direct result of having to compete with Microsoft.
B) Yes, to use IE you require a Wintel machine. What innovation in the computer industry doesn't have some sort of dependency or prerequisite? Most people on this board would rank the development of Linux as one of the top ten innovations this decade, but you still need some type of hardware (i.e. intelligent toaster or better) to run it.
C) If you created a competing, superior browser, you could charge for it, by the very fact that it is superior. People will pay for superior products, unless you are arguing that individuals cannot think for themselves.
D) (you didn't actually have a "D", but the point is implicit): the car analogy doesn't work at all. The advent of Linux has produced a free OS, and everyone posting here is arguing that the quality of it is improved.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Excel also used Microsoft routines/system calls which the competition could not use because they were not documented. Definitely taking advantage of writing the OS and the application. Did Lotus sue or merely complain? There was quite a fuss about that.
I am not a legal expert, but I am under the impression that the DoJ needs to prove 3 things:
1) That Microsoft holds a monopoly (not in itself seen to be wrong).
2) That Microsofts used this position to prevent competition (you can defend your market share, but not by barring the competitor access to that market share).
3) That consumers were harmed as a result of the lack of competition.
Judge Jackon's FoF find so strongly against Microsoft on the first two points that there is nothing here for Microsoft to argue over in any future legal finding against them (and let's face it everyone has been telling this particular story for such a long time there is little sense of revelation in Jackson's comments on how the industry works).
But 408 gives them the possibility of arguing that consumers were not sufficiently harmed by their actions for the courts to deliver a draconian punishment (splitting up the company, multiple 'baby bills'). I assume that is why they are focusing on it. Of course in doing so they are ignoring the criticism that they have undermined the middleware market and stifled innovation, but this is their only bargaining chip in the whole FoF.
I've got to say that I agree with you 99%. The other 1% is where Microsoft committed acts of fraud and extortion (in the libertarian sense of those words). I have no problem with a monopoly if it was achieved through the natural workings of the marketplace. The anti-trust laws agree. The next step for Judge Jackson is to determine if the Microsoft monopoly still allows competition in the marketplace, maintained its monopoly through coercion or fraud, or violated any of the anti-trust laws.
People vote with their dollars, and all too often they vote for conformity. Sad but true. I know all too many bright and intelligent people who use Windows for the sole reason that all of their neighbors do.
If the government slaps down Microsoft for merely being big and wealthy, it will be a sad day. If, on the other hand, they are slapped down for genuinel acts of coercion, fraud or extortion, then it will be a happy, but delayed, day for justice.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
AC, well, it's too bad your post had so much tongue-in-cheek... otherwise, I would have more enjoyed this moment of denouement. To wit... The scrolling mouse was invented by a small startup company called Mouse Systems back in the early 90's, with 2 patents (below) covering the hardware roller, and software scrolling technique. Microsoft's IntelliMouse was found to infringe on these patents and subsequently MS now licenses this technology from KYE, makers of the Genius brand. KYE was the parent company of Mouse System from 1988 to 1998, when Mouse Systems finally folded. Mouse never got the credit for its innovations: - First optical mouse for PC (MSC Field Mouse, then MS IntelliEye?) - First serial mouse for PC (PC Mouse, then MS Mouse) - First scrolling mouse for DOS/Windows (ProAgio, then IntelliMouse) - Our engineers spun off a startup called Video7 (later Headland) that helped start the VGA accelerator craze. - First free-moving handheld scanner for Mac (PageBrush Pro) Them were fun days. Innovation is indeed invigorating. No dark menace then. -- WebRat Random notes: * I remember worrying when I sent the scrolling devices to Redmond in 1994 for WHQL testing--would the MS hardware group get a look at them? * Steven T. Kirsch founded Mouse Systems in 1982, then later Frame Technology, then InfoSeek (Go Network.) He recruited me in a few months later. * Patent numbers: 5,530,455: Roller mouse for implementing scrolling in windows applications 5,446,481: Multidimensional hybrid mouse for computers * main patent URL: http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?pn=US05530455__
...Judge Jackson respectfully disagreed with you.
Findings of fact are seldom overturned on appeal because higher courts assume the judge with the more direct experience of the evidence has the advantage in determining facts. In this particular case, some of the issues are particularly technical (in the computer-science sense, not the legal sense). This means any attempt to send the decision back to Jackson to rethink these findings would likely allow the judge to reaffirm his findings (while explaining in a way that would not make the appeals court look good).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this decision is the extent to which Judge Jackson demonstrated that he understood both the coding issues and the business-case issues. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft's lawyers.
One of the consequences of the way Jackson has structured this trial is the fact that the MS counsel will now have to argue the facts of law accepting these findings of fact. It should be great fun to watch.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The part I am extremely angry about and most people don't recognize is how they manipulated
Linux and the press for the DOJ's benefit. I hope everyone realizes Linux's new found fame is courtesy Microsoft. They had absolutely no defense as to competition to Windows so they fabricated this story about a new world-class operating system called Linux that is in a position to wipe out Windows. Starting with the carefully laid out Holloween paper(I hope ER realizes he was just a hapless pawn in all this). The unexpected results however where the major corporations embracing Linux. Their experience with major FUD campaigns including DRDOS and OS/2 gave them some particiular expertise at all this but the one dirty trick I still cannot forgive them for is using their wealth to do away with some excellent companies by drasticly and/or giving away their competing products for free. How can a smaller company fight against this. Something tells me that all there well-played plans are going to backfire this time.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
Two suggestions that I have heard and like are:
1. Auction off all rights to each of Microsoft's products to the highest bidder.
2. Force Microsoft to open source all of their software for the next 20 years.
Each of these suggestions would definately level the playing field.
These are the same people who have been
trying, unsuccessfully, to get me to read Ayn Rand for years. What would
Her-Enlightened-Self-Interestedness have thought of Bill Gates and the
"principles" of her followers?
if she was computer literate, she'd probably realize how bad microsoft's products are, but champion their right to sell them how they see fit, and your right to use them at their terms or not at all..
-> Linux doesn't use the same code as other *nix's. It is distinct. Unlike Windows 95 which runs basically on Dos, just like Win311 and win98. -> Wine doesn't use the win311 codebase. It offers an alternative to Windows (311?). It doesn't steal. -> How else would you move files in a graphical envorinment except drag'n'drop? And Gnome/KDE are unique projects, not directly (code-wise) based on existing products. Unlike Windows 98/95/311/Other OS's. I use a konsole in KDE to handle my files, not kfm. And kfm is a filemanager, which happens to be able to view web-pages. Also, it is not mandatory to use it to manipulate files (which is why I use a konsole) Back to you, Johnny.
You forgot to mention that Linux's implementation of NFS stinks so badly that people openly advocate Samba (SMB- something Microsoft pretty much 'owns' at this point) as the filesharing protocol of choice. I've seen Linux Journal columnists openly suggest this, when asked about Unix-to-Unix filesystem connectivity between Linux and other Unices.
There is almost nothing at all innovative in the Linux universe. Any real innovation is brought in from the Unix world in general (where innovation does occur, which Linux shares in)
I am sick of hearing how Bill Gates was a "Genius".
Just because he ripped us all off for many years under the nose of the law doesn't mean that he is a genius.
In point of fact he is a sick and twisted psycotic who beleives that he can do anything he wants to do, no matter how much it harms other people.
As far as a genius at marketing or business goes... He was handed a monopoly by IBM, he misused that monopoly power by using it to beat all competetion into line. Bill Gates used tactics that would have made the mob proud. Microsoft has only advanced its own products by stealing the work of others and claiming it for their own. Don't take my word for it, read the findings of fact.
These tactics don't take skill or finese so much as a cold blooded ability to destroy an entire free market and replace it with his own demented "vision" of the future.
Why should one man control where the future of the desktop market is going? Especially a man who said that no one needs more then 640KB of RAM. Bills answer to the internet was MSN. Imagine what kind of news we would be getting right now if we didn't have access to the internet, only to MSN chat rooms and news sources...
No, he needs to be put down and not allowed to run any more publicly held companies ever again so that he doesn't destroy any more businesses.
But he is saying that in this instance, Microsoft was engaging in illegal practices by bundling/integrating IE into windows.
What is the distinction?
There is a huge difference between eliminating consumer choice to take over a market and providing two products together. You will notice he didn't say anything detrimental about the bundling of Microsoft Office or the packaging of MS Media Player with Windows. And if you read the FoF carefully, Judge Jackson didn't really have a problem with IE coming with Windows, or that it was free. But he did have a major problem with Microsoft's overall business practices.
It's all in the context. If a future judge reads this ruling, it's going to be with that context in mind. If that context is ignored successfully, then we have bigger problems to deal with.
ufdraco
"Yeah, we're a blood sucking monopoly, but hey.. wait a minute.. don't look behind that curtain, look over here! see how kind, generous and helpful we are.
http://www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate/fin_pag e2.htm
First article is the trial update. Careful avoidance of hot words like "monopoly" in the blurb.
Then, an article on how MS helps the disabled.
Then, an article on how MS helps minorities.
Then, an article on how MS supports education.
Gee, they are swell.
"Microsoft Corp today said the District Court's findings of fact in the antitrust lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department do not reflect the phenomenal competition and innovation in the software industry . . ."
Yes, there is a lot of innovation going on in the industry today. Unfortunately, Microsoft is not doing much of it and is trying to squash innovation by other companies so that Microsoft can make more money.
". . . and that consumers make decisions based on the best products in the marketplace."
Which is a lie. Consumers do not make decisions based on the best product. This was something that is supposed to happen in a free market economy, but Adam Smith did not realize what the future (today) was going to be like. With advertising everywhere, it is all too easy to just cave in and believe the hype and buy from the first company that says "ours is best!". So, very often, consumers make decisions on the best _advertised_ product, not the product itself.
"We remain committed to resolving these issues in a fair and responsible manner as quickly as possible." said Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft.
Yes, so they can get back to scamming people out of their money and squashing innovation. We understand, Bill. It's frustrating when petty things like anti-trust lawsuits take time away from being a dictator.
"We understand that Microsoft has a responsibility to provide leadership on behalf of consumers and the industry. As part of that, we have a responsibility to protect the principle that has made America a leader in technology - the freedom to innovate on behalf of our consumers."
Microsoft has a responsibility? Then why doesn't it live up to that responsibility? And while were on the subject, who the fuck gave you the right to dictate that you have that responsibility? If it's the consumers, as you so often like to claim you are defending, then I think the consumers have spoken with this trial. Your responsibility and rights have been rescinded. We no longer trust you, Microsoft. We'd rather innovate for ourselves than let you do it for us.
"Microsoft's products are popular because we've focused on our customers and innovated to meet their needs," Gates continued.
When was the last time you honestly listened to your customers? You're products aren't popular because your customers actually want them, your products are "popular" because you force them to be. Again, let me mention that this trial is your customers last resort in trying to tell you that WE DON'T LIKE SHODDY SOFTWARE. Remember, even war is a form of communication/diplomacy.
"In this industry, no company has a guaranteed position."
Microsoft is a company. Therefore, Microsoft does not have a guaranteed position. Therefore, Microsoft shouldn't be complaining when it's customers are telling them that WE DON'T NEED YOU ANYMORE.
"Microsoft has succeeded because we have been guided by the most basic American values: innovation, integrity, serving customers, partnership, quality and giving to the community. We compete vigorously, but fairly."
Yet another lie. Microsoft has succeeded because they have been guided by the most barbaric of competitive values: steal, lie, cheat your customers, embrace and extend. They compete vigorously, and most definitely unfairly.
"We believe the American legal system will ultimately affirm Microsoft's position, and conclude that Microsoft's innovations have brought tremendous benefits to millions of people," said William H. Neukom, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel.
To rephrase this quote in a less confusing manner: "We believe the American legal system will ultimately affirm Microsoft's right to dictate whatever the hell we want to the rest of the world, and conclude that even though Microsoft's "innovations" have ruined the lives of millions, it has allowed countless other "ME TOO!"ers to gain acces to the internet, thus polluting it with their idiocy."
The rest is mostly legalistic rhetoric and BS.
NCSA Mosaic, 1993. Before certain forces ran west with the source code, closed it, started strip-mining it for profits, and paradoxically became heroes of the Open Source crowd. (later re-opening the source after making an incredible mess of it)
The cheering on of Netscape has always been one of the big paradoxes for me.
Assume the Model T ran on a "secret" formula of gasoline. Further assume that Ford had 90% of the car market and witheld the secret formula from any gasoline seller who dared to make regular gasoline to fuel other makes (Olsmobile, Benz, etc.). Also, they changed formulas every three years or so to one that would barely power the old car but worked well in their newest model. Would there be any other car makers today? Would we have had the innovation of Cadillac, Cherolet, or any other domestic make? Is one lucky play (using mass production on a large scale) enough to justify Mr. Ford's dominance of the car business in the US?
Does Mr. Gate's foresight to sell IBM an OS he didn't have entitle him to own your desktop forever? It isn't innovating when you fall into a monopoly and then use every tactic at your disposal to guard it. Had Microsoft faced an intransigent monopolist and beaten them in the market, they would have an appreciation for competition. As is, they have yet to be bloodied, they haven't cut their eye teeth on fair competition.
Don't be too suprised to see their political contributions soar. They have the war chest to support it, and they obviously cannot stoop to fair competition. Their only out is to line the pockets of anyone who has power over DoJ appointments...
i am a liberal minded person as well and freedom is one of the most important values we have. but unrestricted capitalism does not bring freedom. and if capitailsm brings fruits like a monopoly then it takes away the freedom of many. where is the freedom of the person who wants to use an office packet and she can only choose to use m$ because she needs to share documents with others who had no choice for the same reason? a monoply in a market is like dictatorship in the political realm. of yourse you can say replacing the dictatorship is taking away the right of the dictator but at least it gives rights to millions of people where they had non before. think about it.
you say that "people are voting with their dollars"? lot of people do not like the m$ office shit but they need to buy it to be able to read the shit the get mailed from people who have that crap. they do not like still they have to pay. is that a free vote? no. if you for them to buy something they do not want that is theft. i hope people will sue the hell out of m$ to get their money back.
greetings from vienna. austria.
der mond.
When their buddies take over the administration, the suit will be dropped or settled to Microsoft's satisfaction
Nah. Take a look at the first page of the case document. There are state's attorneys general and civil suits brought by individual states involved here as well. The Feds don't have the power to dismiss the state suits, and cannot settle without the approval of the states. In addition the Finding of Fact may provide the basis for lots of private tort actions.
Once you open a can of worms, its all over.
Yes.
I'm frankly bothered by the fact that the Government seemingly chose to focus on the inclusion of IE with Windows.
Why? Because that's implicitly opening the door to regulation of software engineering; and that's a very dangerous Pandora's box, indeed. Is it legitimate to ever integrate software, or to give away your software for free? If your product subsequently takes off, will you have to undo the integration to avoid illegally mis-using your new-found power? If a product shipped with a shared library that other applications find useful, is that integration or no?
I'd have absolutely no problem with the Government coming down hard on Microsoft if they find violations of a consent decree that don't lead to the above, or if they investigated and found that Windows did indeed have code that deliberately broke on competitor's products to prevent interoperability, or if they established pricing schemes that punished OEMs that refused to buy into their whole product line. Those are all clearly anti-competitive business practices that would probably be barred by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. I'm just leery of the Government deciding what software can have what features...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
> MS is getting to be less and les a monopoly, because people are voting with their dollars
Although the scenery you prospect is really desiderable, please stop a moment to think about who has money to spend, and who has the power to decide where it should be spent.
In a perfect world, this wouldn't be a problem. In real world, there are people that have no choice but to accept what the market gives to them, because they may afford only the cheapest things. So, the cheapest wins.
Don't you think that a judgement such that was possibile because millions decided to give away their precious software for free with respect to freedom, breaking the market well-established rules?
My 0.0002 Euro, as usual.
I agree it had some great technology, though.
here it is
>the real reason here is microsoft employees earn more than you. its jealousy.
The crack whores and drug dealers on king st. make more money than me too. I'm not jealous of them. Why would I want to have to be a lawbreaking asshole to make my money? As this trial has proven, MS is a monopoly. This will, almost for certain, be grounds for later legal action against them (read: MS is doing something illegal). This makes them no better than the crack whore on the street corner.
We complain about MS in the same way the police complain about drug dealers. It a problem that needs to be dealt with, but none of us who want to do something about it have the resources to do what needs to be done.
BTW: No one forces you to go to slashdot.org, why don't you get your news from Ziff Davis instead if you don't like it here? Sticking around here and saying what you say would be like going to a biker joint and saying "You all suck! Cars are safer and faster!". You are asking for a pounding!
The real jealousy here is your personal case of it. You don't run slashdot, or any other site worth a sh*t, so you gotta bring down the site that is your envy. When will you people learn?
Until a few months ago, it was standard talk coming from MS that the Win9x and NT products would merge. It's only because the scale of joining the two is so great, that they haven't yet.
Dave
What don't you understand?
There is no free marketplace when a company has a monoply.
Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop computers, therefore they have the entire market for desktop computers. Therefore Microsoft has no competetion.
Now, that would be fine, being a natural monopoly is not against the law. As long as you gain the monopoly by simply being better than the competetion.
But Microsoft has never competed on the basis of a better product. Dos wasn't better then CP/M or UNIX. Windows isn't better than the Mac or Xwindows.
But the Judge also found as a fact that Microsoft used their monopoly over the dos operating system to gain a monopoly in the desktop market and that they have maintained their monopoly by breaking the law.
Bill has had a presence in Washington for the past 10 years. Just this year he was lobying congress to get the DOJ anti trust division budget cut.
It is pretty obvious that all you guys are poised at your swivel chairs, in anticipation of seeing MS lose the trial so you can say 'I told you so'.
So what if we are? If we all believe Microsoft is wrong, and we are involved with computers, wouldn't you expect us to be happy? Should we be saying instead, "Oh, darn, Microsoft isn't going to get away with breaking the law."
Rejoicing when right triumphs over wrong is normal.
This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every six pack?
Perhaps yes, if Coca Cola controlled 90% of the world's supermarkets, and forced you to buy a six-pack of Coke every time you went through the checkout lane.
More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys?
Whether it does or does not is immaterial; the fact of the matter is (as I see it), Microsoft broke the law and deserves to be punished.
As it happens, this does affect me very much. Thanks to Microsoft, I am typically forced to buy a copy of Windows with a new PC, myself and my friends are continually stuck with an inferior product which we are coerced to use, and I find it hard to get support for non-Microsoft products because OEMs are afraid of Microsoft.
you are really not really affected by this whole IE/Netscape fiasco anyways
Wrong. If Microsoft uses their market dominance to turn the web into a Windows-only system, it affects me very much.
if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain?
Me, personally? In the near future, almost nothing. But again, this isn't about me, it is about the people of the USA vs. Microsoft. (In the more distant future, a world that MS does not control looks much more appealing to me.)
And we all know that whatever happens nothing is going to put a dent into Microsoft...
You are wrong there, as well. The government is the one thing that can hurt Microsoft. It is within their power to, for example, force Microsoft to openly publish the {APIs|source} to Windows. No amount of money is going to save Microsoft from a court ruling. (If you are thinking of bribes, well, that was Al Capone's defense as well. He died in Alcatraz.)
It is interesting to note that much of Bill Gates's wealth is tied to stock price. If MSFT tanks because everybody decides to abandon the sinking ship, Bill Gates will be significantly less rich then he is now.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Sun ought to obide by those rules also.
Which seems to me to be what is at the heart of this issue. The previous post, which you'd do well to re-read, makes just this point. MS should be free to innovate, as should all companies.
Can your IM do this?
perhaps if MSFT wasn't a monopoly we would already have those on linux
... compliant and certified Posix API (something Linux only wishes it could be!)
Heh. You're full of shit. Linux 2.2 is POSIX compliant. Y'know that line that says "POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX"? That means it conforms to POSIX.
Try RESEARCHING before you shoot your mouth off. Then maybe someone will believe you...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Ha ha Microsoft.
For once, you lose.
Go cry in a corner, Billy.
Because you just died.
Thanks, DOJ.
W
Actually, I was amazed. This "Reply" page is the best Microsoft page I've ever seen. Its HTML worked fine on Netscape, the character set and sizes were reasonable, no proprietary characters.
Most of those people even paid for these programs but MS (illegally) added code to Windows 3.1 to make it claim incompatibility with anything other than MS DOS, forcing people to switch. Go buy a copy of Undocumented DOS if you don't believe me.
As a former user of DesqView and DR-DOS, I would have to agree to some extent. DR-DOS did run, but was not 100% compatible with Windows 3.1.
The Undocumented DOS bit does explain quite a few things. Basically, MS-DOS 5 and later actually know about Windows 3.1 and make accommodations when Windows 3.1 announced to it that it is loading. Other DOS operating systems, like DR-DOS, Compaq DOS, etc. didn't make these accomodations, so Windows 3.1 would present a BSOD warning message stating that it wasn't running on a compatible DOS operating system.
Other DOSes are also not compatible with Windows 9x for obvious reasons. (no LFN support, no FAT32 support)
Of course, this case doesn't cover these issues. It mostly revolves around Windows 9x and Internet Exploiter.
My journal has hot
Microsoft can disagree all they want, but that is worth about as much as a can of barbeque starter in Hell.
Wouldn't "but that is worth about as much as a bucket of water in Hell" be a more appropriate analogy?
Remember, I'm looking for things that impact me more than once a month. Also, I pretty much implied that I'm looking for things that cause a negative impact - just being different doesn't count. So:
1) Drive letters: not a problem. UNC pathnames.
2) Backslash as a path separator: not a problem. Are you serious? How is this better or worse than a forward slash? Also, I do most source code editing in emacs 19.34, which allows me to use either interchangeably if I really want to.
3) Bad shell: OK, I'll give you that one. I miss find and grep (which are available using other tools in NT) and sed (which isn't, at least not that I've seen).
4) A single-user mentality: not a problem. I'm a single user (tee hee). Seriously, our company uses both NT and Solaris servers, and their performance is interchangeable.
5) Disorganized directory structre: not a problem. Again, this isn't worse or better, just different. I'm free to organize my user files any way I want, and as far as C:\WINNT goes, well, that falls into the "less than once a month" category.
6) System crashes: not a problem. Why is it that only Linux users constantly get Windows BSODs? The only NT server failure we've had in our company in the last 6 months was when I accidentally disconnected the UPS while moving it. My NT laptop has had 2 BSODs, but never during normal usage (both times were powering up from hibernation mode).
7) API: not even an issue - remember, I'm looking for legacy DOS problems.
So, I'll give you 1 out of 7. I'm still looking for more, if anyone else has some ideas...
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Hypocrisy aside, do YOU think Linux is a threat to Microsoft? Probability is that you would say no. I like Linux and I think it is powerful, but I only use it for console-based applications, and nothing graphical until there is something that suits my needs (and quits making that noise!), which is, for now, Windows. I find myself booting from one to the other too often, though.
I agree, except for one important point. It's equally important that the rules be set ahead of time so that all players will have an equal chance to decide whether or not their actions fall within the rules or not. In this case, I think the US anti-trust laws are so incredibly vague that there was no way MS could have known whether or not this case would be resolved. If, in fact, we are going to as a society outlaw MS-style innovation, we should pass a new law about it - and then only prosecute companies that violate the law in the future. The existing law is too vague.
Can your IM do this?
Look at it this way. I've got a Microsoft Natural Keyboard plugged into my Unix system. Why did I buy the Microsoft one? I went to the store looking for a natural keyboard. There was a whole big shelf of them, one of which was Microsoft's. I tried them all out, and the one that felt best was Microsoft's, so I bought it.
If they competed like that on everything, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
It's been awhile since I watched Triumph of the Nerds, but didn't Kildall found DEC? And then turned away IBM when they were looking for an OS?
And wasn't originally, Intergalactic Digital?
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"innovation, integrity, serving customers, partnership, quality and giving to the community."
All I can say is WTF.
Now's the time to take advantage of the current judicial systems lack of understanding of innovation and commerce, two things my company, Microsoft, understand better than anybody. Mortgage your home, sell your mother, wife and daughters to roaming bands of sex starved gang members and buy lots of Microsoft stock.
Soon Microsoft will be breaking new ground with its innovative Microsoft branded judicial system and believe me, the present judicial systems rulings won't stand up in the new court. Soon after we will be entering the education market with Microsoft branded schools where the youngest consumers will be taught the value of Microsoft innovation.
In the long term Microsoft is planning MS-Government for the 2004 timeframe. For a small yearly fee MS-Government will ensure that all men are treated equally(*) in accordance to the Bill (Gates) of Rights. In addition we will take measures at stamping out Communism under the guise of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and all those other commie sympathisizers who would interfere with your right to pay for our bug free(**) software.
(*) While Microsoft believes that it will sell a product fully free of any bugs in equality (in accordance to Microsofts definition of equality and bug free(**)) we respect the rights of people to offer differing opinions. Should your opinions differ please contact the nearest MS-Life Cessation officer for further advice.
(**) It's not a bug, its a feature.
But, such a small market share would potentially put Domino's out of business. They are both commercial entities and thrive on making money. Therefore, when Pizza Hut completely monopolizes the pizza industry you will be forced to have a Pepsi accompany every Pizza (with an additional price, of course, but will be unnoticeable relative to the price of the pizza).
(1)This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every sixpack? And then sue them for stomping all over your business if they refuse? Really thats basically whats going on here!
Bad analogy. A more accurate one would be if Coca Cola owned all the vending machines and paid off store owners in order to block Pepsi from distributing their product. Coca Cola has been accused of doing some of this to some extent but I don't think their market share is nearly as large as Microsoft's.
(2)More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys?
Believe it or not it does affect a lot of us and very directly. Microsoft's development and protection of its "application barrier" has made it increasinlgy difficult to find programming work that isn't on or for Windows. Linux is turning the tide to some extent but if the trend had continued as Microsoft would have liked eventually anyone and everyone in the computing business would have been force to work in Windows and program in Windows API's.
Microsoft's also made a large number of enemies in all the companies they've devestated by abusing their monopoly power and by abusing the vast wealth they've acquired with their tax on nearly every PC sold in the world.
if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain?
Hopefully, a world where there are a lot of employment opportunites that aren't tied to Windows.
Hopefully, a world where open standards aren't being pollutted and destroyed by a company pushing proprietary API's they give out only to companies that kiss their ass.
Hopefully, they ability to surf the web using the platform of my choice and not encountering a web that is accessible only to Microsoft's browser.
Hopefully, the opportunity to start a company and develop software that might compete against Microsoft, with a lowered risk of being arbitrarily crushed. Succeeding or failing on my own merits and the merits of my product would be good.
FEATURE BLOAT, compliments of Microsoft.
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Microsoft did not invent NetBlewie. IBM did.
Good link, thanks.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hell. They INVENTED the concept of Vaporware.
No, Linux invented that. The developers have been promising a MS killer. Funny, MS is still doing just fine. This little ruling will do nothing to hold them back.
Yes, but if you created a superior browser, MS can simply add their version of your improvements to IE, issue a service release that incorporates all of your innovations and improvements, and put you out of business ala Netscape. They can leverage their browser to stiffle *any* competition in the browser market.
...doesn't mean you get to make the rules.
Try reading both the findings of fact and the MS statements with the idea that every word is completely sincerely meant, and then you'll get an idea of the real situation. MS is _not_ intentionally trying to be manipulative by making false statements- they 'drink their own kool-aid', believe their own lies, and are very dangerous right now because they believe they _must_ prevail over the government for the good of the world and innovation everywhere. It doesn't matter that this is howling nonsense, they believe it anyway. It's important to remember that they believe this and consider it overwhelmingly important. Don't ever think they are mere schemers. They are more dangerous than that, and now they are basically at war with the government and truly desperate (as I said in an earlier post, I would bet money that the MS people were _convinced_ the findings of fact would exonerate them completely. These are not sane people...)
That is actually a very good comparison.
The business model is setup like a feudal system with an absolute lord telling all the serfs what to do.
Interesting that half the workers at Microsoft are temporary and are called Microserfs.
If you look back at the business practices of Standard Oil you will actually see people being killed in order to protect the monopoly power.
Any monopoly that isn't carefully watched will eventually grow to be bigger than many states and even larger than many foreign governments.
Companies of this size do have intelligence and security services greater in size than many nations. These companies will even overthrow valid governments to earn a profit. See the actions of the British India Trading Company for a historical example of this occuring.
Of course nothing like that could ever happen here...
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
how ironic.
If Microsoft wasn't around, i'm sure that Sun would be in the same posistion that Microsoft is now, except it would be even worse.
Actually the only difference between windows 3.12 and Win95 was long filenames and a new desktop.
But I had already patched 3.12 to use long filenames and was using someone elses desktop that looked exactly like Win95 for a couple of years before exploder came out.
There are several comercial X servers for Linux that are "multi headed."
You can download redhat CDROMS for free from their website and make as many copies as you want to give away.
Actually the only alternative to Windows that the judge saw was Linux and it could only compete by being free.
Due to your enlightening comments, I now understand that only commercial enterprises can write browsers. Also, I thought Opera was going to release for Linux (non-free, non-gratis), but you've set me straight, Anonymous Coward.
Zonker Harris "There is not, nor ought there be, any food more exalted on the face of god's grey earth, than that
When SGI/IBM/HP/SCO are out of unix, Linux and BSD will take over.
Proof: Sun starts giving away Solaris becuase of Linux pressure, weren't that true?
no fears kiddie. sleep tight.
You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our industry is creating innovations and providing amazing benefits for consumers -- and prices have never been lower. New companies, mergers and alliances are bringing fundamental and dramatic changes to the marketplace all the time. - Bill Gates
If anyone would look objectively at it, you will see this is true. And the concept of monopoly is simply stupid. Linux based companies are among the most succesful IPO's in recent memory, for example. Long before the government is an issue, the matrket is already at work.
More startups than ever, more software available, incredibly inexpensive PC's - the industry is everything we could ask for. More power is comming faster and cheaper than ever before.
Now, you don't have to agree with the idea that MS helped this happen. However, you cannot deny that it has happened, that it is happening. All the complaining about how stiffled the industry is is simply completely unsupported by fact.
Like any other group of zealots, some of the open source/linux people simply cannot believe that their view is not universal. In your egotism and elitism, you simply assume that if everyone doesn't see it your way then they must be stupid, or brainwashed, or coerced.
It isn't so. Intelligent people make a deliberate choice everyday that doesn't agree with your vision - get over it.
I think your arguments are specious....
Firstly, this trial is about illegal monopolistic practices. (Illegal has not been determined.)
Secondly, Microsoft has consistently maintained that they are innovators in the computer industry. Linux has never claimed that.
Thirdly, KDE/Gnome borrow from may sources, not just the kludge interface in Win9x
Personally, I'm not surprised by the ruling nor am I surprised by your decision to post anonymously.
BTW, has your telephone ever given you a "GPF"? Probably not. Unix was invented to run the telephone system.
Being innovative and posting my E-mail Address: alt_at_telus.net (remove the at and put in an @)
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
True libertarians believe in small government AND small business. Try reading Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful'. What if Microsoft were to buy Intel? They then design a chip that only runs Windows- not to stifle competition but to give their software 'engineers' the ability to better innovate and serve the interests of consumers. Do you litigate now? A few years later, MS acquires SUN. Now? Big business can be just as bad as big government. However, you can vote out your government.
The real problem is Microsoft doesn't allow anyone ELSE to innovate.
I don't believe that it is hypocracy. The idea is that Linux, judging it by its merits, *should* be competition for the various Windows operating systems. It has the technical excellence to compete.
However, Microsoft, through its unfair business practices and monopoly power, do not allow Linux and other operating systems to compete on a level playing field like they should have the opportunity to do.
Note that I don't neccesarily agree nor disagree with the above sentiments, I'm just saying that they aren't neccesarily being hypocrites.
Random and weird software I've written.
i'm sick of people giving thier opinion not having read the FoF.
I am not the person to defend Ayn Rand as a philosopher; her ideas were too often simplistic, and I think her understanding of many of her influences (Aristotle comes to mind) a bit mislaid. This is vague, but any more specificity would be off-topic, I think. And as a writer-- well, a those one-hundred-fifty-page objectivist monologues are about as entertaining as lazer wart removal. But this is not to say that all of her ideas are bad. In a lot of ways, her particular type of moral philosophy (not necessarily her epistemology) is apropos here. She would have most likely viewed Bill Gates as a function of a lazy and uneducated consumer body. The loss of a feeling of personal efficacy that emasculates democracy ("my opinion doesn't matter") is the same that has allowed Gates and his ilk to put a strangle hold on the personal computing business ("everyone else is using it, so anything else i might pay for will probably just die and be unsupported in two years"). if everyone truly acted in their own self-interest, you wouldn't see this kind of pheonomenon. only responsible business would survive. of course, the irony here is that we've only gotten lucky this time; we can't count on the government to save our asses every time a threat like this appears, and it will happen again. why can't we count on the judicial system? because it is the standing product of the same kind of apathy and denial of efficacy that produces corporate tyrants like Gates. large-scale functional systems like the courts cannot be automated to control the quality of life at the individual level, because there is no way to encode all of the rationality needed to do this successfully in finite time (this is another large claim i'll have to leave undefended). power has to flow in the other direction. yes, your friends have laid their principles aside and helped create the kind of destructive standard you (and many others) envisioned some time ago. this is not a weakness in the philosophy. this is a weakness in it's would-be adherents.
I'm not trolling for flames, I'm just looking for real limitations that impact the work you can accomplish (as opposed to limitations that do exist, but don't affect what you do during a normal course of business).
Drive letters: I work with several large power and telecom utility clients in North America. The nature of the applications I work with (GIS) frequently require databases in the order of magnitude of tens of GBs. My clients are roughly equally split between NT and Unix servers. None of them on NT have ever encountered operational limitations due to running out of drive letters.
Back slash/forward slash: good example of something that was a limitation in DOS, but not on NT. The following program compiles and executes fine, whether I use forward slashes or escaped backslashes:
#include
main()
{
FILE *f;
if ((f = fopen("c:/temp/stuff.txt","r")) == NULL) {
printf("Cannot open c:/temp/stuff.txt\n");
exit(1);
}
printf("Woo hoo\n");
return 0;
}
Disorganized directory structure: I can't make a problem go away just by saying it isn't a problem. However, you can't cause a problem just by saying there is one. What specifically is disorganized? I repeat, except for the system-level things that go on under the NT installation directory (which most users never have to muck with), you can (dis)organize your directories however you want.
System crashes: I disagree - system crashes are not an acceptable part of any mindset. Remember I have clients who use NT and clients who use Unix, and they both demand (and receive) the same high level of availability from each.
Single-user mentality: I see your point now (I did misunderstand it in your previous post), but as an application developer this is not a problem. From an OS standpoint, Terminal Server (which I haven't used much) is possibly not as good as Unix tools. However, if I want to develop an application designed to run as an application server (i.e. 3-tier client/server architecture), there are no limitations to doing it that I have encountered. Again, this is based on actual development of applications for power utilities that are designed to support hundreds of users. Mebbe I can't make it work for orders of magnitude more users (or mebbe I can...) - the point is, for realistic use, there is no limitation.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
Actually Caldera has a version of Linux that is POSIX compliant.
only i'm running win98 and my is running linux and he sees all the network and i get to see 4 workgroups (out of 100s)
--
I don't think any company would have enough bad taste to place that useless goddamn thing in any application, nomatter how drunk/stoned/schizophrenic their programmers might have been at the time.
Just think of the innovation involved in distracting one from working with its seductive swaying and suggestive winking. Conspiracy, I say.
Well, that's okay, since the editorial staff of this website are so objective and fair-minded...
Hope you get better soon, Rob!
Actually he had a complete monopoly from the very begining of the age of PC's. You do remember a little thing called DOS don't you?
And to see how he handled competetion in the DOS market take a look at caldera.com
How is it that this same crowd gladly shouts to the heavens that Microsoft is a monopoly with no competition whatsoever, then the very next moment talks about how much competition Linux is for MS? I really don't like the hipocrasy, could the zealots please make up their minds?
Simple.
The trial isn't about Microsoft's status as a monopoly now; it's about if they were a monopoly at the time of the incidents in question, and if they were using means that are illegal under anti-trust law to extend that monopoly in the case of the incidents in question.
Jay (=
Excel also used Microsoft routines/system calls which the competition could not use because they were not documented. Definitely taking advantage of writing the OS and the application. Did Lotus sue or merely complain? There was quite a fuss about that.
Excel on Windows did, yes. But Excel was first introduced on the Macintosh.
My journal has hot
"Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice."
And, apparently, people who didn't read the findings of fact. The judge's whole point was that MS was doing their damnedest to hijack freedom, and liberty, and personal choice. He understands how the MS monopoly came about and what it is very well; far better than some "card carrying libertarians" it would seem.
You obviously did not read the report. Judge Jackson's main findings were about how Microsoft stifled free capitalism. IBM promoted Lotus Smartsuite with their PCs and hence Microsoft wouldn't grant them a Windows 95 license until just minutes before they released it, thus causing IBM to not be able to be ready for the Chrismas buying season. Microsoft basically told Netscape to get out of their territory or else and then cut off Netscape's air supply. As for comparing this to the breakup of AT&T, this is the best thing that could have happened. Each of the baby bells and AT&T spinoffs has been much more successful than they would had they still been a huge monolithic corporation. In addition, long distance rates have fallen dramatically due to the competition of the other carriers. I guess you don't remember when you couldn't even own your own phone. You had to lease it from AT&T.
Likewise, look at Standard Oil or the railroads who controlled everything. There is no such thing as a free market economy. An economy without checks and balances would be like a government without checks and balances. What would happen to our government if, say, the President wrote all the laws, enforced all the laws, and interpreted and executed all the laws? Can you say dictatorship? Capitalism leads to greed. Not that there's anything wrong with capitalism, but checks and balances are required such that one individual or corporation doesn't dominate huge aspects of the industry or our lives.
Can you imagine a world where MS used their capital to gobble up other companies left and right without any stopping of it? If MS had their way, no computer manufacturer would be able to sell or distribute any other operating system. Also, all of Microsoft's distributors (i.e. computer stores) would be prohibited from selling alternatives. MS would then require all ISPs to use some proprietary protocol for Internet connectivity (like AOL) and prohibit non-Microsoft platforms from accessing the Internet.
If you think Linux is a serious competitor, perhapse in a few years, but at this point it still has a long ways to go. The applications are still missing. I hate to say it, but supporting MS Office is essential in the corporate space. Even if nobody likes it, because everyone else uses it you are forced to use it just to read other people's documents. Star Office isn't enough (I know this from experience).
In the corporate space, Linux has barely made a dent. Go down to any business and look at their computers. I imagine that you'll find few Linux boxes in use. Let's face it, for a vast majority of users Linux has too much of a percieved learning curve. Someone can sit down to a Windows box and click start and start running apps. Installing apps is trivial due to their Install Wizard. Many people put up with the frequent crashes and lock-ups because they don't know any better. Give them a Linux box and there will be just as many crashes because they won't know how to properly configure it.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Innovation isn't necessarily a breakthrough idea, it usually is an idea to improve an existing product or process, or an idea to exploit an opportunity in the marketplace based on trends or demographics.
Most successful innovations are not clever, or complex. One of Microsoft's greatest innovations is the "Office Suite" - they bundled together a word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation package together for 1/3 the price you'd have to pay by purchasing them seperately.
That innovation alone explains billions of $$$ of Microsoft's profits - they make almost as much money on Office as Windows.
It's the geek dream to be respected for doing something "clever", but in a competitive market place, an innovation has to be comprehended by morons or near-morons. Cleverness does not equal success, it usually is just an investment in ego.
Think big, but innovate gradually, one step at a time - and execute those steps well. That's the mantra of entrepreneurship. Microsoft has followed this very well, and I find it disappointing that the Linux community is stuck on the belief that the only respectable problems worth solving in this world are the hard ones.
-Stu
Please moderate the above post up a point. Thanks
Why would you look for garbage? Are you a garbage collector?
Which one are you using Professional or Server?
The professional version only takes 40 by default, if you want to reduce it, go to the services section(located in server management) and remove some of the services, (the ones the arent need) You can get it as low as 34 as I have.
I'm certainly not against microsoft.
Microsoft has done an incredible job of bringing the masses online. This is a good thing and anyone with half a mind can only applaud this feat. This is good.
I'm against improper business practices.
Microsoft has used their monopoly power to coerce businesses into deals which are improper and violate anti-trust laws. This is bad.
And besides.... Who would we kick around if there were no big bad $MS to point fingers at and giggle.
Fish! LipHo
So, by your logic, when the "Feds" outlawed lead in house paint, so I could no longer "choose" to apply it where children could eat it and suffer brain damage, this was bad?
And when Asbestos was outlawed, this was a bad thing, 'cause consumers did not have the "choice" to buy asbestos oven mitts and spread the dust all over the house, setting their kids up for Asbestosis 30 years down the line?
As far as I am concerned, the DOJ is performing a long-overdue toxic waste cleanup.
Asbestos is safe. Nicotine is not addictive. Microsoft makes quality software products and works well with other companies.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
3rd Reich and Gates reminds me Hitler. The only Good World is a Pure Microsoft World. Anything is legitimate to achieve this Lofty Goal.
Sigged!
It's a bit surreal hearing people say the existance of a free code project means m$ doesn't have a monopoly. "Hey! As long as you're not actually, you know, in business or something, you can make a competing product! Where's the monopoly?" gee, idunno. ;)
Each of those clips has a big "Live" in the upper left corner. Albright and Gates must be getting tired of repeating themselves by now.
"Recorded-LIVE!" hehe
+&x
That's the way things are supposed work in a free market economy!
Wee
Not true. A free market economy needs controls to ensure fair competition and a level playing field. Just like boxing has established rules to ensure a fair fight. Tyson violated one of those rules and I didn't see anybody saying "hey let the guy be - he is just trying to be successful".
There are rules in conducting business. For instance, price fixing can be very successful, however, its illegal and an abuse of power.
You cannot restrict your competitions ability to get to the market unfairly like MS has done with computer OEM's. You are suppose to compete on price, features and quality.
MS has used the free market system to get their products at the top
MS abused the free market to get on top and stay there. That is the point. This is like defending the Mafia by saying they are using free market to make a living.
yeah right, how come no netscape user is alowed to vote on thier site?
"a monoply [sic] in a market is like dictatorship in the political realm"
The reason this is wrong is that the market is free. If I don't like Windows, I am free to write my own OS (if I'm extremely resourceful), or to at least help a thousand other friends write it. If my friend sends me a Word document, I can ask him to send me an EBCDIC version instead, if I want do; my friend is free to comply (or not).
In a political tyranny, you are not free. If I don't like the government, there is nothing I can do about it that doesn't involve risking my life. I have no autonomy: I have no control in all of the most important aspects of my life. This is an entirely different situation, and to compare it to having Windows preinstalled on your new PIII is an insulting trivialization.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
we needed an entity larger than MS to do the bullying--who else but the Govt. of the US could do it?
j.
As a matter of fact, the Ayn Rand Institute has a Microsoft Defense Site.
http://microsoft.aynrand.org/microsoft.html
What about all the versions of Linux that are designed to run from floppy only? I'd like to see those 500M floppies.
I love free software, but Windows' closed-source IE/Windows implementations are almost de-facto standards because of their huge share in the desktop/common user market. I find it unsettling that they can dictate the web, being IE integral to the operating system. If their share was significantly less, say 50%, they would not be able to do so as efficiently. Open standards, Please!
He was quoting at0m.
Not only will this not happen, but this would be an attack on the hardware manufacturers if MS were forced to release the driver specs. Thats just not going to happen.
As for opening all of the source to windows, why bother? How will that help Linux? There's no innovation in windows, all the Linux community should care about is the hardware support. Hardware support unfortunately is not an MS issue under MS' control. You want more hardware support, you need to go to the hardware manufacturers.
In my opinion, Microsoft has probably launched and executed one of the most ruthless, yet also one of the most successful marketing plans of all time. After conducting interviews in shopping malls, local businesses, retailers, and corner PC shops, I bring to the Slashdot community some interesting finds.
-
1: The general public is unaware of alternative OSs:
This doesn't surprise me at all, but it raises some interesting questions. Few knew what an operating system actually was, nevermind give me an alternative to Windows. And those that did mostly said MacOS. A few OS/2, some Linux, one or two cited *BSD, BeOS, and a few others, but the vast majority had a scope of only Windows.
This shows how much damage Microsoft has done to the industry. Only 1:6 interviewed could name an OS other than Windows, and 9:10 times it was MacOS.
Windows is right for some, but not all. For instance, the public seems to consider crashes as a regular occurance and tolerates it. Being a psuedo-sysadmin I've learned that crashes lead to lack of job security, and if you tell the guys at eBay that crashes are alright, I guarantee you'll be chased out of there with angry techs wielding baseball bats and billyclubs.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg. Its a Windows world out there.
2: Brand name and reputation is powerful:
This I can relate to. If I need to replace a drive on my workstation I usually narrow the selection to a handful of companies (IBM, Quantum, Seagate), though I usually stick with a product or manufacturer I've been pleased with (Seagate for me). The same goes for toasters (Oster), cars (BMW), telephones and whatnot. For the average consumer PCs are no exception.
Here's an interesting scenario that occured only just recent. Our instructor decided to have us type our test rather than write them so he could get them corrected faster, so we went to one of the many computer labs. We sat down and almost instantly classmates complained they couldn't type their papers. Why not? After all, Word Perfect 8 was on every machine in the lab.
Apparently no one wanted to use Word Perfect 8. They wanted MS Word. After much bickering one pointed out that Wordpad was on every machine as well. All essays were completed in Wordpad (with myself as the sole exception; mine was HTML formatted). What's the catch?
People like things they're comfortable or familiar with. Everyone was used to MS Word and Wordpad and preferred to use those applications over Corel's WP8. Why? Simply because they were comfortable with the software and partly because of the brand name. I asked one classmate and got the reply, "I've never heard of it before".
3: Looks are everything:
This is all too true. I was test driving an AlphaServer ES40 just the other day. Four 500MHz 21264 CPUs, coupla G of RAM, tons of quick storage. I was having so much fun I almost shat myself. A student walked by while I was enjoying my telnet session and inquired what I was doing. I told him I was mucking around with a ripping server worth tens of thousands of dollars. His exact reply:
"Why is it worth so much? There's no pictures or anything."
Even though I was reduced to console since it was a telnet session anyways, he does prove a good point. People like GUIs. Command lines are just too time-consuming for those who can't type well, and isn't as appealing as Windows. Even if I told him how absolutely insane that hardware was, he wouldn't give it a second though unless I went into X and had a purty WM and the Gnome or KDE desktop.
Not that Linux, BeOS, and all those wonderful other OSs don't have great GUIs, Desktops, WMs and whatnot, but people don't like dealing with console. They like simple interfaces to get things done. Course, we(geeks) all do at times, but when you need to do crazy things you hafta switch to a console or at least open an xterm.
4. The general public is lazy, and is often slow to change:
We live in a consumer economy, where manufacturers often make products for civilians to make life easier. 99% of those interviewed wouldn't buy another computer if they had to deal with a console on ocassion. And someone whose VCR still flashes "12:00" probably won't take the time to learn some of the basics and intracacies of a new operating sysem or software application. The first time was enough of a chore for them.
People are also slow to change. Once they get used to something, they are often relucatant to try something different. Switching to Linux from Windows to my mother would be like switching religions. To her Linux is weird and just plain different. My parents used to say that it was a bunch of $#!*, and that I was wasting my time. They don't say that anymore given my paychecks, but they still wouldn't use it themselves. Why? They remember the old Commie64 and how archaic it was for them, they use Windows now, and they don't want to switch to anything else unless its easier than Windows.
I mean, we're all like this in certain situations. And for the general public, operating systems is just one of those things. They're usedta Windows and for the most part, don't want anything else.
-------------------------------------------------
In essence, the public isn't aware of what alternatives exist, and don't care that there are. They have Windows, and they don't want anything else.
Now, am I talking about everybody? Certainly not. Some use other operating systems whether for personal or business use, and some are looking for alternatives. But the majority of people want their Windows.
Although I frown on how it was done, Microsoft has done one helluva marketing job. That cannot be denied. They dominate the PC Operating System market without question. Of course, what can we do about it?
Some of us would just love to see MS sued into the ground. Sounds nice but that would only create chaos. We however are fortunate that Judge Jackson has seriously looked into the issue and we can only hope that the government takes the appropriate action to not disturb the general public yet give Microsoft what it deserves. Yet regardless of what happens, change probably won't be rapid, and things will take time to change, if at all. Our job is to continue supporting our beliefs and to continue to educate the public about the personal computer industry, and the computer indsutry in general.
We are computer geeks and sometimes we forget that we are and expect people to know all these things. I drive a nice car, but if it breaks down in my driveway I can do a few things, but more than likely I'd be calling a tow truck. On the other hand, there are some people out there that would have it fixed up in less than an hour. Some people though would call a tow truck from the start. As much as we'd like to see fair competition, happy consumers, or our favorite such and such being used by so and so, it'll be a while before it happens, if it happens at all.
However I must admit that deep down Microsoft has a noble goal, despite the road to it being tainted and corrupt. One platform. Imagine the perfect platform in which everyone can get everything done? No more porting source code, or retooling yourself. Unfortunately it will probably never happen.
I could continue on and on but I fear I'm starting to be compared to the likeness of Jon Katz a bit, so I best step down from my soapbox while I'm still able. And I feel confident that the Slashdot community will provide some constructive criticism, discussions, and -- of course -- flamebait. =)
--
but didn't Kildall found DEC
No, he founded Digital Research. Ken Olsen founded DEC.
And then turned away IBM when they were looking for an OS?
Well, that is sorta the subject of some speculation. One of the other stories was just that he was out of town and couldn't be reached, and Bill Gates was able to persuade IBM not to wait for CP/M (he was already going to be supplying them with a BASIC interpreter for their ROM image), and that he could deliver a workalike (so he bought QD-DOS from Seattle Computing).
>You forgot to mention that Linux's implementation of NFS stinks so badly that people openly advocate Samba (SMB- something Microsoft pretty much 'owns' at this point) as the filesharing protocol of choice. I've seen Linux Journal columnists openly suggest this, when asked about Unix-to-Unix filesystem connectivity between Linux and other Unices.
>There is almost nothing at all innovative in the Linux universe. Any real innovation is brought in from the Unix world in general (where innovation does occur, which Linux shares in)
Why innovate when you got it right in the first place?
NFS only sucks because OTHER unices decided to fsck the standard. Linux can't stop that. The OTHER unices don't really implement NFS, just a sucky fake of it. I've NEVER seen NFS on Linux bust when talking to another Linux box. I've run servers that boot from an NFS link, no H/D. Linux developers can't fix Solaris 2.6 (and release the OS to the world), or whatever else. It would be... Illegal.
People advocate samba SMB (which MS doesn't own, since samba implements virtually all of the protocal, dumbass) because it allows:
- USER based authentication (rather than IP based)
- Encrypted passwords (makes hacking harder, IP based access uses no passwords)
- Simplicity of machine setup for small networks (a broadcast packet tells all the other computers on the link what each other's names an addresses are)
- Runs over IP. Makes setup EZ (well, NFS is like this too).
- Doesn't require hostname authentication. Makes connections snappy when first established.
- Flexibility of large setups due to browse master servers. The network does not rely on broadcast packets making their way all over the network, wasting bandwidth. No trusting your subnetworking to RIP, like one would do with NCP (argh! RIP is why my damn mars_nwe server won't integrate nicely with the other Novell servers).
- User name based shares. ie. Conect to \\hostname\homes and you are connected to your homedrive.
- Speed. I've been pretty impressed with the speed of samba.
- Stability. While NFS is stable, so is samba.
- Graphical setup, through swat + netscape.
- Compatibility with world's most used OS. Sorry, I know Linux rocks, but Win '95/'98 have the largest installed base, and a little "pandering" to these OS's is necessary sometimes.
- SMB hasn't been horribly broken by OTHER OS's, leaving it reliable.
Well, does that explain it to you, or do you want to buy another vowel?
Yes. Mouse Systems did a lot of cool stuff. Just the other day, I happened to look at the bottom of an optical mouse hooked to our SPARC Classic, and the name on it: Mouse System. I had no idea they made those optical mice. Cool stuff.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
#1 UNIX is the best OS in the world. Linus inovated by porting the greatest OS to the x86 platform and giving it away under the GPL licence. The operating system now runs on over a dozen hardware platforms.
Lets see Windows run on anything other than an intel chip and I would be impressed.
#2 WINE - Running windows binaries under a non windows operating system is very inovative.
Lets see windows even recognise the existance of another OS and I would be impressed.
#3 Enlightenment has had skins since 93... Where do you think Windows and Mac they got the idea from?
#4 GNU has had a C++ compiler since before windows even existed. This is a standard tool. Along with the other 50 compilers and languages that come standard on a Linux box. (C, C++, java, fortran, cobol, basic, scheme, bash, perl, tcl, python, ada, pascal, ash, and others too numerous to mention.)
#5 I believe that all web browsers have been able to access the local file system since about 1991.
"The thing that set the hairs on the back of my neck to crawling was not Jackson's findings that MS has engaged in questionable business practices, but the findings that said "clearly a browser is a separate product", and other statements that are matters of either opinion or engineering, NOT LAW!"
Doesn't bother me much; the judge put across very good reasons for declaring the browser not part of the OS but instead a seperate application that MS had grafted onto said OS that had as much to do with consumer choice and the market than Law. You are forgetting that at this point the law has little to do with it... the judge is not declaring what is illegal or not, but is saying what the facts of the case are. If MS failed to convince him that the browser was part of the OS after all their work to any significant degree, then it's pretty obvious that the justification for that argument is weak as hell. The Judge spent what, three pages specifically debunking that.
Thanks for remembering.
First, there was Doug Engelbart's mouse (1964).
Then there was Xerox and their optical workstation mouse (1981, I think).
Then there was Mouse Systems (1982) with their Field Mouse (workstations), PC Mouse (duh), and various flavors for Apple, Atari, other OEMS.
--WebRat
http://usvms.gpo.gov/findfact.html
What makes the document fascinating is not its conclusions (what the news media is reporting), but the facts... they read like a government brochure about illegal business practices.
Microsoft's reaction is not surprising. The facts of the case can't help them. They might as well start lobbying for certain words to be removed from the english language.
Lying means you tell a falsehood that you know is a falsehood. I have no doubt in my mind that Gates believes in his heart that everything he wrote is the undistorted truth, and that he has been fundamentally Cheated and Wronged (tm) by the DOJ.
I concede that MS did accelerate the growth of the internet (though they had nothing to do with its development or beginnings) and they did drive hardware prices down (by making faster hardware a constant necessity). Other than that though, they were not good for the industry or consumer.
I bet he believes that he has been Chosen as the One to bring computing to the world, and that anything he did to drive people out of business is justified because it was a means to his said goal.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
(1) Drive letters: not a problem. UNC pathnames.
It doesn't really matter how you get to those drive letters, the fact that new storage must be mounted with a new root, and cannot be added to an existing filesystem, is a serious design flaw.
(If you had symbolic links at the file system level, you could fix it, but NT doesn't have those, either.)
Backslash as a path separator: not a problem. Are you serious? How is this better or worse than a forward slash?
Because POSIX, C, and half of everything else in the world use the backslash as an escape character, and the forward slash as a file name seperator.
Please note that Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and original programmer, agrees that he blew it on this one. The reason they used the backslash is that they had already taken the forward slash for a switch character in MS-DOS 1.0, which didn't even have subdirectories.
A single-user mentality: not a problem. I'm a single user (tee hee). Seriously, our company uses
both NT and Solaris servers, and their performance is interchangeable.
I like how you counter the problem I point out with a different answer (i.e, moving from singler-user-mentality to performance). Have you been taking Bill Gates lessons?
The singler-user mentality is a problem because it means NT is designed to be operated by one person at a time, sitting at the local system console. File and print sharing are nice, but true multi-user applications (i.e., more then one user running an application on the same machine at once). Windows Terminal Server tries to do this, but there are many implementation problems traced to the fact that the NT kernel assumes that only person at a time is using the system and they are sitting at the console. (This also leads to security problems.)
Disorganized directory structre: not a problem.
You cannot make a problem go away just by saying it is not a problem. Your main answer seems to be "I don't care", or maybe "It doesn't effect me often enough". Well, I am happy you are willing to settle for crap -- some of us are not.
System crashes: not a problem.
Again, you try to wish the problem away by using an example only tangentally related. The problem is that in the NT mentality, occasional system failures and forced reboots are acceptable.
Now, since you seem to want to get into anecdotal stories: I once had to use NT server to check implementation of some cross-platform Perl scripts. NT crashed with a BSOD twice in as many weeks, under light use. I was not impressed. Meanwhile, NT 4 still requires a reboot to enable your modem!
API: not even an issue - remember, I'm looking for legacy DOS problems.
Huh? This is a problem that comes directly from DOS. A lot of the NT brain damage is still tied to the ancient DOS API. FindFirst, FindNext, anyone? Okay, sure, there is plenty of new brain damage, too. How does that help?
You're not looking for real answers, you're looking for an opportunity to try and defuse known defects in your favored OS with bogus arguments. Are you a Microsoft astroturfer, or are you simply trolling for flames? In any event, if that is all you can do, don't waste my time.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Although I didn't see what the original person mentioned, nor do I know the people who called, but I'm guessing they are likely not heavily educated on capitalist economics and U.S. capitalism. As the first poster mentioned, it's highly likely they're poorly educated (in this area) people repeating the beliefs and slogans of those on "their side" in this "war." Since everything is about us vs. them. Black vs. white. Good vs. bad. Republican vs. Democrat. U.S. vs. Evil Nation. What a brilliant nation.
In all fairness, many people on the left (and Anarchist) do the same. In fact I was watching Cross Fire, and the representative for "the Left" could have done a much better job of being informed on the topic. The arguments from the right representative and the right's special guest were very weak and flawed. The right's representative really didn't present any serious arguments for that matter, yet she made sure she came off as being supremely intelligent.
...that reminds me of a guy I used to work with.
He wrote a program that could debug dos's boot process. Since he wrote device drivers, this was quite handy.
One day, shortly after he had a working version of his tool, he came to my desk shaking his head. "I never knew it was this bad. It's amazing the thing boots." Curious, I went back to see what he had discovered about MS DOS's internals; very nasty stuff.
He submited quite a few tid bits to the Undocumented DOS author; the closest thing to Open Source the DOS folks had at the time.
Wee ranted the following :
When the Fed steps in like they did, the market becomes less and less free. (...)
Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice.
I have big problems following your reasoning, especially from a libertarian point of view. I don't think the first statement is necessarily true, and - only partly as a result of this - find the second one overly melodramatic.
I'd like to think that true, "card carrying" libertarians and firm believers in capitalism in particular would agree that this ruling seeks to address a threat to the free market. Surely, if any action is taken, be it regulations on those MS practices that are seen as problematic or demands for changes in their organization, the consequence will hopefully be that the adverse effects of MS' total market dominance are reduced a bit. Of course they will be the major force for years to come, but maybe the market will become just a bit more open.
This can only be a Good Thing for the free market, IMNSHO. Why? Because in a market more open for smaller players, the diversity increases. Fair competition is what the free market is all about, and diversity is a necessary condition for true liberty and personal choice for consumers. A software market without options seems to take some of the pleasure out of "dollar voting".
(Insert a condescending and not very enlightening reference to Monty Pythons "cheese shop" here.)
Don't you see? Windows owns about 85% or so of the PC/Desktop market. IE is included with Windows. The main reason they did this was to push Netscape out of the web browser market, and in the doing found an "innovative" excuse to integrate it with everything that is Windows. With this power and userbase, they can practically dictate web [de-facto] standards. Anything but Windows/IE will not be able to view these pages. Windows can (and IS--Java) violate any standards and make their own, making everything else incompatible. This recent feature on Slashdot proves this point, and it is only the beginning unless they are regulated. Their "shared library", useful or not, is being used as commercial power.
Brittanica.com and WWWebster Dictionary have identical definitions:
It's always been my understanding (and nearly everyone else's) that to be innovative, something had to be new AND better than what was available before. BUT WE'VE BEEN WRONG! Not only does a product not have to be beneficial to be "innovative", it doesn't have to actually be new...only APPEAR to be new! Stolen technology from Xerox, Apple, or whoever can be repackaged and honestly called "innovative" because it is "introduced as if new"!!
So everything new can be called innovative, from DIVX to Echelon to MS Bob (at the time they were introduced or discovered).
Yeah, boo hoo to the original MS shill. It's so easy to believe that this is all about money, huh? Some of us really DO think justice is being served.
Funny, NFS works just fine for me. You must be a lying troll.
you don't have to buy your pizza at pizza hut..you can go to domino's who'll be happy to sell you a coke..or maybe they'll only give you rc with the pizza..you don't have the right to a coke..you are free to try to find someone to sell you coke..
your rights cannot be violated when you agree to buy a pizza..even if pizza hut decides it's going to sell pizzas for $50 because they know everyone loves the stuffed crust, you are free to not buy it..
What is your rating system? If you have a user name you're automatically assumed not to be a moron? I only read /. when I'm looking for garbage.
Ok.
The government should stop purchasing MS software, nullify MS patents and quit enforcing MS copyrights on people who pirate MS software.
Sorry? I thought you wanted them left alone? Do you want the government to stop protecting the IP of other companies, too, or just MS?
Take note:
-------------
124. (from MS's rep. Mr. Kempin in ref. to MS's $25 mill requirement from IBM):
"If you believe that the amount I am asking for is too much, I would be willing to trade certain relationship improving measures for the settlement charges and/or convert some of the amounts into marketing funds if IBM too agrees to promote Microsoft's software products together with their hardware offerings."
346. "At the end of June 1997, the Microsoft executive in charge of Mac Office, Ben Waldman, sent a message to Gates and Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer, Greg Maffei. The message reflected Waldman's understanding that Microsoft was threatening to cancel Mac Office:
'The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated alot of people at Microsoft. The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously...'"
[Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.:]
extort (vt) - to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue legal power
extortion (n) - the act or practice of extorting esp. money or other property; esp: the offense committed by an official engaging in such practice
-------------
324. "... In July of that year, Gates reported to other Microsoft executives on his attempt to convince Intuit's CEO to distribute Internet Explorer instead of Navigator:
'I made it clear to him that beyond giving him the best browser technology for no cost that we were only will[ing] to do some very modest favors in addition to that... I was quite frank with him that if he had a favor we could do for him that would cost us something like $1M to do that in return for switching browsers in the next few months I would be open to doing that.'"
[Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.:]
bribe (n) - money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust
bribery (n) - the act or practice of giving or taking a bribe
- Word format (851k)
- Wordperfect format (438k)
perhaps MS should change "freedom to innovate" to "freedom to bloat"??
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Innovation? Didn't Netscape invent the browser and Apple the GUI? Integrity? Who filed "simulated" videotape evidence in court? Serving customers? Ever tried Microsoft's tech support? Partnership? With who? Quality? Of course, BSODs are only figments of imagination! Giving to the community? So Microsoft is going OPEN SOURCE!?! Microsoft: The most un-American corporation in America!!
Hell. They INVENTED the concept of Vaporware.
Technically, no. The term was originally coined in response to Vision. Vision was from the same people who made VisiCalc, the first spread sheet program. Vision was supposed to be a complete office suite, complete with a multi-tasking, windowing GUI. (Sound familar? MS Windows was as much in response to Vision as it was to the Mac.)
The company (I forget their name) showed a very impressive demo with multiple windows all running at once. Only one problem -- the product never actually existed. The demo had no functionality, it was just eye candy, not the real thing. The product was never delivered, despite the company having built up a huge expectation for it. It would be like if Microsoft announced next week that they were canceling Windows 2000 and getting out of the OS market. In response, the term "vaporware" was created.
Microsoft didn't even invent that much.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"You can download redhat CDROMS for free from their website and make as many copies as you want to give away. " of course i knew this... but what about a company distributing RH on new system builds in this manner?? I know RH is free for ME to distribute, does this carry over to my company as well?
Not a fair comparison -- see my posting above. Win2k is not a replacement in that lineage. Your average consumer will not be buying it to replace their aging Win9x OS.
It is pretty obvious that all you guys are poised at your swivel chairs, in anticipation of seeing MS lose the trial so you can say 'I told you so'.
/. audience. There's a lot of diversity here.
/. advocate forcing non-MS products into windows, and even if someone did, nobody would take them seriously.
'All you guys'? Heh, no. *Some*. Please don't stereotype the entire
(1)This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every sixpack? And then sue them for stomping all over your business if they refuse? Really thats basically whats going on here!
No it's not going on here. You must be thinking of some other forum. I haven't seen anyone on
(2)More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys? Face it, youre just wasting revenge! Whats the bet that most of you use *nix, or other OS's, and not windows? Am I right or am I right?
There is a big world outside of my computer. NT servers running IIS, incompatible pages made using Frontpage, and even the computer lab where I print my school papers has nothing in the realm of UNIX machines. Lots of people hit these issues on a daily basis and it *does* affect everyone.
Also, if MS stifles competition as this case seems to indicate, that doesn't just affect the PC market. It trickles down through the industry. Companies that have been stunted or ruined by MS now obviously haven't the resources to apply their efforts to program development for a less-popular operating system like Linux. This is a side-effect MS enjoys.
if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain?
Hmm... perhaps open standards and compatibilty with the most popular desktop operating system and office suite in the world?
Yeah, i guess you're right: that won't affect anyone here.
Find out what he really meant to say...
Statement by Bill Gates on Findings of Fact
MR. GATES: Good evening. I'd like to take this opportunity to spread a bit of
FUD about the findings of fact issued by the Court.
It's important to recognize that today's filing is not going to hinder us. In
fact, we're counting on years and years of appeals. Meanwhile, we'll just keep
on doing what we've always been doing.
We respectfully disagree with the whole idea of being brought to trial, and
believe that our exteremely highly-paid lawyers will eventually affirm that
Microsoft's predatory behaviour is fair, legal, pleasing to God, and has
brought tremendous benefits to my personal fortune.
The Court's findings do acknowledge that Microsoft's actions accelerated the
death of competition, increased the cost to consumers, and held back the
advancement of software industry by at least 10 years. Microsoft kills off
competition vigorously, and efficiently.
Microsoft is committed to resolving this case in a manner that suits me, while
ensuring that the principles of Windows hegemony are protected.
This lawsuit is fundamentally about one question: can a delusional American
nerd continue to produce bloated and unreliable software for the benefit of his
personal fortune? That is precisely what Microsoft did by developing buggier
versions of the Windows operating system while claiming to have invented the
Internet.
Paul Allen and I started Microsoft with the simple idea that technology can
improve our bank balance. Over the past 25 years, Microsoft has helped create a
broad legacy of literally thousands of unstable software products. Together,
we've made software more bloated, more unreliable, more unpredictable, and easy
to crash. I'm proud to be in charge of a monopoly that is commited to my vision
of a Microsoft logo tattooed on every foreaerm.
You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our
monopoly is killing off innovation and providing consumers with the One True
Choice -- and my bank balance has never been higher. New bugs, technical issues
and ill-considered service releases are bringing fundamental and dramatic
instability to ourt hapless customers all the time.
Our software is the most bloated and inefficient in America, and consumers are
paying the price. Microsoft's products are omnipresent because we've focused on
our customers and stuffed them down their throats. But we know we must
continually stuff them even deeper, because lacking technical merit as we do,
no one has a guaranteed position.
Because of our low quality standards, we understand that Microsoft products are
held in great contempt by any technically-savvy person, and frankly, we don't
care. We continue to be guided by the most basic Microsoftian values: profit,
lies, deluding customers, predatory business practices, buggy software, and
taking everything you poor fools are willing to cede us.
As we work to find a way to buy off someone in the appeals circuit or perhaps
the Senate, Microsoft's 30,000 employees are focused on designing new obscure
bugs, bloating our lousy products, taking quality lunchtime, and figuring out
the right moment to sell off their stock options, the ungrateful bastards.
With another delay of the launch of Windows 2000, and our efforts to hinder
further the potential of competing companies, Microsoft remains totally
committed to delivering to consumers the full potential of the Brainwashing Age
through lousy software and inexistant services.
Fuck you.
... for answering one of the original questions in this thread: "how much has 'windows' really changed over the years"?
If Windows NT is re-written from scratch, without any significant and identifiable limitations of its DOS ancestry, it sounds like it has changed a lot.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
The Court's findings do acknowledge that Microsoft's actions accelerated the development of the Internet, reduced the cost to consumers and improved the quality of web-browsing software. Microsoft competes vigorously, and fairly.
I only read the first 30 pages or so, but I feel qualified in saying that bill's statement was a wretched lie. The judge most certainly did NOT say microsoft competed fairly. He also didn't say m$ accelerated growth, but pointed out instead that it probably had hindered it. Did the last 173 pages change the tone? did it get that much different?
This trial isn't about helping Linux out. If MS becomes more competitive as a result of the trial, and produces better software, great!
The judge stating MS has a monopoly. We all know the definition, no compitition. Does this mean that linux isn't worthy of competing with windows?
It wasn't a viable competitor four years ago. This trial isn't about the state of the industry today. It's about MS' behaviour four years ago.
Nobody would do anything illegal like break kneecaps, but I know I would try to develop better products and keep current customers in any way possible.
But breaking kneecaps is (metaphorically) what MS did. You suggest making better products. But that's hard. It's easier to tell your competitor's distributors not to sell the product or you'll double the price they pay for yours.
This trial is not about MS being a big, rich company. It's about them being a big, rich thug.
Anyone interested in a critique of libertarianism, check out this (and especially the FAQ).
The way the computer industry has developed has made it a breeding ground for libertarian ideas, perhaps because it is seen as an example of how libertarian principles presumably work in practice. But the computer industry is only a small part of the societal web and generalizations can be dangerous!
Libertarian theory, like unrestricted (laissez-faire-type) capitalism, is appealing because of its apparent simplicity. Alas, this simplicity hides away concerns about a number of issues, such as environmental protection or the (lack of) willingness on the part of many people to participate in a jungle society, whether they like it or not.
Hmmm, does this apparent simplicity ("user-friendliness") of libertarian theory, which however comes at the cost of ignoring important side-effects and their consequences, remind you of an operating system that we all love to hate? :)
No no, you don't understand innovate == integrate to a typical Microsoftie.
And to integrate better what do you do? You 'improve' (or release nastier bugs) on your next release. I have an analogy that nobody likes; essentially it's like you're
served potato hash one day with catsup. But you can't finish it, so the next day (for breakfast) you get up and it's still on your plate... but the cook puts more potato
hash with mustard on top... He grunts and says "It's an upgrade kid gimme 80 bucks" - so you reluctantly pay him because he's the only perceived cafeteria /
restaurant / kitchen in town. This continues over the course of nearly 14 years of his 'innovation' to the original food. True, he added onions a year or two ago -- but
they are still there and each time you look at it you get sick.
This thing is going to drag out for years to come. I doubt that each small step of this very long process needs to get so much coverage...
Uhmmm..Let's get something out in the open...
:) )
This is about Microsoft trying to squeeze out of the accusation of being a bully in the market.
Twisting the point of view around 180 degrees will only prove YOU any good if Linus Torvalds is sweating in front of the cameras, trying to claim that Linux is innovative, merely to cover up that Linux is a dangerous Monopoly on the OS market.
(As IF
Pulling Linux into the ring won't help the fact that Microsoft is hiding behind a lie. Linux may not have purely innovated, but it sure has given us an OS that is stable, and is innovative on the grounds that it's free for all that are willing to work with it.
my 0.1 euro of thought,
loop
loop@leech.net
Here's Sun's equally predictable response
Why do you assume there are only two choices?
There is almost nothing at all innovative in the Linux universe. Any real innovation is brought in from the Unix world in general (where innovation does occur, which Linux shares in)
Who gives a damn about innovation? If one product has a feature that I want, and another doesn't, I sure as hell want the second product to "steal" that feature! It's the combination of features that matters, not whether they are new.
---
END OF LINE
Instead of babbering non-sense, let's see some facts to back up what you claim above. Just show me one quote by just one of the kernel developers and I'll believe you.
Also, the case has nothing to do with Linux getting more marketshare then Windows. It has to do with Microsoft's anti-competitive practices which harmed customers. For instance, preventing Intel for innovating by making a much better chip that results a non-Windows API. If it wren't for Microsoft, we'd have much better processors by now. Also, their actions, purposely harming consumers when it benefited them, in the areas of streaming media, web browsers, and OEM licensing.
No, the case isn't about marketshare. Linux can take over the market on it's own strength. We don't need a court case for that.
-Brent--
As far as I remember, MS's public image has already been heavily damaged already by their bullying, condescending attitude toward the trial and the government--and now they're trying to be good sports? I find it hard to believe the "respectfully" in disagree. MS has a history of bending and outright breaking the laws they agreed to abide to in previous rulings . . .
On the other hand, I don't really like the outright self-righteousness and glee that many Silicon Valley anti-MS proponents are fostering. As much as MS is receiving their comuppence, I'm quite ambivalent about whether the future really holds a more competitive playing field . . . let's face it, Bill Gates is a genius marketer and businessman. It won't be so easy to seperate hhim from his profit incentive; he'll find a way to squeeze as much money out of his enterprise. The time is not quite ripe to declare victory. This is an important step, but not the end of the war. Any further thoughts?------
Michael Huang
darva@geocities.com
"A spirit with a vision
Is a dream with a mission." -Rush
To borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs: For Microsoft to lose, Linux doesn't have to win. There are people who aren't impressed with Linux and still want to see Microsoft die. If you want to know why, go and reread the FOF.
Freakin' kids!
I felt that they showed a great deal of constraint, given the tremendous extent that the judge agreed with the prosecution. I am also surprised by the lack of spin they have (so far) put on the story, as their responses were quite predictable, and did not contain many of the tactics they're known for.
They plainly pointed out their strategy, in very clear terms. As we all know, this was a 'finding of fact', and there is still a long ways to go before a judgement is made about how these facts will apply to the law. The battle has just begun.
I was a bit amused by the links on Microsoft's page for downloading the entire decision:
- Word format (851k)
- Wordperfect format (438k)
HebGb
Well, since the Finding of Fact came out instead of rambling aimlessly about how great the Universe is because Microsoft in it, I have been reading it. Finding of Fact is not a bunch of legalese. It is written in plain and clear english that a geek can understand. I have been in this hack game since 1979, and I thought I knew all of Microsoft's dirty tricks. That is until I started reading the Finding. If you are pro MS you will not be after you read it. Stop your inane banter and go read it online. You have made a big enough fool of yourself already.
>Someone ought to start a Buzzword Bingo for Microsoft and their press releases. Its pretty obvious everyone
>speaking for them have been told to use the words "innovate", "innovative" and "great technology" as many
>times as absolutely possible.
So I'm not the only person who noticed how BillG's little speech sounded like the speechifications of some PHB CEO?
No, I didn't see or hear him give the speech. But reading it on the MS website a few minutes ago, I felt that these are the exact same words that any B-school graduate in a black suit, pressed button-down shirt & red power tie would say, having learned that his company has just been convicted of criminal behavior. (And perhaps calculating just how fast & quietly he can cash in his stocks & options before the US Marshalls come for him?)
The Findings of Fact the honorable jurist Jackson has released is a crippling body blow against MS. The next few years will not be fun ones in Redmond, no matter what this PHB says, or whether he rants how this is ``the most stupid thing he has ever heard", lacing his language with spittle-lipped profanity, or ``respectfully disagrees."
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
you're not forced to have a pizza though..and if you really want a pizza, but not a pepsi, you can buy a bobolli (sp?)..or start your own pizza parlor offering customers their choice of beverage..
What is with this obsession with MICROSOFT????
Almost every story here is an anti-MS rant. Can we get back to News for NERDS please????
The main consequence of the Sherman Act was an invocation of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The Sherman Act was passed in large part to curb railroads and abuses committed by them. James J. Hill, railroad tycoon extraordiare, praised the efficiency of monopolies and crushed all competition. He makes BillG look like a douche bag.
After the Sherman Act was passed in 1890, the only time it was used was in 1894. The American Railway Union organized the Pullman Strike to challenge Hill.
Guess what - the Sherman Act was used against the union and the strikers, the judiciary found it was the unions that were monopolists. So much for laws protecting us against tyrants.
Same thing will happen here. Too bad you don't read history.
Ok. I have to say it.
There is incredible value, incredible market, industry, and end user value in having a single operating system.
It truly is like plugging your electric appliances into the standard electric outlet.
MS os, as much as it hurt, and stifled, and sux, and i hate it, it does have this huge advantage.
It was "net effects" that made microsoft unstoppable. The incredible advantage of simplification of having everybody use compatible everyting. If it weren't for net effects, MS would have lost long ago because their products sucked, dispite their tactics. People voted with their dollars for "a single universal operating system" not for MS Windows specifically. MS tactics merely ensured that they were that "single universal operating system."
Bill gates is and always will be a genius for understanding that fact better and sooner than everyone else. A more altruistic person might have put the same effort in establishing some quality public standards for operating systems, but this version did not happen.
ok, point 2:
I can't believe that you have not suspected that the entire reason why Linux and the Mac are doing anything resembling business is because of this trial. There is a huge upside for MS at this point to forgoe 10% of their market share. There is a danger that a competitor might establish a foothold, too, but the statement "Look at how Linux has 10% market share" is a powerful one in an antitrust suit.
I fully expected that MS would be acquitted and that red hat would promply go out of business. Consider that Dell said it is because they're no longer afraid of MS cutting them off that they are offering Linux on Dell.
The linux market has been up to now the mouse being played with by the cat. Yesterday's decision will likely change all that.
As to IBM and the false marketing practices, I think that's a horse of a different color. The suits against IBM were eventually dropped, and the only end effect was that IBM ceased bundling its software with its hardware. False advertising is a case made against many industries and many products -- obviously computer companies are going to be sued on those grounds.
But the issue of litigation (specifically, litigation this significant) revolving around whether a product is or is not a particular thing is extremely frightening. It's the technical equivalent of the pornography "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it" argument. It's far too subjective to be defined, let alone determined, by anything other than the marketplace.
This may be a finding of fact, but the judge is saying what is illegal here. Had MS not been found to be a monopoly, everything would have ended on Friday. This is definitely a guilty verdict.
[actually, if I can be allowed to contradict myself (hey, this *is* Slashdot!), the one case I can think of where the government has been consistently interfering in product design is crypto software, but I think we're all on the same page there!]
Like the guys who have Red Hat or Cobalt stock.
I'm not jealous of anyone who's making more than I am.
I flame microsquish for two main reasons: 1) their products suck. 2) it's very difficult to avoid paying them for a product that sucks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Imagine all the appears Microsoft is going to make in case of ANY ruling against them. This isn't anything official - it's more like a hint as to where the judge is leaning.
:\
Just think of how many years people sentenced to death stay alive thanks to appeals and followups to those. And we're talking Microsoft here - if old Billy boy earns more money than Peru, imagine how much his lawyers make!
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
I'm not a big fan of ms's business practices either, but they have made several innovations. Windows9x while not popular with anyone on slashdot was a huuge quantum leap when you compare it to windows3.11
And i personally love being able to hook up up to 8 monitors to my win98 box (is there a way i can do this on my linux box too?, thatd rock!)
"and just exactly what have they given back to any
sort of community?"
I work for a non-profit company that sells, maintains systems and networks for other non-profits, schools, churches, and the like.
Microsoft has donated hundreds of windows packages and office packages for us to pass on FREE to these NPO's
While you can argue that this is probably just a PR campaign, and im sure that M$ takes all this off their taxes, still, we have yet to get any offers like this from BE or Macintosh or RH
http://www.msnbc.com/news/331815.asp?cp1=1
See, we're not biased for MS at all. Seriously. Really. FoReal (tm)
Can your IM do this?
according to Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com), innovation is defined as:
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device : NOVELTY
this definition could be used to argue that nothing *new* has been contrived by Microsoft since the dreaded 'blue screen of death'! how much has 'windows' really changed over the years? fundamentally, it still reeks of the restrictive aspects ubiquitous in DOS and the user interface is hardly something to market on.
"mr gates, is innovation the successful advancement of a company in order to maintain its propritaries and drive the nascent innovative start-ups out of business?"
beware the omnipresent hyprocrisy!
-raj jr
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I can't help but wonder why not a single consumer interest was called to the stand, but every competitor/Clinton donor did make a statement. Hear Janet Reno's statement/orgasm over this made me sick. Then again, now that this case is over, Frankenstien can focus her attention on Charlie "I just want to stay alive" Trie.
Actually long distance rates have dropped from about 50 cents a minute to about 5 cents a minute. And there are dozens of optional features on my line that weren't there after 50 years of AT&Ts monopoly.
So I am glad that AT&T broke up. It saves me money nearly every single day.
Microsoft can't live without court system.. There's no patents, copyrights or trade secrets without govermental intervention. Therefore you may stick your FUD UYA.
Anyway most likely in the long run M$ shareholders will be the biggest winners because after the (likely) breakup baby-M$es will be more competive and truly innovative...
V.
.signature not found
Are there people out there who actually believe this? These actions a) Eliminated a company which was competing with MS (Netscape) b) Required the purchase of a Wintel machine c) Meant that if you wanted to create a competing, superior browser on the Windows OS, you couldn't charge for it. Hmm, let's say we decide to make all the car companies stop charging for cars... anyone think the quality of the cars will improve?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Of "innovative" - it's not clear to me why we on /. are so high and mighty that we get to make thsi normative decision, namely what constitutes innovation. Surprise, surprise, all we're interested in is engineering excellence.
Perhaps true innovation is the ability to market engineered products to non-engineers. Oops, I think that might count as flamebait...
Can your IM do this?
Now that MS has been found guilty, I'm wondering what kind of punishment they will receive. Do you think it's possible that the judge might take feedback from the technical community at large to determine what is appropriate?
Even though it's doubtful, I think this is a great opportunity for Slashdot readers to make some suggestions of our own. I wonder if we can draw up some kind of a document that expresses a concensus of the Slashdot community and our recommendation about what needs to be done.
Now that MS is on their knees, this is the perfect opportunity for us to do more than just complain. We have a chance to DO something real about it. I think we should not let this opportunity to make a difference slip on by.
Here are some of my suggestions:
(1) Force MS to port some of their applications to other competing operating systems. I think people in the general community are always confusing the OS with the applications that run on it. There is no reason why some of their applications such as Word, Excel & IE could not not be made to run on UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. If the applications were made available on Linux, who cares what the underlying OS is? I think the judge already made this distinction with regards to the web browser, why not extend this to all their applications? Maybe they could be forced to provide assistance to the WINE and other Win32 porting projects.
(2) Also, I think there should be more pressure on other vendors to make their software available on other OS. In particular, a lot of the Netscape plugins have no Linux version (this relates to a previous post) and this drives me crazy. I hate it when my MS friends are bragging about some new cool plugin that I can't make use of because I'm running Linux. There is absolutely no reason why these plugins could not run also on Linux! I don't know if MS has anything to do with the lack of plugin support on other platforms (by putting pressure on the developers), but if they are in any way responsible for this, they should be forced to stop this practive and even encourage multi-platform development.
(3) Wouldn't it also be great if MS was forced to pay a huge fine, and then that money was invested in an organization that fosters the porting of applications to other operating systems? Maybe the time has finally come to end the Windows dominance once and for all!
Any comments or additional suggestions?
Out of interest, why is the (US) government getting involved in the geek world a necessarily-bad thing, especially if the decisions are coming out favourably as this would appear to be?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Daffy Duck's post is the funniest thing I've seen in a week. Someone moderate it up, quick!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The government is both the biggest user of MS software and the biggest promoter of MS. I wish the government would leave MS alone. The government should stop purchasing MS software, nullify MS patents and quit enforcing MS copyrights on people who pirate MS software. MS would never have gotten in a monopoly position without the help of the government.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
I pulled Linux in because a large amount of the community (sure, zealots, but they make big amount, or at least a large amount making noise), claim Linux is innovative. Its hypocritical to call your "enemy" a lier for being innovative and turn around and say "use Linux. Its innovative!"
Turn on tv, check your mbox (snail and elect), walk outside and see the billboards, walk into a deli and see the lcd screens - almost everyone makes claims that they cannot backup and are pure lies. Sure, I'd love it if MS would shut up already, but then I get enough crap as it is. So I take it with a (heavy) grain of salt.
We've seen innovative companies in the past. Its even becomes hard to say what exactly is innovative. We say Netscape.. but that was an offshoot of Mosiac (which was just a graphical lynx). I'd have to say the Xerox PA Labs were innovative (mouse, GUI, etc). Perhaps Apple for the "home computer" concept (or at least making it feasable).
The good aspect of Microsoft was taking the innovative ideas, embracing them, and making a better product for the consumer. The bad thing was destroying the innovator.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
fuck you I said "monopoly" not "anti-trust" maybe you shouldn't go and make assertations on what think people said.
"Uh - the term monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust act has a very specific legal meaning."
I know what an anti-trust is, that is why I didn't refer to it as an anti trust! God damn!
fuck you,
Mike
Am I correct in reading this:
"since their producer has a conflict of interest which prevents him from making his apps work well on any platform other than his own."
to mean that you're faulting Microsoft for not porting its applications to other operating systems? If I remember correctly, they've ported several big apps to MacOS. If they don't port it to Linux or any other unixish operating system, it's probably because they don't think they'd make money on it. This being the case, not porting to unixen would be a sound business decision, not an anti-competitive attack.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
All right all you Microsoft lovers. I ask you this, how in your right mind can you like an operating system that's roots are based on a file manager? How many of you have actually seen a copy of Windows 1.x?
Long live Linux!!!!!!!!!!!!
>There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the computer industry.
And it was probably said in the late 1800's:
There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the oil industry. (Standard Oil)
And it was probably said in the 1960's:
There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the computer industry. (IBM)
And it was probably said in the 1980's:
There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the telecommunications industry. (AT&T)
This case is not about the computer industry or software. It is about the business practices of a company. That company happens to be in the computer industry (software specifically, but attempting to expand into other areas), but it is its BUSINESS PRACTICES that are getting it into trouble. The same kind of business practices that got Standard Oil in trouble. The same kind of business practices that got IBM in trouble. The same kind of business practices that got AT&T in trouble.
See a pattern?
jeff smith
jsmith@alum.NOTMICROSOFT.mit.edu.
I'm sorry but Microsoft does innovate. Their products are better than the competition.
. shtml
I am sorry, but I disagree with the first part of your statement. Why?
1. Innovation in it's highest form is breaking new ground, delivering a new type of product. Not incremental improvement. Where is Microsoft's Visicalc?
2. Look at the following web site. 'Innovations' often attributed to MS are easily debunked.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation
3. Many people never see anything but Microsoft products, so they think that features like 'Intellisense' are Microsoft innovations. Well, sorry, but I have seen similar software functionality for years. C programming environemnts with syntax completetion date back to the mid 80's. Pandora, a Mac database had auto completion since 1988 or so. So did Apple's Filemaker. There is nothing innovative about Intellisense. Ditto mouse/key cording. Apple has been doing mouse-key cording since 1984 - it is how they got by with a single mouse button. It just is not a Microsoft idea at all. The fact is that what passes for innovations by Microsoft are generally features stolen or purchased from somebody else.
Regardless of the source of the ideas, Microsoft does have products that are often best of their type. How they got there is perhaps something that should not be looked at too carefully. Like sausage, you don't want to know how it is made.
It certainly was not by innovation.
No one is shoving MS (Office) down people's throats
Nonsense. My company shoved it down my throat. MS cut them a deal - to get a discount they had to agree to install Windows and Office on every PC in the company. I had to buy SoftWindows for my Mac to comply with the resulting company policy. MS forced IE onto every computer that had Windows preinstalled. MS forced computer vendors to pay a windows license for every machine they shipped, regardless if the user wanted it or not. MS forced Apple to drop Netscape and set up IE as their primary browser. It's all there in Judge Jackson's finding of fact.
And I do believe he has good intentions.
If you believe that you have not read Judge Jackson's Finding of Fact. Bill Gates is a preditor with no concept of business ethics.
If you don't believe me after the FOF, go and look up what has been published about the DR DOS case.
Reading that FoF seemed a lot more like an Intel-bashing fest than a Microsoft trial, constantly referring to the infeasbility of alternate microprocessors and OS's for anything but Intel-based systems. Anyone else get the impression this whole process is laying the groundwork to nail Intel next?
But to stay closer to topic, do any of my fellow Microsoft-bashers know what would be a "healthy" solution to the monopoly? I feel a bit like the cat who caught the rat and now doesn't know what to do with it.
On contemplation, I really don't think it's healthy for Windows to be artificially forced to a smaller market share, and I wonder if releasing the source is about as useful as Netscape releasing the source to Mozilla. The Win9x source has got to be even nastier. And would the resulting OS-fragmentation will be good for already horrific compatability problems.
Certainly, breaking the company up will have little effect on Windows dominance, as one of the companies will still own the OS, and that company will clearly continue as the dominant monster. There are a lot of things Microsoft could do to be friendlier and more open, but most of those things are unusually hard to enforce.
I guess splitting the NT (Win2k) side from the 9x (Millenium) side would be a healthy start, as I understand those dev groups are fiercely competetive within Microsoft anyway. I think the NT guys would quickly lower their prices to compete head-on with Win9x, and I'll bet a lot of people would switch on the grounds that Win2k is so much more stable and even a lot faster for some applications.
Sorry to burst your bubble but not everyone who has some hot air and speacks of Linux is a Linux developer. There are lot's of idiots continually blowing a lot of hot air around too. But I don't take that as Microsoft's official position.
If you want to claim that one of the Linux developers actually made that claim, you'll have to show me a quote from a developer listed in the CREDITS file or other valid source. Anyone else is just being a nuisence.
Right...I bet you believe in Santa Claus, too...We now have the FOF to go by. It's no longer rumor and hearsay. I recommend downloading the FOF and reading it yourself. Nothing else really matters.
And yes, the Judge found that Microsoft had wrongfully inhibited Intels freedoms to develop better processers. We have all been damaged in the processor market by lower quality/preforming chips, because Microsoft deemed the innovations a threat to their dominance.
Funny, I don't see anyone with broken kneecaps due to a MS OS...I hope that's a figure of speech, or something. It is really far out to define harm as just broken kneecaps. Then we'd have this in a murder trial, "No, your honour, I did not harm the murdered victim. Both his kneecaps are still intact."
But the Judge has determined that Microsoft's actions have harmed consumers. In not just one way, but many numerous ways. Consumers were hurt when they had to have a browser integrated with Windows when they didn't want one. They were hurt when OEM's weren't able to make PC's easier to use then Microsoft allowed. And many others. They are all documented in the FOF. And Judge Jackson determined that they were able to successfully due this only because they had no competitors.
Note that it is not wrong to not have competition. It is wrong however, to use your position to harm comsumers and deny others the freedom to innovate.
As any other company would do! All you Linux people seem to forget that if we did a s/Sun/Microsoft/g on the past few years, we'd all be griping about how evil Sun was...quit picking on MS just because they got lucky.I think this is the first point in this post that you actually said something good. You are right, if it were Sun, or AOL, or Red Hat, or any other company that violated the law in the way Microsoft has, then they would be in Microsoft's place in court. No one is above the law, not even Microsoft.
The only thing that matters here is cold, hard facts. Judge Jackson gave them to use. If you disagree with them, then I ask you, along with Microsoft, "Show me the facts." Opinion doesn't matter here. Hypothetical situations are of no concern. Theories and ideas play no part of this. It is solely about facts, and facts alone.
I'd be more then willing to concede with you any single point that you can back up with a fact. So far, I've seen no one on Microsoft's side, not even Microsoft themselves, be able to use one single fact to prove their case. Every single fact is against Microsoft. Every single one. I dare you, prove me wrong.
-Brent--
...I can respect. At least on this. Blind party loyalty makes fools out of almost everyone. Thankfully some people can think realistically.
For the record, my political beliefs are very similar yet very different than Libertarians. There isn't a univeral Anarchist belief/opinion Bible that I worship, and I don't agree and share the same likes and dislikes as other Anarchists. This is reality. Will I sit around and tell people Anarchism is the only realistic alternative, and it will work? Of course I won't. It hasn't been fully tested. Neither has Capitalist Libertarianism.
Infoshop
Now if MS could just learn to innovate "Forward". To paraphrase the always quotable "Chong":
"Just remember, Bill, 'D' is that way (points forward)"
Bill seems to be getting his d's and r's confused. :)
evguenii
Mind you, it's basically the ONLY place anywhere in the whole document where anything even vaguely nice is said about Microsoft. But they're pretty desperate here, and will take anything they can get.
One Microsoft-positive paragraph out of the whole of the Findings of Fact, and MS/brother Bill latch onto those few words as indicative of the Judge understanding their perspective? What are they smoking, up there in Redmond. Did they not read the rest of the document? Clearly, MS is in no mood to attempt to settle this dispute.
This will drag on and on, and by the time it is over, the judgements and rulings will probably be irrelevant, because the world will have moved on. The scrutiny that Microsoft will have to work under in the interim will serve to open the doors for quality competition from Linux, Sun, Apache and many others. The purpose will have been served.
Of course it is.
I think the original would be better - having all the flames already going around you would mean a can of starter fluid would rarely be needed, whereas the bucket of water would provide for a refreshing drink amidst the inferno.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Neither you, nor Libertarians understand things all that well in some ways. Note though that I tend to call myself a libertarian. :-)
Microsoft's dominance comes from two sources, both government supported.
One source is their copyrights on their software. This is a government supported monopoly. It's a leaky monopoly, but a monopoly all the same, and corporations are making it less and less leaky all the time.
The other source is their status as a 'corporation'. A 'corporation' is a legal fiction, created by a body of law. For example, if corporations didn't exist, only individuals could hold copyrights or patents, and individuals would be responsible for actions. An organization couldn't have trade secrets, only individual people. The list goes on and on.
Both of these reasons exist because of government. They exist because a body of law exists to support them. Arguments based on Microsoft achieving it's position purely through market forces are ingoring too many things. Arguments on the other side based on the failure of the free market system are ignoring the fact that in many ways, we aren't.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that a body of law defining a market (not a particular market, but the marketplace as a whole) should always be engineered such that self interest will cause companies to do what is good for consumers with an absolute minimum of government intervention. I don't think the current body of law is engineered in such a way, and that is much of the source of the reason I call myself a libertarian.
There also remains the coercion question. I think it's a very questionable activity to restrict the kinds of contracts you will allow business partners to enter into, especially when you hold such a dominant position in a market that they almost _have_ to deal with you in order to make any money. Then you start becoming a government of sorts in your own right.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Honestly, though. Did we really expect him to just sit around and say nothing, or just admit 'yeah, we really have tried to stifle our competitors'? Hopefully, the findings in this will lead to an environment where you actually can innovate. I would love to see the best product win out, instead of whichever is pushed on people.
How many of us have thought "I wish IE was available for Linux" after Netscape came to a grinding halt, taking up all the memory. I know I have. Or wanted to be able to USE office and such. Maybe someday with WINE we will be able to do it anyways, but it would be nice to get come competetive products on *nix, too. If all else fails, though, we will do it ourselves. Thats the beauty of having choice, and not having a certain product pushed on you.
Still not dead.
Secondly, is this not a really big slap in the face to linux? The judge stating MS has a monopoly. We all know the definition, no compitition. Does this mean that linux isn't worthy of competing with windows? I would argue till I was blue in the face that linux is a competitor, so I guess in my definition MS doesn't have a monopoly. But man, for a judge to say that there isn't any competition, even if linux has but a small hold on the OS community for the intel/client machines, I think most here would argue that linux is growing, is a good product, and is competition for MS. And granted if you have a decent connection to the net you can download any distro's cd image file, Red Hat charges $70 where I live to get the CDs and manuals. There is competition there. Not to mention how many file systems are there? FAT, FAT32, NTFS are the three that MS uses, I know that linux uses its own, OS/2 uses its own, all the OSs use there own file system and there are a ton of them, that has to say that there is at least marginal competition as well.
Lastly, is Bill really doing something that anybody wouldn't do? How many of you, upon owning a software business, would allow a competitor to produce a product which would cripple your company? Nobody would do anything illegal like break kneecaps, but I know I would try to develop better products and keep current customers in any way possible. MS has been using the fact that it has a ton of software to keep people tied in. That is the primary reason that I still have a partition on my box dedicated to NT. Not because I particualarly enjoy the OS itself, linux is IMHO far better, but because MS has some software that I need, and it has the games as well. I like games and well, if I'm willing to drop $3000 on a sweet computer with the latest technology, I'm going to play all the games I want. I spend most of my time in linux, but games like GTA2, Dune 2000, and whole slews of other games are not on linux. I keeps me with a copy of a MS product though, something that, well, just kinda happens. Buying other companies like buying groceries, it keeps MS on top of things, gets them new programmers I would assume, and gets them new technology they weren't developing but are now. Its not like businesses trading hands is anything new to people. AOL aquires new companies, netscape and nullsoft included, and nobody whines about them being enormous. We just chuckle, pat our computer and thank the heavens for DSL. No biggie. I think we too should be chuckling, patting our computers and thanking the heavens of linux. We don't need to break up MS any more than we need to break up AOL. They're annoying and sometimes we wish they would go away, but as soon as people wake up they will. I too, think the government should keep its nose out of MS. They will fall someday, and Bill knows it, and has admitted that MS will eventually be replaced. Make it happen by the force of economics though, not through government intervention. We need the government to intervene in all of our lives less and not more. We can take care of ourselves DOJ, thank you very much.
If not now, when?
Come off your high horses people! At this point it doesn't matter how many companies were destroyed my Microsoft. Time to move on. Instead of commenting on this dead issue, work to make Linux useable for the 'rest of us'. When I install an OS, I expect it to be up and running quickly, support ALL of my reasonably current hardware, be easy to use, and run current programs with a minimum of fuss. At this point Linux does not do this, and I do not expect it to. As much as C/C++ was not designed to solve every programming problem, unix-based systems were not designed to be easily used by the masses. Simply put, MSWindows operating systems are now, and will continue to be both my choise and many other people's choices until there truely is an alternative. Leave the law to the courts and get back into your cubicles. love, crank-
Microsoft buys all it's innovation or they stomp it out with dirty tricks. If they didn't they'd have real competition, and they can't deal with that on an equal playing field.
If Microsoft is innovative, it's in the art of the deal, not in creating new products. But then again, Machiavelli's The Prince was written about 500 years ago. Hmmm, so M$ isn't innovative after all. They just read the book.
For those of you who don't know, the only way that this is a freedom is if everyone has the same opportunities. Microsoft doesn't give everyone the same opportunities. Look what they did to Java and Netscape. This was freedom?
And my favorite words "Lower Cost". Many of you think microsoft products are superior. Good for you. Believe what you want. But you will have to agree with me that Microsoft continues to increase the price of there products (regardless of what new features they put in). This is a result of a lack of competition since M$ likes to kill off those who don't comply with it's liking (IBM OS/2 ring any bells?
I think it time to put the company that stifles innovation and charges higher prices back into check with the rest of reality. my 0.02 cents.
From the brief skimming I've given to that 200+ page monstrosity known as the findings of fact in this case, it looks as though the US has a bit more right to break out the champagne than Microsoft. But at this stage it doesn't mean much.
Everyone involved is eager to put their own spin on things. Here, though, Microsoft is at a real disadvantage; they can only influence one media outlet (MSNBC), whereas everyone else seems to be already siding with the government by default.
It's not a ruling (yet). It's a mildly entertaining read, but that's all. Similarly, the MS documents from this article are mildly amusing, but they're just spin. Ditto for anything cranked out by the people on the other side.
When rulings and penalties and all the fun parts show up, then I'll be ready to celebrate the downfall of everyone's favorite 700-pound gorilla. Until then, back to reading /. :-)
I never quite understood libertarian ideas. Libetarians' grasp of economics leaves a bit to be desired.
You assume that capitalism is good. The problem is that unchecked capitalism leads to monopoly situations. Your company fights until you are killed, your competition is killed, or you reach some sort of an "agreement" with competitors that usually includes price fixing. Look at any industry there is and you will see this. There are a few exceptions, of course.
Microsoft did exactly what they were supposed to do in a pure capitalist economy. Our government intervened because that is it's job, it has never beleived in a pure free market. But that is starting to change. Corporations today have more power than they've ever had. Just look at all the corporate mergers in the past 5 years. It's absolutely incredible.
The average CEO today makes 450 times that of an average factory worker, up from about 70 times 15 years ago. Are these the wonderful market forces you are talking about?
You mention the baby bells and how this hasn't helped competition. This is absolutely true. However, keeping it intact wouldn't have helped either, which you support.
You also mention "voting with your dollars." This is an important concept for capitalism to work as theorist's would say. But when a monopoly exists, you no longer have this option, your dollars can only go to one place! Can't you see this? I could start my own company I suppose, but can I make inroads into ATT, MCI, or any other companies territory? Unlikely. They'll buy me out, spread FUD, and just plain outmarket me. Just look at microsoft, that is almost an exact definition of their business operation!!
Capitalsim is a paradox. Unbounded it NEVER reaches any kind of competitive equilibrium! What evidence makes you think that it does? I'd sure like to see some. The fact that your ecenomics 101 professor said so doesn't make it correct.
Yesterday was NOT a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice. It was just another day of going down this road. I'm so sick of crap like this, and I'm not just saying that because I support linux. This has nothing to do with microsoft. Corporations AND the government have equal responsibility for these erosions. It's been going on for years.
Lets face it. Corporations care about one thing only: money. This is the botom line. They don't care about you, your family, or the planet. Unless you tell them otherwise. I don't like our government much, either. But I'd rather be led by them than a faceless corporation.
Corporations and our government have never done a thing for our country. They only do things symbolically when the people demand it. We have to fight for our rights, we have to stand up for our freedom, because god damn, the corporations only want your money and your soul.
I'm sorry if this sounds like flamebait, but I get really passionate over this subject.
well, at least BillG starts with "good evening". :)
It's really a good evening
Yes, the distribution on RedHats website is free for anyone to distribute. Or you can buy copies of many distributions for $2 a CDROM from cheapbytes.com and copy and give away or sell as many copies as you want. Your company is also free to give away or sell as many copies as they want.
That is why this software is called open source.
Just don't give away or sell copies of the box set CDROM, because this contains code that RedHat doesn't own and isn't allowed to redistribute.
First of all, I find it pretty interesting that they quoted the only paragraph that held them in any sort of positive light, a 200+ page Finding of Fact, and what does MS quote? One paragraph...
"We continue to be guided by the most basic American values: innovation, integrity, serving customers, partnership, quality, and giving back to the community." -- Bill Gates of Microsoft
I've never seen them innovate, they've shown no integrity, their customer service costs extra, the only partnerships they want is ones which make them money, and just exactly what have they given back to any sort of community?
-- iCEBaLM
Someone ought to start a Buzzword Bingo for Microsoft and their press releases. Its pretty obvious everyone speaking for them have been told to use the words "innovate", "innovative" and "great technology" as many times as absolutely possible. They are borderline on becoming incoherent because they have to make as many different sentences as possible using these words. Presumably they are hoping if they repeat these enough times people will believe them to be true.
Microsoft keeps saying it innovates. But it doesn't seem to back it up. Their two most famous innovations seem to be a talking paperclip, and the blue screen of DEATH.
Am I missing something here?
"I'm not a crook"
Bill Gates
"We are not a Monopoly"
For "more information" on M$'s presspass update, you need M$ Word, WordPerfect (a dead product) or M$ MediaPlayer. I guess when Quicktime and RealAudio are finally laid to rest, M$ info will be distributed in those formats as well! Can't wait for more 'innovation' to kill off some more real innovators! ;c)
Lets face it. Corporations care about one thing only: money. This is the botom line. They don't care about you, your family, or the planet. Unless you tell them otherwise. I don't like our government much, either. But I'd rather be led by them than a faceless corporation.
Corporations and our government have never done a thing for our country. They only do things symbolically when the people demand it. We have to fight for our rights, we have to stand up for our freedom, because god damn, the corporations only want your money and your soul.
I agree with that first paragraph, but not the second.. I think there are fundamental differences between corporations and the government:
If the government does things that are not in the public interests, then that's a FAILURE of the government, due to incompetence or corruption. However, the purpose of government is to serve the people, whether or not it succeeds.
However, the sole purpose of a corporation is to make money. They care nothing for the people unless it helps the bottom line. This is not a value judgment; it's a fact. Corporations must increase stockholder value.
Thus, the government does at least occassionally care about the people, but corporations by definition do not.
The FOF refers quite specifically to the browser wars, which for the most part were waged between competitors who were both offering free products.
The FOF talk about how a free product was a threat to Microsoft's Operating System as a platform. About how Microsoft used it's unbelievable wealth and power (it's monopoly) to kill Netscape, because it realized that a cross-platform development environment would weaken the strength of Windows as the only choice for the consumer.
Everyone talking loudly about the FOF and whether the government should have gotten involved seems to think that the monopoly case is about the Operating System Wars - Windows, Apple, BeOS, Linux, etc. The FOF, however, only refer to those other OSs to point out that Windows is the current clear winner. Given the OS strength that they have, they used their power to crush a competitor - Netscape.
Reading the portion of the FOF about how Microsoft screwed IBM makes me sad. I don't think IBM is the best company in the world, but if anyone could have defended themself, it would have been IBM. The FOF details how IBM lost hundreds of millions of dollars because Microsoft jerked them around.
Anyway, the Findings of Fact are easy to read, very interesting, very well written, very consice, and very damning for Microsoft.
I believe that this is the Internet's "Declaration of Independance." We will not allow Microsoft to exist as a monopoly, while abusing its power to kill competition.
Education is the silver bullet.
you forgot the ability to copy and paste files. While this "feature" really is a horrible travesty and doesn't actually make sense, i'd have to say it's the only "innovation" in microsoft windows or DOS where "innovation" means "something which is not exactly identical in concept to a feature in an existing program". (not counting, of course, the idea of naming all the drives after (for some reason) letters-- that's already been discussed in this thread)
microsoft bashing is fun
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Now that's just silly.
Of COURSE they disagree.. The court decided the facts were against them!
Everyone on the losing side of a court case (yes, I know it's not over yet.. but MS is certainly losing, just not lost) is going to disagree with the court.
It's such a pointless statement.
It seems to me that one of the biggest possible benefits of the FOF is that a few reporters might actually read it.
Let's face it, there a lot of "tech reporters" out there who are quite willing to regurgitate MS press releases, like this one, into "news". Perhaps a few of these (or their editors) will have a skim through the FOF and realize that perhaps they haven't been telling the whole truth.
We might start seeing a little more balanced reporting on MS and the world around it. Even if that is the only effect, I'll be happy.
Greg
Because of our success, we understand that Microsoft is held to a high standard, and we accept that responsibility. We continue to be guided by the most basic American values: innovation, integrity, serving customers, partnership, quality, and giving back to the community.
In other words: We are 'da BEST', and we want everyone who knows how to use an ATM to know it!
Integrity? Uhm, right (*points to DR-DOS/Caldera thing*)
Quality?
Giving back to the community? Sure Bill, I'll take a few million if you insist!
But I guess I can't blame the big G (no, the other big G) for this piece(-of-....). Any reaction is better than no reaction (my part-time employer frequently employs the latter strategy)
--
I would choose a nick, but it would probably be 'Anonymous Coward' anyway...
You should look up the LEGAL (not dictonary) meaning of Monopoly. It does not mean what you think it does in the legal world. I will leave it up to you to educate yourself.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
We're just wondering when Micorsoft is going to get on the bandwagon.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
realisticly linux takes 500meg.. what are you complaining about.
however, yes, linux doesn't need lots of memory.
Whether or not putting a browser in the OS is a good idea is not something for a judge to decide.
If Microsoft don't compete in a legal way, that's fine, but it's nobody's business but their own to decide what their software looks like. Don't we all agree that software patents are a bad idea? For what reason was it a bad idea, again?
Nonsense. My company shoved it down my throat. MS cut them a deal - to get a discount they had to agree to install Windows and Office on every PC in the company. I had to buy SoftWindows for my Mac to comply with the resulting company policy. MS forced IE onto every computer that had Windows preinstalled. MS forced computer vendors to pay a windows license for every machine they shipped, regardless if the user wanted it or not. MS forced Apple to drop Netscape and set up IE as their primary browser. It's all there in Judge Jackson's finding of fact.
I think apple got paid to set IE as the default browser (as if Netscape didn't do the same with ISPs). See what I mean? Everyone does it, just Microsoft can't do it anymore since they're the biggest.
Discount deals to buy Office etc are also standard business practise. If you don't want office, you don't get discounts on other MS products...I see any problem. You should look at it the other way round. If you do support office, you get discounts.
Jackson's findings of facts are hardly my opinions. I think Jackson is wrong on that. Bill Gates is not an 'evil' person. He uses predatory tatics. That's called american business and capatilsm. I don't have any problem. Even now we're starting to see microsoft start to fall, that's the way the IT industry has worked for years.
When MS falls, some 'darling' company will rise up and then get real big. Everyone will start hating it, and it'll fall. The cycle repeats. MS's position in the computing indistry has helped made a standard for software development. Sure it's proprietry, but it's better than no standard at all ain't it?
I can't wait to see what happens to the stock market on Monday. The monopoly power Microsoft has on the industry can be reflected in the number of companies whose stock may get a shot in the arm on Monday. Basically, any company whose product has been stifled by Microsoft's (perceived or otherwise) anti-competitive practices has a real shot at a stock boost tomorrow.
Examples:
Apple
Real Networks (even in the face of the twin GUID and DVD fiascos)
Allaire
Corel (Linux, WordPerfect, *and* Draw!)
Adobe (like they need any more help!)
AOL (too late for Netscape? Maybe not)
Red Hat
Caldera
Logitech
Kensington
To a lesser extent:
Sun
SGI
Anyone else care to fill in those I've missed? I know some of the small caps I don't know about could really shoot forward as well...
Kevin Fox
www.fury.com
Kevin Fox
To say that Linux is a unix clone, and so is not innovative misses the point. The main innovation of Linux is having a complete OS available under the GPL.
Think that's not innovative. Well, try asking Cobalt networks, Red Hat, etc. Entire new businesses and product categories are being developed based on that innovation.
The basic ingredients of a computer system are pretty much set. In fact, Windows is so ubiquitous that any innovator must start with a Windows clone as a baseline. That doesn't mean that no innovation can take place.
Interesting that anytime MS or some other evildoer gives their side of the story, the simple act of their doing so makes some Linux geek sick.
They drink their own Kool-Aid. That's a metaphor for being deceived by their own obvious lies. By now their corporate worldview is downright psychotic, bearing no resemblance to the realities of business or the law.
Speculating on possible smart reasons for them to act this crazily is an error, the reality is that they are that crazy and believe every damned word they have to say, so you can't fault them for sincerity, and being done for perjury would shock them- these are people who can, literally, make up video evidence and edit it cutting in faked stuff believing that what they are doing is TRUE and HONEST. I mean it- that wasn't so much a crass attempt to cheat, it revealed the depths of insanity in MS and their legal team and the people making the tape.
"Oh dear, the tape does not show us being as RIGHT as we ARE! Quick, change it so it is more honest and illustrates how RIGHT we really are! We wouldn't want to present the judge with BAD EVIDENCE, would we? Do something to make the evidence more truthful!"
It's important to realise where these people are coming from, otherwise you'll constantly be tripped up trying to guess what they'll do next.
Prediction: Microsoft will not give an inch. They will step up the astroturf, the attempts to get the DoJ defunded- they may try to get Judge Jackson removed by some form of pressure, or even by injuring him in some way if they're _really_ out there. If I was him I'd hire bodyguards. Within the limits of the legal struggle, they will continue to the absolute bitter end maintaining the position of wounded innocence, _ignoring_ the findings of fact that now contradict their whole case. They are arguing from a position of total brainwashed certainty that they are not only right but fighting a war for the freedom of the whole computer industry. To them, this justifies absolutely anything, and they will take the exact same actions against the government that they took against so many companies. We don't know just how far that went yet. The only thing we can be sure of is that now MS is effectively declaring war on the government, and is crazier than an emu and finally truly desperate: I would bet money that the MS people were convinced Jackson's findings of fact would _exonerate_ them completely, and that he was just trying to get them to make some concessions first...
Hardly. Sun have always supported standard technologies and documented interfaces. The MS tactics wouldn't fit their culture.
If MS hadn't been around, DR might have had a similar position (having licensed CP/M to IBM for the PC). Allthough it is unlikely, they didn't have the same kind of business leaders as MS. The most likely effect would be that IBM would still dominate the computer market.
I'd like to remind everyone of the article that Richard Stallman wrote about possible demands that could be made of Microsoft if they would lose.
What do you mean, nothing truly innovative?! Haven't you used their new scroll-ball mouse? I mean, for an OS/software company, they *have* done one thing truly innovative. Admittedly, nothing at all software-related, but they're allowed us to get repretitve-strain injuries in yet another innovative and 'efficiency-increasing' (with the right drivers and .dlls) quantum leap in technology.
Not to mention their incredible marketing and FUD departments. admittedly, this is just taking the ball from IBM, but what MS has done with it-- simply amazing.
Hell. They INVENTED the concept of Vaporware.
And you're sitting here telling me that they're no being innovative?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
On the same page, they say that "Microsoft's products are popular because we've focused on our customers and innovated to meet their needs," and indeed, I need a bigger hard drive.
Greg
..Microsoft is seperated, he'd have shares in all the component pieces and even if required to sell them off would just have converted his theoretical value into real value. I'm not sure there's enough real money for this to be a good idea. Actually if Bill was forced to do this it'd be a good idea to look for companies Bill might be interested in buying into to replace his MS shares.
He would be hit temporarily in terms of his net worth if Microsoft were fined, as a result possibly of a blip in MS share values, but I'm sure they'd go back up again.
I understand that being declared a monopoly places some limitations on your trading practices - [Sherman Act ?]. Anyone care to explain the likely consequences?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Microsoft has been able to trample many small companies who came up with new, unique software. They either buy out the company, or in many cases, they simply used their vast wealth to start working on a competitor to the new product. Then they make PC vendors offer their product and impose "penalties" for offering the competing product.
I don't care if Windows is the dominant OS. I don't care if Office is the dominant productivity suite. But I *do* care if other companies cannot carry competing products due to fear of Microsoft retaliating.
Don't be so quick to judge. There are no penalties against Microsoft yet. If the only outcome of this trial is to give companies like Dell and Gateway the cojones to start offering Linux, *BSD, and BeOS on their machines, it will have been worth it. This trial has already done a lot to allow the free-market model to work again, and no penalties have been applied to Microsoft.I would be happy if things stay just as they are now.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
For their unparalleled product quality. ("To avoid the problem, Microsoft suggests turning off JavaScript, ActiveX, Macros, and your computer.")
For integrity. ("Well your honor, the viedotape isn't so much falsified evidence as it is an artist's conception of what we wish the truth was.")
For partnering. ("We love you Intel/Apple/Compaq/Real/IBM, and as long as you do what we say, no one will get hurt.")
And most of all for giving to their community. ("Senator Gorton, another truckload of cash just pulled up. Where should we put it?")
Try changing your refresh rate to a different value. Or setting your resolution to a different value.
As for the fonts, run your xserver with the option
-dpi 96
see if that helps.
Fact:
the price of phone service dropped DRAMATICALLY after the Bell broke.
FACT:
yes, all the lines still route through the big companies, but we buy service from different channels. for example, i called my gf using my phone card for 4 cents per minute. If it wasn't the breakup, why do you think we can do that today? why do you think MCI/Worldcom/Sprint/AT&T are willing to sell service in bulk and allow competition?
You like the stuff MS makes? People vote with thier dollars? how could people vote when MS is the only choice on the ballot? 10 years ago, the country where i'm from, people vote for presidency like a perfectly democratic country - except for one thing- there's only one candidate. You think that's freedom?
The whole paper is full of proof that MS is monopoly. the best proof is 'the bookproof': "Microsoft priced its product not according to the marginal cost($49, as a perfect competitive firm would prefer) but the higher fix point ($89), where a monopolistic firm would maximize its profits. Microeconomics tells us that this is a dead proof that MS is a monopoly.
If you are naive enough to think that the US is the complete free market, again, you have not been educated enough. In the spectrum from Capitialist to Socialist countries, the US is at near the middle. a typical freemarket economy is one like HongKong. If you have been in HongKong before, you would understand why free market has failures: half of the houses are empty and yet people cannot afford to live alone. Why? because of monopolistic behavior. Monopolistic firms would make more money when the price is higher, and they don't care about who has a place to live or who hasn't. This is taxing the entire society.
P.S. stop your Linux bullshit already.
Some of these innovations may just be my win98 system, as the longer you use windows the more personal and quirky it becomes. Hey lets make that innovation number 1.
2. Auto-rebooter. My win98 system needs to be rebooted at least once a day. If I don't, it does it for me! And always when I'm using it, so I know its done its duty.
3. Application freshness. Windows knows that after you've installed a program on your drive that it'll go stale after a while, like bread. So it makes sure applications won't run after a few months and it needs a re-install. Keepin' it fresh!
4. The talking paperclip. Need I say more?
5. Those new windows keys. Why should we let years and years of typing habit go unchanged? Now those expecting CRTL to be next to ALT can enjoy this innovation.
6. Lack of documentation. Everyone knows only nerds read manuals.
7. ActiveX controls. I'm just too busy to download something and double-click to install it.
Thanks for the innovations, Bill. Keep up the good work.
>>The Pepsi is not free... despite whatever marketing gimicks they use. Pizza Hut is spending the money you gave them, to give you pepsi. You bought the Pepsi, and there was no way to buy the pizza without it...
Real simple way to buy a Pizza without the Pepsi. Buy Dominos.
>>Going back to the assumption that 90% of the consumers in the world buy Pizza Hut pizza, what reason could ANYONE have to buy Coke? Coke gets pushed out of the market, PepsiCo extends it's monopoly from pizza to cola.
Perhaps liking coke better? And if coke is not better than pepsi, then pepsi has legitimately won the cola wars. Coke charged you $1 for their soft drink, pepsi charged you less than that. They won fair and square by making either a better product, or by selling an equivelant product for less.
I'm not sure I understand the argument against drive letters, either from a technical point of view, or from a user interface point of view.
I'm really more interested in drive letters as a UI feature: as a shortcut to a logical "slice" of data; a miniature file system, if you will.
H: for data, (C:/data)
K: for downloads, etc. (C:/data/downloads)
L: for config data (C:/data/config)
This allows quick access to important data areas, and splits out those areas well (e.g. for backup purposes).
Sure, it may appear to be a poor man's ln -s, or useradd -d, but it actually provides some functionality that these *nix tricks don't allow:
Not that I wouldn't love to have symlinks under Windows of course. But I really wish that *nix had something as flexible as Windows drive letters. G: is so much nicer than /mnt/cdrom, especially when you can type:
H:\projects\misc>cd g:\archive\980909
H:\projects\misc>copy g:.
I have a big problem with that crituque. Instead of arguing with the basic concept of libertarianism (basically: a person's rights consist of doing whatever he wants, so long as he doesn't interfere with another person's exercising their rights [example, it's morally wrong for me to kill a person, since that would then prevent them from acting out their will]. Property takes longer to define, but the burden of proof is his, since he's writing the challenging critique) he uses the same "evangelical" techniques in arguing specific points that he attributes to libertarians. If he wanted to make this more effective, he should have detailed why the basis of libertarianism is wrong and worked up from there, building on his own reasoning to counter libertarian arguments. Instead, he comes off as laughing behind the backs of libertarians with fellow conspirators.
In short, if you're going to quote a source to back up your argument, make sure it's an effective source.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
"I think apple got paid to set IE as the default browser".
Here is what it says about this issue in the FOF:
Apple increased its distribution and promotion of Internet Explorer not because of a conviction that the quality of Microsoft s product was superior to Navigator s, or that consumer demand for it was greater, but rather because of the in terrorem effect of the prospect of the loss of Mac Office. To be blunt, Microsoft threatened to refuse to sell a profitable product to Apple, a product in whose development Microsoft had invested
substantial resources, and which was virtually ready for shipment. Not only would this ploy
have wasted sunk costs and sacrificed substantial profit, it also would have damaged Microsoft s goodwill among Apples customers, whom Microsoft had led to expect a new version of Mac Office. The predominant reason Microsoft was prepared to make this sacrifice, and the sole reason that it required Apple to make Internet Explorer its default browser and restricted Apples freedom to feature and promote non-Microsoft browsing
software, was to protect the applications barrier to entry.
Apple had IE crammed down it's throat The facts are there.
I see no original ideas here; you must've run out long ago. You even used Bill Gates's bogus Coke and Pepsi analogy. What do users of non-MS OSs stand to gain? Applications, perhaps. The ability to go to a nearby store and buy a computer with a non-MS OS preinstalled, or hardware that doesn't require an MS OS.
What the hell are you talking about? The computer industry hasn't had any special protections from the goverment.
The computer industry is regulated by both the state and federal governments.
Why do you think that there are warning lables on violent games?
Computer companies obey all the same laws that all businesses are bound by. They have to obey the sherman act same as any other company.
Anyone who thinks that Gates didn't know that he was in violation of the Sherman act is either ignorant or a moron. He just thought that he was bigger than the government.
Have you read the posting which started the riot? The findings of fact? Against Microsoft?
And the stories aren't rants. They're what's happening. Negative initial finding of fact against MS; analysis of the finding of fact; CNN poll on finding of fact; MS' response to all of it.
Tell me which one of those is an anti-MS rant? As for news for nerds, in case you've been under a rock, this has been one of the biggest stories in almost the last decade and has quite a significance for nerds!
Sheesh!
Would you guys just GIVE IT UP!!!
M$ employees ARE NOT very well paid. They usually are contract people working for VOLT technical services and it is considered a entry level technical position. Having worked for Microsoft usually means you have to retrain big time.
Microsoft was wrong in their business practices.
READ THE SEC FILINGS of DEC and Microsoft DUH!!
They conspired to put all the messaging software from Lotus and sendmail to Exchange because M$ promised they would port Exchange to Unix. Or at least make it so that Unix could use Exhange.
They went out to sell over 100,000 copies and sold (with the help of SoftWare Spectrum) (whose origins I won't even touch here but they are shady at best) They sold over 2,000,000 and never ported aas they said they would. Well not karma has come to roost.
There are now products that run on Unix and Linux that can talk to exchange. Microsoft will at LEAST get heavy heavy fines and their reputation is gone forever. They have had this coming for a long time...
Read the SEC Filings THEN talk to me....
Niko
(I speak for myself, not my company)
STANDARDIZED SLASHDOT BONEHEAD REPLY FORM
(c) copyright 2000. See GPL for terms of use.
(Check all boxes that apply)
Dear:
[ ] Clueless Newbie [ ] Lamer [x] Flamer
[ ] Loser [ ] Spammer [ ] Troller
[ ] "Me too" er [ ] Pervert [ ] Geek
[ ] Freak [ ] Nerd [ ] Elvis [X] MS Apologist
[ ] Racist [ ] Fed [ ] Fundamentalist
[ ] Satanist [ ] Homeopath [ ] Unbearably self-righteous person
I took exception to your recent:
[ ] Email [ ] Post to Newsgroup [x] Post to Slashdot
It was (check all that apply):
[x] Lame [x] Stupid [x] Abusive
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[ ] Loathsome [ ] Satanic [ ] Despicable
[x] Belligerent [ ] Mind-numbing [ ] Maladroit
[ ] Much longer than any worthwhile thought of which you may be capable.
Your attention is drawn to the fact that:
[ ] You posted what should have been emailed
[ ] You obviously don't know how to read your newsgroups line
[ ] You are trying to make money on a non-commercial newsgroup
[ ] You self-righteously impose your religious beliefs on others
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[x] I don't like your tone of voice
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[ ] Not only that, it was also done better the last time.
[ ] You quoted an *entire* post in your reply
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[x] You posted low-IQ flamebait
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[ ] You said "me too" to something
[ ] You make no sense
[ ] Your sig/alias is dreadful
[ ] You must have spent your life in a skinner box to be this clueless.
[ ] You posted a phone-sex ad
[ ] You posted a stupid pyramid money making scheme
[ ] You claimed a pyramid-scheme/chain letter for money was legal
[ ] Your margin settings (or lack of) make your post unreadable. Each line just goes on and on, not stopping at 75 characters, making it hard to read.
[ ] You posted in ELitE CaPitALs to look k0OwL
[ ] You posted a message in ALL CAPS, and you don't even own a TRS-80
[ ] Your post was FULL of RANDOM CAPS for NO APPARENT REASON
[ ] You have greatly misunderstood the purpose of this newsgroup.
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[ ] You are a loser.
[ ] This has been pointed out to you before.
[ ] You didn't do anything specific, but appear to be so generally worthless that you are being flamed on general principles.
It is recommended that you:
[ ] Get a clue
[ ] Get a life
[x] Go away
[ ] Grow up
[x] Never post again
[ ] Read every newsgroup you posted to for a week
[ ] stop reading Usenet news and get a life
[ ] stop sending Email and get a life
[x] Bust up your modem with a hammer and eat it
[x] Have your medication adjusted
[x] Jump into a bathtub while holding your monitor
[ ] find a volcano and throw yourself in
[ ] get a gun and shoot yourself
[ ] Actually post something relevant
[ ] Read the FAQ
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[ ] consume excrement
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In Closing, I'd Like to Say:
[x] You need to seek psychiatric help
[ ] Take your gibberish somewhere else
[ ] *plonk*
[ ] Learn how to post or get off the usenet
[ ] Most of the above
[ ] All of the above
[ ] Some of the above, not including All of the above
[ ] You are so clueless that I didn't even bother filling in this form.
Talk is cheap. Anyone in BG's position would probably come up with more or less the same defense. When you are in such exalted positions, you can say anything you want. But it doesn't mean anything. What do you have to show for your talk? MS has not convinced me one bit that their products match their words. That's why I'm using Linux, and I'm proud of it.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
The FoF download from the Microsoft site:
.. very nice of Microsoft to at least provide us with that necessary information
* Word format (851k)
* WordPerfect format (438k)
Appearently, the Word format adds about 400k of new information, which we otherwise would never have seen
--
Ignorance is no excuse
Do you run linux? Does anybody run linux? If you answered yes to these questions then there is no monopoly.
Cheers,
Mike
I may be wrong about this, but basically Microsoft's only option here is to focus on the sentencing phase of the trial. A judge's Finding of Fact is not something that can be held up for appeal. Microsoft can "respectfully disagree" all it wants, but the FoF stands.
Microsoft's next move is to prevent a harsh penalty. To do this it has to put on a good face, and engage in a bit of spin doctoring. Sure they quote the only line of the 204 page finding that could (by taking it completely out of context) possibly be made to put them in a good light.
How much of an "application barrier to entry" would there be if the DOJ breaks up Microsoft? This trial has already emboldened OEM vendors to start bundling other systems with their Intel PCs (read: Linux). Imagine Microsoft without the leverage of its Internet and Applications business. Windows without IE. Office without insider ties to secret APIs.
If the DOJ takes the harshest route, Microsoft as we know and loath it is history. While there might be some short-term collarteral damage (re: paragraph 408 in the FoF), in the long term this levels the playing field and allows real innovation instead of "Microsoft Inovation"(tm)
ill get started on a linux box to put in the showroom monday morning... sad part is... all the chruches, schools, & other NPO's want windows.
but we'll see how long that linux box sits
Who would want to work at MS? Lessee.. About the most uncool place to work (check), already IPO'd (check), not much chance of standing out as an individual (check). What geek would want to work there? And I'm getting compensated quite nicely, thanks.
nm
"It is an OS for simpletons"
then
"people who are too ignorant to except this"
Do I need to point out the grammatical error? No, I don't think so. (For the reccord it's "accept".)
I don't point out grammar errors (especially common ones such as this one), but I feel that this is important.
This man is ignorant in grammar.
Is he a simpleton? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say "no", though I haven't checked his user history, so I don't have proof of this. But he doesn't know every Windows user, now does he?
So, is somone who is NOT ignorant in grammar have any real reason to be knowlagable in the ways that this man is? The short-short answer is "no."
Thanks for playing.
The longer answer is this:
Some people have things they would rather be doing than compiling a new kernel when they need to upgrade their kernel to support Quake IIXX. Sorry. If I want to type letters and play the new version of Grand Theft Auto and I don't have a clue how to use a computer, I'm sure as hell not gonna want to take it upon myself to learn Linux (yes, even one of the "easy" distros like RedHat.)
Some people have other things to do. Computers don't rule the world, and I fear the day they do, because they will learn how to unplug me before I realize I should've unplugged them.
End long answer.
I must be honest, people who think their occupation is the be-all-end-all of all occupations need to get their brains split open and examined and need to be dropped in whatever would be closest to an anti-thesis of that area. Computer geeks should play football; football players should learn poetry.
In an ideal world, everyone would have a working knowedge of everything, and specialties in some things. This is not an ideal world. You are not in the best company. As a writer, I don't have to learn linux, but I CHOOSE to, for personal gain, but to say that ALL writers should use something not designed for them is just stupid.
Oh yeah, I could get a friend to do it. I could, but when it screws up at two in the morning, he (or she) isn't gonna want to come and futz with my machine under the possible pressure that I may lose my train of thought.
"Don't make me learn more than I have to to finish my job." is a quote I hear often at work, and I respect it.
Open your mind; there's more than computers to life.
Dan
I was being sarcastic, by the way. In a true free market, M$ would have never gained the monopoly it has today.
Also, I'm not against IP but it has gone WAY too far. Granting patents on downloading over the internet or assuming that the year 39 means 2039 is a bit rediculous.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
How is it that this same crowd gladly shouts to the heavens that Microsoft is a monopoly with no competition whatsoever, then the very next moment talks about how much competition Linux is for MS? I really don't like the hipocrasy, could the zealots please make up their minds?
Dan "(Score: -3, MS Support)" Turk
Think before making statements that don't have any bearing on the subject.
MS has been able to increase the prices for their product while almost every other software manufactor is reducing prices.
a n99.html
Also, for those who mistakenly believe MS has not harmed consummers check the link below
http://www.essential.org/antitrust/ms/cfa/cfa-j
Well said. What exactly does ;card carrying libertarian" mean anyway? those 60's flower cards?
I disagree. One of the biggest factors that make or break an operating system is hardware support. When Microsoft is twisting the arms of hardware companies to prevent them from writing hardware drivers for alternative operating systems such as Linux or OS/2 or BeOS, or even to prevent them from releasing specs to people who want to write drivers at no cost for the benefit of the public, other operating systems simply can't compete. Put yourself in this position. You want to try a new OS, one known to be stable and fast, but your video card or your DVD drive or something along those lines won't work under that OS. After you tried the OS, would you stick with it if you had to constantly boot into Windows to play Quake 2 or do CAD work? Most don't. Those of us that do, mainly Linux or OS/2 or (your favorite OS here) devotees, have to put up with hardware support issues because of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. As for super-gluing IE to every copy of Windows: if that doesn't show Microsoft is abusing its monopoly, I don't know what else does. Was IE really superior to Netscape Navigator? Netscape 3.x was far better than IE 3.x. The same can't be said for 4.x versions of the two browsers, as Netscape could no longer compete with a giant company giving out free copies of its browser and was practically driven to bankruptcy. If you're still not convinced that government intervention is required, then open your ears and listen to the people around you. Not just to the Linux zealots, but also to current Windows users. How many of them are satisfied with the operating system that crashes as much as 3 or 4 times a day? Furthermore, how many of them are satisfied with the operating system at the cost of $200, plus some $90 for bugfixes and minor improvements (Read: Win98)?
If there is another choice then it's not a monopoly! if you can use anything besides windows (not phyical ability, were talking choice here) then there is no monopoly! People choose windows and alot of them can barely figure that out. Windows was built for the basic computer user and it performs the functions that they need to have done. Its not a crappy OS. It is an OS for simpletons, and people who don't want the hassle.
I am kinda expecting some flame; from people who are too ignorant to except this.
cheers,
Mike
then, as their (microsoft's) biggest customer, the government should require publication of interfaces, file formats and protocols of their suppliers. The government is part of the problem, so they must be part of the solution.
You should read paragraphs 41 and 42 of the Finding of Fact that talk about the 'first mover incentive' and the 'collective action problem'. Furthermore, as the FOF states just because us geeks like Linux does not mean the general public will. For average joe user is subject to the 'positive network effect' which creates a positive feedback loop for MS. Joe doesn't know what kind of apps he may want in the future. So he will pick the OS that has the most application choices today and in future. Joe has been trapped in the past and he remembers Apple, Commodore, Atari, Wang, and OS2/Warp, and what it cost him to move to MS/Intel PC. Everything else for Joe is secondary like bugs, efficiency, even the price. The price is a fraction of the PC cost. Joe tolerates it, because he remembers the pain of incompatibility. He also remembers the pain of retraining. Unlike us geeks Joe has a job where his PC is just a tool meant to save time. Retraining wastes that time. Joe unlike us geeks finds computer learning hard and will make choices so as to do as little as possible. This of course does not prevent Linux from getting seriously into servers, specifically web servers. Servers are controlled by us geeks and we unlike Joe see the clear advantages of switching and don't mind doing a little computer learning. Further most of us got some exposure at college to Unix so the learning curve for use is less than it would be for Joe User.
In political tyranny (dictatorship) if you decide to start your own government you will be killed.
In market tyranny (monopoly) if you decide to start your own company and compete you will be put out of business.
The example holds even factoring in Linux to the OS market, simply because Linux is a totally different beast, a community not a company. It takes political tyranny to stop a community from competing (to pull the analogy into a tight little bow)
+&x
Microsoft has been a great success story. I am not criticizing them for their success. The problem I have with Microsoft is that they are using their success as a weapon to stifle the free market system and crush those who would compete against them. Microsoft is not unique or the first in US history to achieve this level of control. Many such companies have. In many cases companies have used their market power to try to raise barriers against competiton and thus harm consumers. This is what Microsoft did. This sort of behaviour is illegal, and should be so. It is not the free market in action.
Microsoft is not being punished for their success. They are being punished for their abuse of the power that their success has given them.
Yesterday. It wasn't just yesterday but some time ago, the government gained access to our civil courts as plaintiffs. The result is manifest as rapacious tragedy.
Let me ask you how laws can be enforced if the government does not have access to the judicial system as a plaintiff? Without such access there is no way the government can enforce the laws of the nation. Do you propose that only individual citizens be able to bring suits? What would happen in the case of a murder? Who would bring the complaint? How could traffic laws be enforced?
The standing of the state in court is a lot older than the history of our Republic, my friend. Take a look at the Magna Carta (dated 1215 AD) for some interesting history on the topic. This was when the concept and right of trial by jury first became fully a part of English Common Law, which the legal system of the US evolved from.
I laughed when I read this line. MS has not created one single thing from whole cloth (if you don't count the MS EULA). They bought DOS and many of their apps. Windows is a Mac/Xerox ripoff. The hired a man from Digitial to create a VMS clone, which MS then proceded to fuck up with legacy support and a Win32 API (we call now call it Windows NT).
I really have no other probem with MS. I use a lot of their software. But please, I know who innovates and who doesn't.
Bloody inbreds..
Monopolies are not necessarily bad but a strong government presence is necessary. In Canada we had a monopoly for years in the form of Bell but rates were reasonable and rural people still got good service... Why? Because the government made strict regulations about the quality of service and so on.
Now we're looking at having only one national airline but, if the government doesn't drop the ball, it will not necessarily be a bad thing. Go back to Freud....if big companies are the id then the government has to be the superego. It's not the worst thing that could happen.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
What could be better then US Government coming down on MS like a ton of bricks?
Well Microsofts replies for one thing:
"At the heart of this case is whether a successful American company can continue to improve its products for the benefit of consumers. This is precisely what Microsoft did by developing new versions of the Windows operating system with built-in support for the Internet." - Bill Gates
This is the only part of the Governments case that Microsoft has the slightest chance of being able to refute.
Okay so bundling IE with MS was helpful to the rookies and was therefore defensable.But no one can deny the way MS levered IE through other companies because, as the report states, it's the only way to explain how Microsoft were acting. Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting something you're giving away for free? Unless of course you're trying to protect Windows.
Also note the complete lack of a retort against the Java accusations. Again because it's clear what Microsoft were doing. Protecting their biggest money earner by illegal damaging other peoples technology.
Far from "innovating" and "promoting competition" (I swear if I hear another MS employee say those phrases again I'll strangle them), they've crushed anything that's had the potential to release from a world locked into Windows.
I dearly want to see Linux running on every desktop with a whole host of applications and I think we've come a step nearer with the publication of this report.
True Linux stands on its own technical merits, and no doubt would one day surpass Windows. But the findings of Judge Penfold will give even the most dedicated MSphile something to think about. Even better is now Microsofts competitors will be able to stand their ground, we've already seen an increase in the interest commercial companies are taking in Linux, other operating systems and whole open source movement.
This report and the rest of the trial will make the entire techology industry stronger. Sure it's going to seriously hurt Microsoft, but I don't think the world needs them anymore.
"it's fucking seabird flavour"
"If you unscrew Bill Gates' navel will the bottom fall out of the software market?"
How do you feel about that drug dealer up your st with all the guns & his homies? Would you cheer if his house got burned down & kiddies killed? You wouldnt mind, most likely...
Personally I'd take Gore. I can forgive that faux pas. I will never, under any circumstance forget hearing that I have too many rights.
I prefer to wait and see. We basically have a year before elections and I cannot see a canidate getting away with not voicing an opinion of the MS trial. The antitrust suit could become a bullet issue for voters.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
My biggest gripe has been that I wish they would stop using that word: 'INNOVATE' However, we may not understand the word as they do... From dictionary.com:
innovate \In"no*vate\, v. i. To introduce novelties or changes; -- sometimes with in or on.
innovate \In"no*vate\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Innovated; p. pr. & vb. n. Innovating.] [L. innovatus,p. p. of innovare to revew; pref. in- in + novare to make new,fr. novus new. See New.] 1. To bring in as new; to introduce as a novelty; as, to innovate a word or an act. [Archaic]
I think you and I see the word 'innovate' to mean, create something original and novel, perhaps even revolutionary or pioneering.
However, according to the definitions above, one (i.e. Microsoft) could use the word to mean 'we introduce changes' or 'we bring things in AS IF they were new' or 'we introduce things AS IF they are novel'
Makes me wonder... Bill Gates & Bill Clinton, dictionary lawyers.
Microsoft of course will try to do whatever than can in terms of damage control. Including saying that they disagree with the judge's findings. That however does not change the fact that:
1.) These findings of facts are in general not possible to appeal. This means that the document that was released yesterday is firmly implanted in the law as a basis for futher action. Much like an axe right between the eyes. Microsoft can disagree all they want, but that is worth about as much as a can of barbeque starter in Hell.
2.) Judge Jackson is now moving on to examine the facts in view of the law in the US. If he rules against Microsoft in any substantial way I am sure Microsoft will appeal etc. etc. At this point it is almost irrelevant. Microsoft's butt is in the crack, and every attorney general, tort specialist, ambulance chaser and half-assed trial lawyer in North America is staying up nights trying to think of ways he can get his hands on the $500 Billion Dollars that represents Microsoft's market capitalization. It will be just as bad in every country in the world that Microsoft does business.
3. The part I like - The FOF will encourage many many competitors to take on Microsoft's market domination. No longer will people be afraid that they will be crushed when the elephant goes for a walk. Dell has already stated publically that the reason they offer Linux pre-installed is that they are no longer afraid that Microsoft will saw them off at the knees for offering choice and innovation.
A thousand flowers will bloom where there was once only desert.
4.) As a side note, Microsoft is in big doo-doo for ignoring court orders associated with the 1995 browser case. Sun is going after their butt for further Java atrocities. Microsoft in going to trial for the defensetration of DR DOS.
I actually believe that M truly is innovative... who would have ever thought that success is so easily gained through purchase? In 20 years, I want to read Mr. Gates' new book, 'A Look Behind: How to Purchase Success'
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Quite expectedly, MS has picked up the only paragraph (408) they are not censured!
They should be answering the questions about their behaviour in para 409-412, especially 412: this suit is not about their right to technically innovate, it is about their conduct (in the business world).
To focus however on "innovation" is like arguing that a naughty boy in class should go unpunished because he got a A
What if Linux/OSS was held to the same standard as MS?
-> Another *nix clone -- why doesn't Linus **INNOVATE** and come up with a new OS?
-> Wine -- another cheap way to embrace somebody else's technology and rip them off -- why don't they **INNOVATE**?
-> Gnome/KDE -- drag & drop, different skins, etc; Hello, Win95? Macintosh for that matter (esp Mac's new skins)? What have they done that's **NEW**? Why don't they **INNOVATE**?
-> egcs -- yet another C++ compiler. With optimizing bugs to boot. Why don't they **INNOVATE**?
I install KDE and the first thing I see is my FILESYSTEM IN A BROWSER WINDOW. Hello -- who was the first one to start doing that?
- Being innovative and posting anonymously
Let me just say that, compared to many many many other industries (such as the telecommunications industry, of which I am part), or even industries like agriculture or the medical community, the computer industry *IS* a bastion of laissez-faire behaviour.
Hey, pick all the examples you want -- Standard Oil, AT&T, IBM, whatever -- in those cases the government DID NOT look at the particulars of the PRODUCT to make their decisions. They did not regulate how Standard Oil refined their oil, they did not tell AT&T how to engineer their switching systems, they did not tell IBM what color to paint their mainframes. But by telling MS what bits they can ship on their CD-Roms, they have crossed a very real boundary here. What's next, the Justice Department telling Red Hat they can't ship a finger program?
Once the goverment gets the taste of something like this, like a wild animal getting the taste of blood, they will not stop. Shall we take some bets to see who is next? My guess is AOL.
asqui asks: "why the heck does this affect you guys?"
Because I use Windows at work. And am not allowed to change some settings.
Because two web sites I work on were forced to move from UNIX to Windows, because the since-fired PHB (an MSCE) said it would dovetail so nicely with all the other Windows stuff he was foisting on us.
Because I dual-boot at home, and am hard pressed to find software for my aging 'puter on the Windows side. Sure, I could "just upgrade" again. But a new OS would mean more memory, a new mobo and chip, and new video card.
Because, and someone else has stated this already, out on the Net there are an annoying number of clueless jerks who just assume that everyone has the very latest incarnation of Windows, and are downright hostile to other operating systems, browsers, newsreaders, mail clients, and word processors that did not come from the One True OS.
Because people ask me for computer help, and often I have to reassure them that it's not their fault, they didn't do anything wrong to cause BSOD/bogus error messages/incompatible Microsoft-only "standards".
Because in the big picture, I do not like to see greed, theft, deception, extortion, and monopolistic control.
Most employees are over 35.
"The debut of Internet Explorer and its rapid improvement gave Netscape an incentive to improve Navigator's quality at a competitive rate. The inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows at no separate charge increased general familiarity with the Internet and reduced the cost to the public of gaining access to it, at least in part because it compelled Netscape to stop charging for Navigator. These actions thus contributed to improving the quality of Web browsing software, lowering its cost, and increasing its availability, thereby benefiting consumers."
:p)
Well theres one of the things I've been going on about in [one of] the other anti-ms threads going on today.
Just give the guys a break okay? I dont see why this whole thing has to be stressed so much, and every little step documented like crazy, especially since this has already taken months, and will prbably go on for much longer...since no side will give up.
It is pretty obvious that all you guys are poised at your swivel chairs, in anticipation of seeing MS lose the trial so you can say 'I told you so'.
Step back for a second and consider a couple of factors:
(1)This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every sixpack? And then sue them for stomping all over your business if they refuse? Really thats basically whats going on here!
(2)More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys? Face it, youre just wasting revenge! Whats the bet that most of you use *nix, or other OS's, and not windows? Am I right or am I right? So if that is the case then you are really not really affected by this whole IE/Netscape fiasco anyways, are you? SO just go on using your fave distro of linux and Netscape navigator, and leave microsoft alone! This doesn't affect you so stop making an inflated deal about it!
Going on from that idea... if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain? Apart from the 'i-told-you-so satisfaction factor'? Nothing much...especially if you dont use Windows! And we all know that whatever happens nothing is going to put a dent into Microsoft... the sheer amount of money that Bill has makes me believe he could get out of anything, any situation could be remedied. If worse come to worse whats stopping him 'donating' a total packet to some new company that has just started up, which my sheer coincidence is called 'Microosft MKII'? Kind of scary when you think about it, eh? All that money...he could do anything...short of taking over the world -- but maybe he already has.... lol, scary thoughts!
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Well, that CNN poll is now down to 18% for MS...looks like my target of falling from 60% to 0% in one day due to the the 'slashdot effect' is seeming more and more realistic every minute!
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(Hye rob, you gotta stop letting all these MS articles get though, Im running out of original ideas to go on about in endless posts in response to every artice you post
If Microsoft is so focused on their customers, why won't they let me uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows 98? If they want freedom to innovate, they should at least give their customers freedom of choice.
I know it's possible to get rid of IE (or at least most of it), but not through any option Microsoft gives you. And if you reinstall Win98, IE comes back. So far, "rm -rf /mnt/windows" has been the best method for me.
Give the man 5 points!!!!
-slams
-slams
Why does Bill Gates refuting what he believes to be false have to be sickening?
I'm sorry but Microsoft does innovate. Their products are better than the competition. Noone is shoving MS Office down people's throats, but people still buy it. Hell, my boss at work just went and bought several copies of Office 2000 over free copies Star Office. It's easier for the employees to use without having to really learn it. And it's fast and reliable.
Microsoft innovations aren't in the form of major leaps like coming up with the idea for spread sheets etc etc, but their innovations come in the form of how they utlize other people's innovations and extend them with their own small ideas. Small ideas add up.
For example, Intellisense technology, which originated from VB & Office and has extended it's way throughout much of MS's major software. It's not a b ig thing, but it makes a big difference. And their software has all these small things which are there and they've obviously thought carefully about what they do.
Eg. Ctrl and Shift are heavily used for 'power' users. If you drag and drop with the left mouse button, the mouse icon shows what action will be taken (move/copy etc)...and holding down ctrl or shift will modify that action without havint to use the right button.
Just very small things they put into their products make them very powerful.
Microsoft _HAS_ led the PC industry for quite a while now, and I'm glad for that. Who cares if someone else would have done it anyway? Microsoft had. I'm glad that Bill Gates is the CEO of the world's largest software company. He's a geek businessman. He drinks coke and eats cheese during he trial etc. And I do believe he has good intentions.
Imagine the alternatives. Scott McNealy. Larry Ellison. See what i mean?
Many people have said things like "Now bill will have to play by the same rules yadayada".
Well, Bill plays by the same rules everyone else does. Only his company is the biggest and playing by the same rules he used to do 10 years ago is no longer acceptable. There's a point where you have to change your practices because you're too big and considered a bully when you do the same things you and everyone else have been doing since that start.
1: netscape had a browser on the market that cost me $$$ to get/install.
2: microsoft saw this as a threat, licensed some code from spyglass so they could 'create' ie.
3: microsoft has to pay companies like spyglass regular licenceing fee's, yet does'nt charge consumers for the browser based on that technology.
I seem to recall that the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade refers to actions like this as dumping and makes it illegal.
if this is the case, would'nt this allow non-us governments and corporations to lodge a complaint or start a(nother) lawsuit against M$?
gunderwo@hotmail.com
I'll admit Microsoft has done at least the moral equivalent of making the trains run on time.
But I think the key to understanding both their response to the finding of fact, and the whole position they've found themselves in, is this:
Microsoft honestly believes that everything they've done is right, and that they've never done anything wrong.
I don't buy that. (Planning to "cut off the oxygen supply" of a competitor, or a partner who doesn't want to play the Microsoft Way, is at least unethical. IANAL.)
I think Microsoft really does believe that. From the days of the CP/M-80 Basic interpreter, Microsoft's official mission statement was, "A computer in every home [and every office], running Microsoft software." They believe they're making the best possible products, that they have the vision for making computers better and better every year, and that they shouldn't allow folks from those inferior companies to interfere with Microsoft's continued progress of adding value everywhere they can.
If you equate "innovation" with "Microsoft innovation," naturally you'd be upset by the direction Judge Jackson has taken. If you equate "innovation" with "innovation from Microsoft and other companies," then Judge Jackson is on the right track.
Naturally, Microsoft's belief that "everything we do is right" has the potential for serious abuse. (I like understatement.-) --PSRC
P.S.: Shoe-on-the-other-foot: When was the last time you cast your own actions as villainous?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
At some point we should recognize that he really does believe that the world is a better place for the changes he has brought about.
I don't disagree with you, I do think Gates thinks the world is a better place because of himself, but...
He dropped out of college to take up programming for the Altair, because he was sure someone else would, had he not. Today, he seems to think that had he not done it, nobody else would have, and we wouldn't have PCs in our homes.
The fact is that we would. Some other company (maybe IBM?) would have gotten into the PC market. One of the reasons Microsoft has a monopoly today is because Bill and Paul had the foresight to realise that the PC was going somewhere. Had everyone gotten into the PC business at roughly the same time, they may now have been in equal competition. And even if they weren't, and some company did rise as a monopoly, it may have abused its power much less than Microsoft has. And think: could there be any worse abuse of monopoly power than Microsoft exercises?
My $0.02.
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"I already have all the latest software."
>the new president can appoint a new head of the Justice Department's >antitrust division.
Don't think it will change anything. There are too many in the House and Senate like Hatch who wants to see Mircosoft get what's coming to them. Microsoft's antics, especially in the court cases, have made this become personal to a lot of people.
They've ported apps to MacOS, often a year late. They've released IE4 and IE5 for Solaris and HP/UX, and they both suck. They've released only crap for Linux. They haven't ported Office to anything but MacOS, despite the demand. And they know that MacOS users aren't likely to switch from MacOS to Windows, it's a different hardware platform too. It's much easier to switch from Windows to Linux.
Microsoft and Sun hate each other, and Microsoft has extended that to all of Unix. They used to maintain XENIX, but they lost that market. I've only seen Microsoft release crappy products for Unix, probably as a statement to say "If you want a real OS, use Windows". IE 3.0 under Wine in Linux runs better than any IE for Unix from Microsoft.
Fault Microsoft for not porting its applications to other operating systems. If they released decent versions of IE for the major platforms Netscape supports, and released Office similarly, they might have won the browser war by now, or at least be doing better, and many people and businesses would have switched from Windows, or not kept it around, or would not be switching to NT.
The only reason why my university is starting to use NT is so they can use Office. Microsoft apparently makes more money with people using both than with people only using one or the other. That's a conflict of interest between Applications and OS.
In this case, it's a sound business decision *and* an anti-competitive attack. But only because there is no real division between Applications, OS, and Greed.....
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Of course, back in those days Apple was a serious competitor. Plus there were 3 different companies making DOSes (MS did stomp on Caldera, but the only sneaky anti-IBM thing they did was release 6.2 after 6.0 so it would appear to be better than PC-DOS 6.1)
It wasn't until Win95 exploded that they had enough of a monopoly that it was worth leveraging.
[TMB]
I don't see why including IE with Windows was such a big deal. The TCP/IP stack used to be a separate product. Then it was made a part of the OS. No one got all upset and pissy. In fact, if it were not made a part of the OS, the internet would not have taken off as it did because everyone would have had to pay for it in addition to the OS and perhaps the browser - remember Netscape was not free until IE came along. IE was the competition that made browsers free for consumers. The consumers benefitted from IE whether they used it or not.
Remember that at one point IBM was considered by most to be a monopoly but was not broken up. And now we have Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and Linux! unseating them -- all through the marketplace
Holy shit. How about a tiny history lesson for you.
The DOJ was investigating IBM for many years. During those years the IBM management became very wary of doing anything that could be considered as anticompetitive. This gave other companies a real chance in the marketplace.
Consider this - the only reason that IBM allowed MicroSoft to get rich on their behalf was that they didn't dare to kill off MS while the DOJ was watching.
No matter what the judge says, Microsoft does not have a pure monopoly in the desktop OS. Obviously there are people using OS's other than Windows on their desktops. This is "voting with your dollars". And this means my dollars do not go to "just one place".
Did you even bother to read the document? It contains many examples that shows that MS have excerted monopoly-like pressures on OEMs and ISVs. To be a monopoly, or near-monopoly is not illegal. There are however restrictions to what you can legaly do with that monopoly power.
How about reading a book about economics. Especially one that explains which safeguards are necessary in a free marketplace to make sure that there is healthy competition.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Now comes the funny part... M says that they disagree, that doesn't mean anything (legally). However their lawyers MUST recognize the newly found facts as facts, and argue how the law applies. In effect the lawyers must say "We broke the law, but it doesn't apply to us."
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
At a place where I used to work we had the PC optical mouse, as well as a couple of SPARCStations. It was pretty neat to have the same technology on advanced workstations as well as on PCs. Sorry to hear that the Mouse is dead, I personally own a ProAgio and am very happy with it.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
if i was getting this done to me, i dont think i would go around agreeing with the court!
"why yes judge, we are a monopoly."
Gorfin
Are you old enough to remember just how bad long distance sounded 15 years ago? If not, I'll tell you -- it sounded like you were talking to your buddy next door, using 2 tin cans and a string between them. Need more evidence, why did Sprint have the "pin drop" ads for the next 10 years?
What you fail to realize with your example of the break up of AT&T is the fact that competition has greatly improved the quality of phone service as well as greatly lowered the price. I don't know exactly how much long distance was when AT&T was a monopoly, but I can guarantee you it was not 0.07 per minute.
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
I don't think many people will agree with me. But, the truth is, every computer company tries to do the same things: first they get their hooks in you, then make you their slave. Every computer company wants to dominate the standards. In fact, I don't even think MS has done anything really unique. I even expect that MS learned about marketing from IBM. I used to work for IBM, I could hardly believe the stuff they did to their customers. Personally, I believe that given half a chance, Apple or Sun would the same thing that MS has done. IBM almost has done the same thing. Incidentally, I don't like MS, never have. But I try to be objective.
You're going home in a fucking ambulance
The average CEO today makes 450 times that of an average factory worker, up from about 70 times 15 years ago. Are these the wonderful market forces you are talking about? what really matters is what a factory worker makes today compared with a factory worker 15 years ago. It is more.
I quote from http://www.sun.com/announcement/findings.html
I can't see how any Microsoft supporter could object to these simple restrictions and still believe that the products are superior. And if Microsoft really does have better products, then these restrictions will help MS show that they don't need to fight dirty to win. Bill G: you should jump at the chance to show you can live this way!You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our industry is creating innovations and providing amazing benefits for consumers -- and prices have never been lower. New companies, mergers and alliances are bringing fundamental and dramatic changes to the marketplace all the time.
When I read this I just laughed, becuase I pictured myslef walking into a computer store and looking at the computers. Everyone of them running MS Windows 98. As for the prices, they are lower becuase the hardware is getting cheaper. PCs that have no OS or Linux installed on them are cheaper than their Windows counter parts.
Allow me to explain whay the Fed should stay out of MS's business practices. Basically, it boils down to market forces. When Ma Bell broke up, everyone thought it was going to be low prices and better services for everyone. But now look what's happened: A bunch of little companies have sprung up and become successful. And have then been bought out. The break up took the big fish and made many little fish. Now the biggest of those little fish are eating the small ones, getting bigger. And we're coming back to one big fish again. How much of your voice/data traffic travles over lines owned my MCI/Worldcom/Sprint? Yeah.
The bottom line is that the market has spoken: We like the stuff MS makes. It's sad but true. No matter what, it comes down to MS has used the free market to get their stuff on top and the Gov't has no business second-guessing those market dynamics. People have voted with their dollars, and MS has won. Setting aside possible illegalities like surreptiously licensing software and then squashing the author's company (and cases like that should be handled like any other case where a company breaks the law), MS has used the free market system to get their products at the top. And they might even be inferior products, but it doesn't matter! Nobody says that the best thing has to be the most widely sold thing!
Do I think MS is a monopoly? Three years ago, I would have said yes. But now I use Linux on the desktop more than MS, so I'm not so sure. I'm probably a statistical anomaly, but even stll we have plenty of choice these days. MS is getting to be less and les a monopoly, because people are voting with their dollars, like they should! We don't need the DoJ to tell us what the market should be like. We need to do it ourselves. That's the way things are supposed work in a free market economy! When the Fed steps in like they did, the market becomes less and less free. The Gov't is making choices for you, and that is never a good thing.
Anyway, there's the rant. I'm going to keep influencing the market the way it should be influenced. I'm going to keep writing letters to software companies telling them I would love to buy a Linux port of their products. I'm going to continue to buy Red Hat CDs. I'm going to continue to pay for commercial Linux software, and continue to tell game companies that Loki is going to eat their lunch if they don't get on the bandwagon. I don't trust the Gov't to do the thinking for me, so I'm going to keep on thinking for myself and voting with my dollars and you all should do the same.
Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Why? Because there's not enough money in it to hire the programmers. Sure, big companies like IBM and Oracle can devote some time to port an already existing products to Linux. And RedHat can make money off donated software. But a small company can't afford to develop for Linux.
Which is really too bad, because if Opera could justify the time on Linux, we'd have a real browser.
I'd rather hear about how they expect to market Win2K to general users as a replacement for Win95 or 98 -- it might recognize and perform appropriately on new hardware and have 64-bit memory, but some reports suggest 500M to a full gig of hard disk space and 128M of RAM to function. All at NT 4.0's prices ($319).
9 /11-02pricing.htm
It's all at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/199
If they can sell this turkey, I would call that innovative. Innovative marketing, that is.
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
To be honest, I think M$ would have been better off to have _not_ written a reply, because whatever they would have written would have made me sick (unless they wrote that they were effectively going into self-destruction mode). I can't believe how utterly clueless they have to be, to not only act as they have (as a corporation) but to blindingly forge onward, as if they can't see how wrong they are, or as if they're some sort of marytr. When will they ever get the point?
Insert mind here.
i'm not jelous of ms. i have a couple of friends working for hotmail ms and they're a bunch of alineated persons. they don't work, they just waste their time waiting to cvomplete their vesting, talking about how much money they will do with microsoft splitted in microsoft and msn.
they don't care, they're just waiting for the money.
In the very next sentences he stated the down
side to Explorer's success.
It isn't illegal to make a better product and
charge less for it. If that is all Microsoft
ever did, the verdict would have been different.
One reason why this trial wasn't a complete
no-brainer is that Microsoft does have some
talented programmers and can make good software.
Unfortunately for them and for consumers, the
lengths to which they will go to preserve the
applications barrier to entry have no limit.
Libertarian != Lawlessness.
If you read the Findings of Fact you would notice that the behavior of microsoft is illegal for reasons such as fraud and extortion. I don't think that any Libertarian will say that these are not crimes.
After seeing the Windoze interface for years on their PCs, many everyday users are scared to convert to something like Linux. I argue that the KDE interface, imitating Windoze, is so the mindless M$ followers find it easier to convert. I do not see it as the Linux community embracing the Windoze interface as the defacto of ease but simply as a way of getting people to at least give Linux a try. Just imagine their shock when at the end of the day their computer didn't crash.
Yes. Most countries where they have anything resembling monopoly will give much the same result as what has already happened. The findings are applauded here in Australia, for a start. Anywhere else? :) And, my own observations: M$ have a large job market for tech service people. ...And not all their people use M$. Two of the M$ tech service people I contacted over the past year use Macs - they just work at M$ for rent money.
Kallisti
Hardware geek and Beowulf herder.
In a civil court the defendant must prove his innocence. That flies in the face of what we consider to be criminal justice in this country.
I love how the MS response only quotes the one paragraph in the entire 412-paragraph finding which is pro-MS. ;-)
[TMB]
What is important is what the government says is illegal. They only said that racketeering is against the law and will not be tolerated. If a company simply makes the best product it can, it will have nothing to fear from any government action.
I really can't stand all of you MS flamers, don't get me wrong MS is far from great, but because something is made by MS is it automatically bad Now I'm a linux man so I'm not really trying to take sides here. Oh boo-hoo they programmed IE into win 98 I'm to lazy to go and d/l netscape. Putting Netscape instead of IE is like putting the engine of a volkswagon in a corvette. Is windows the best OS? NO it's not, is it a popular OS that to some degree users have a choice of using? Yes it is. They can easily use Linux (for free), or remeber ye' ole' os/2 warp?
And if you reallya wanna get nitpicky you could say Apple ran a monopoly, Besides Linux PPC (which is not a novice's OS) and Mac OS what other OS is there for a mac?? And Macs can only be made by apple now. So apple could be a monopoly since prolly 99% of mac users use Mac OS.
And what about all you complaining that gates copied mac os? Well as Pablo Picasso once said "Good artists copy, Great artits steal" Jobbs gave gates the opportunity and he pounced upon it. I think that Mr. Gates' so called "monopoly" is just due to his good buisness skills. Can't the government leave him alone? Or are people just jelaous of how much he makes?
I could keep going all night but I think I have rambled on Long enough.
Nick S.
One of Microsoft's greatest innovations is the "Office Suite"
:-)
This is hardly Microsoft's idea. I was using AppleWorks before Office was a gleam in Bill Gates' eye. It booted and ran off of multiple floppies, on the Apple ][ with monocrome monitor. Whoo who!
they make almost as much money on Office as Windows.
More, I am pretty sure.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I thought I just needed Boardwalk and Park Place to have a monopoly, not the whole friggin' Monopoly Board
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
"Talk is cheap and lies are expensive, my wallet's fat and so is my head... I am one (I am one of those) I'm a walking contradiction..."
Yeah, should be BillyG's theme song
-Elendale
She grew up in Soviet Russia, and her books are
anti-communist; she fights against the notion of
people getting paid according to what they "need"
and having to do a volume of work according to
their ability.
Her books glorify companies who have vision, and
make better products, and meet their deadlines.
I'm sure she would be outraged and disappointed
that Microsoft had to stoop to killing or hurting
other companies by monopolistic tactics, rather
than by simply making better products. She would
also ridicule them for releasing products years
late.
In many ways it is the consumers' fault for not
paying more attention.
I am sick to death of hearing that "well, the industry is changing and MS is less poweful now, so why bother with any of this?" The point of this trial is NOT that MS shouldn't be such a big company or have so much money. The point is that they shouldn't be able to break the law without any consequences.
If I rob a bank and get caught, but by the time I get to trial I have spent all the money on liquor and donuts, should I be set free since I no longer enjoy the benefits of the money I stole?
Or to be more realistic, if I use strongarm tactics to drive a hundred companies out of business to maintain a dominant position, and then later I find that I might not be able to maintain that position anyway, should I escape prosecution because my plan didn't quite work out the way I hoped?
It's tempting to be bitter about how rich MS is. But guess what, they did make a lot of their money by supplying a product that people wanted. There's no reason they shouldn't be filthy rich. There is a reason why they should not be allowed to do anything they want in the name of "innovation" - it's called the law.
I'm frankly bothered by the fact that the Government seemingly chose to focus on the inclusion of IE with Windows.
;-)
Two answers:
(1) The Internet -- that is, the web -- is becoming the information medium of the modern age. Microsoft was using their market dominance to control the web, to ensure that only their software could be used to serve up web pages, edit web pages, and view web pages. Would you want one company controlling the printing press? I sure don't. I believe the US DoJ is right to go after Microsoft's illegal product bundling.
(2) The Windows+IE thing was really just the excuse the DoJ needed to get the ball rolling for broad anti-trust action against Microsoft. You cannot sue someone just for being an abusive monopoly; you have to pick something to fight over. #1 makes this as good a thing as any.
Just my 1/4 of a byte.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Microsoft talks about their wonderful innovation a whole lot, while in fact, I can't think of one thing they really invented (besides NetBeui... and we know how wonderful THAT is)
Instead, it has swallowed, destroyed or bought influence in companies that were innovative. Read
this list to search for your favorite Microsoft product and see who really invented it!
Also, Microsoft really likes throwing with unrelated figures to prove their point. Like: The software world is very competitive, 1 million people are working in this wonderful business, how can we have a monopoly.
They forget to mention that those 1 million people are forced to compete eachother on Microsoft platforms.
Toward the end of the third world war, Hitler had become so mentaly ill and convinced of his own lies that he actually planed battle strategies using units that had been destroyed months earlier. He believed that everyone was lying when they said that the units were no longer.
My point? Many at M believe their own lies so much, and are so convinced of their superiority that they dismiss all facts to the contrary as lies. Only M knows what is the truth.
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
The hidden message in all of this has very little to do with Microsoft, in my opinion. I don't think anyone else has mentioned this on Slashdot (hey, they might have, but there are like 700 postings in various threads now!), but:
Doesn't anyone realize that the camel's nose is in the tent now? There is PRECEDENT for the Government to come and meddle in the computer industry. Until now, this industry has been LEFT ALONE. I don't know if McNealy, Barksdale, et al realize it, but they've made a deal with the devil. How will Sun act when SGI is bankrupt, H-P and IBM are out of the unix workstation market, and the justice department comes after them? How would any of us react?
The thing that set the hairs on the back of my neck to crawling was not Jackson's findings that MS has engaged in questionable business practices, but the findings that said "clearly a browser is a separate product", and other statements that are matters of either opinion or engineering, NOT LAW! The government has decided that they can step in, re-arrange our industry, and even re-arrange a company's products.
Don't think that they won't do it again. And again. And again. Which one of us will be next? I can tell you, Microsoft is NOT going to be the last.
:-(
You write: I have no problem with a monopoly if it was achieved through the natural workings of the marketplace.
Alas, you can't have a fair, competition-driven marketplace when the O/S and the applications come from the same party and are tied together in an exclusive arrangement. In such a situation, migrating from the O/S entails abandoning all the apps, since their producer has a conflict of interest which prevents him from making his apps work well on any platform other than his own. As a result the customer is forced to abandon all her favourite apps if she wishes to migrate to another O/S, ie. a huge disincentive. It's primarily this negative feedback that has created the monopoly, and not Microsoft's rather questionable but possibly still "competitive" business practices. The O/S-applications tie is essentially anti-competitive.
I don't see how this link can be broken now though, not in an effective way: it's far too late for that, as the tie is carved in stone in people's minds. It would require Microsoft to be forced to port its apps to a number of competing O/S's (and possibly forced also to abandon its Windows ports or sell them off), which really isn't going to happen even if the O/S divisionn is sold off.
I'll be very interested to see what solution they can conjur up.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
damn you need to get a fucking life outside of computers and /.
how old are you how much do you make a year and where do you get off telling me what I should do?
Or are you studying @ a university? if this is the case spend more time studying instead of making lame ass charts.
thanks,
Mike
It's quite apparent that you haven't considered that a civil court and a criminal court are two different things.
The rules of evidence in a civil court as well as what kind of testimony is admitted etc, are completely different.
If Microsoft had done something criminal, then the proper action would be to indict Gates, or some other official of the company, and put them on trial.
Microsoft is not on trial. They are being sued. By your own government. This is about power and money. It has nothing to do with a browser or an OS.
I would move the company to a different country that would appriciate the job market I provide. but that's just me.
if they did move would they still be able to be tried as a monopoly?
I read the whole findings, and gathered that the main issues were Microsofts strong arm tactics to prevent Netscape from reaching the marketplace, which in turn would prevent middleware from threatening Windows' stranglehold on the desktop. The problem with the law wasn't that MS was giving away MSIE; the problem was MS was using its monopoly-like power to prohibit OEMs from putting Netscape on the desktop. Thus, the marketplace can't work if the products are being restricted from reaching the market. Their blatant disregard of Sun's License was the other major problem. It is kind of ironic that the company with some of the most restrictive licenses was violating Sun's Java licenses.
Get your head out of your ass and try to realize that not every single thing a corporation does is benificial, and not everything Big Bad Government does is wrong. Stupid fucking Republican drone.
The basic idea of libertarianism is "I got mine cause I deserve it. If you don't have yours, then you're a loser. So go fsck yourself."
Libertarianism applied to Microsoft goes something like this. "Bill Gates has got a lot of money because he deserves it. Anybody who doesn't like it can go fsck themselves. All of you losers are just using the government to push your communist adgenda. So go fsck yourself."
[Now that's my idea of flamebait.]
Damn my fingers... What can I say, It's Sunday, I'm at work. :(
Linux doesn't really try to be innovative technically. It's a bloody Unix clone!
Where it *is* innovative is the licensing and distribution! Using the GPL for a whole OS *is* innovative.
It's changed the whole industry!
Deleted
I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that the products Microsoft has developed have hurt consumers; in fact, Windows 9x, Microsoft Office, and other products have actually been influential in bringing the market to where it is today.
HOWEVER, the business tactics that Microsoft has used in marketing these products has hurt consumers. It is because Microsoft has used unfair business practices that there never were any serious contenders to Microsofts' products. A list of all of these is beyond the scope of this post, but a few include: purposely creating bugs in software in order to make competitors' products unstable and increase development time of competitors' products, undocumented Microsoft API calls that only Microsoft knows about and is allowed to use (remember Stacker?), and bundling other products with their own in order to increase market share of their products (not just IE, remember MS-DOS 5 and 6?).
Additionally, it is because competitors' products were so quickly extinguished that we have had to live with UAE's, BSOD's, GPF's, and annoying paper clips that won't go away. If it were not for the misuse of Microsoft's size and position, the market might be much further along than it is today.
I've been waiting for a court case like this for years, and I'm glad the public is finally starting to realize what's truly going on.
They are going *down* .
It has to be really tempting for all you US bods to go short on MSFT on monday!
Deleted
Other governments have taken a great interest in filing their own suits. The DOJ has talked them into holding off until their suit is finished though. If the outcome of the DOJ suit doesn't succeed in satisfying the other governments, they will likely file their own suits.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Raleigh held a monopoly of cards, Essex a monopoly of sweet wines. --Macaulay.
Syn: Oppression; rapacity; exaction; overcharge.
Freedom be damned Today, might possibly be the beginning of the end. The end of the sane masses who wish to be left alone to pursue happiness. Today, people you would consider intelligent, honest citizens, are cheering the demise of America's greatest success story. And many can't even explain why they cheer.
Yesterday. It wasn't justyesterday but some time ago, the government gained access to our civil courts as plaintiffs. The result is manifest as rapacious tragedy. Americans all over the continent are being held hostage by their own government. Extorted, wheedled, cajoled and preyed upon by greedy, poor excuses for men (and women). Sadly, no one foretold the tragic results. The bill of goods that our forefathers read and subsequently accepted, included a litany of bad behaviors meted out by an evil gaggle of robber barons intent on world domination. Of course, what was not included in that list of insult, was the revelation that such behavior was only made possible by the very government which proposed a solution.
How very clever. Create the problem, terrorize the victims, and then turn them into willing slaves. "Save us from this pestilence!"
Why, the mere mention of these former boogy men sends chills down the spine of all: Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Philip Morris...
Giving the federal government, nay giving any government, access to the civil court system, was in effect, creating a new form of slavery. There is now no place that one can consider safe from government intrusion. In fact, it is perhaps the most insidious and insane usurpation of power ever willingly granted in America. Your own government can use your money, to enslave you. You will never win and can only lose. Every dollar you spend on your defense, will be met with a thousand more. And the very money you spend mounting a defense will be taxed again and used against you. There is no amount of money that can be raised that will save you. Why? Because it is in effect feeding the very animal you are wishing to kill. Your battle with the animal actually makes it stronger as you become weaker.
Humans have a very sick sense of justice. We always wish to see the "evil" character punished. The government tort, is a beautiful fantasy fulfilled on prime time airwaves. And the government, with it's limitless resources (borrowed money, the repayment of which will be produced by the slaves) is portrayed as the David to the "evil corporation's" Goliath.
If there is just one thing to be accomplished in my lifetime which would promote the cause of freedom and restore the constitution, it would be the banishment of any government agency from setting foot inside a civil court unless they were named defendants. The person or persons who plotted this enslavement, will never receive the justice they deserve.
This isn't simply a matter of anti-trust law. Consider the fact that our government can now initiate lawsuits against individual property owners for "environmental" reasons. It is in fact, how the tax code is enforced by and large. And in case you're not aware, civil court rules for judgement are a far cry from "beyond a reasonable doubt." In some cases, a mere preponderance of evidence will do. Hearsay is allowed, and in many states a unanimous decision isn't even required by the jury. That is, if you get a jury. You could end up with a government appointed judge. Still think the deck isn't stacked? In civil courts, it is more often than not, the sheer volume of spending which determines the outcome. Whoever can spend the most money, and confuse the jury, wins. Most of these cases are settled however, because a good lawyer will do the best he can to minimize the damage. But going to trial against a plaintiff with the kind of resources that is the governments, is sheer insanity unless you have videotape (recorded in four different spectrums and angles) proving your innocence. In a civil case, you are guilty until proven innocent.
Our founders knew this. It is why they kept the government under strict rule that they would never be able to enslave their citizens in this manner. We must stop this practice at all costs. Some people think that they are not slaves. They are wrong. You are indeed slaves. And if it isn't you who is victimized, you can be sure that the fruits of your labor are being used to victimize your fellow citizen. We are all unwittingly responsible for the slavery. We have simply gotten so used to these chains they no longer bother. Callous upon callous has helped us to forget. I would urge you to make this issue a priority in your life. The government should have no standing in civil courts unless they are the defendant.
http://www.foxmarketwire.com/1106 99/microsoft.sml
Look for the video clip that is labeled "Fighting Back" on the right hand side of the window. The video clip misses the first 3 sentences of his statement, but it's still almost 4 minutes long.
Sorry, I would provide the URL for the video stream itself, but they are supporting multiple media formats and multiple connection speeds, and the link would not have been right for a lot of people.
-- Dave Aiello
Hmmm... "respectfully" disagree - that must be a novel concept over there at Microsoft, considering all the forged evidence they presented at the court - I'm surprised they were not found to be in contempt to be frank.
Anyway... how does one disagree with FACTS?
Now IANAL, but its not the judges opinion we're talking about, its merely the facts as were established by the proceedings until now that he summed up. So, they can disagree as much as they want, it doesn't matter anyway.
-W
One thing that very few people on both sides of this debate seem to have realized is that Gates is a terrible liar. This should have be obvious from his videotaped testimony.
An even better example of this was the interview which Bill gave just after he testified before a congressional committee. It was an hour-long interview conducted by Charlie Rose in front of a live audience (the audience got to ask questions, too, and some were quite well informed) at the New York City Public Library.
It became very clear that the entire audience knew exactly when he was telling the truth, partly because the audience was sitting out of his line of sight when he faced Rose (he then had to glance out of the corner of his eye to see the audience reaction). At one point the audience was so sure he was lying the entire crowd broke out into raucous laughter.
This has consequences which will be uncomfortable for Bill's detractors as well as to his supporters. It means we not only have to accept he's not telling the truth sometimes. We must also realize there are times he is telling the truth when our prejudices might lead us to prefer to believe he's lying.
At some point we should recognize that he really does believe that the world is a better place for the changes he has brought about.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Good work supporting your rebuttals. I'm sure they'd win a first class editing prize in the National Enquirer.
God, some people are stupid. YOU NEED TO BACK UP YOUR CLAIMS. Explain why you feel whatever way you do. Otherwise, I have no choice but to think you haven't any clue, and are talking from your arse.
Now, all of a sudden, PepsiCo (who owns Pepsi and Pizza Hut) decides that along with every pizza, the user has to receive a bottle of Pepsi.
:) but really...noones forcing you to buy their pizza!
The Pepsi is not free... despite whatever marketing gimicks they use.
Okay is this referring to IE or the general Windows thing?
Ill assume you mean their Windows distribution tactics... Okay firstly [im not sure so dont quote me on this] but I think it is possibly even illegal for a computer to be sold to you with software you do not want on it. In any case, nothing is stopping you from formatting and installing Linux!
The price you are paying is (a) probably refundable if you tell them that you dont want windows. (Most computer stores will give you the runaround at this point cause they cant be bothered to uninstall it!) and (b) the price you are paying is close to negligable.
Every time you buy a can of coke, what do you pay for? The coke, well call that 10c (overestimating), the can, well say 3c. I dont know how much a can of coke costs in the US but Im sure its not 13c! So where does (price-13c) go? Advertising, transportation, etc. SO what you are trying to say is that every time you buy a can of coke you may wish to buy one that has been advertised, and one that hasnt? Maybe this analogy is a bit screwed but I think its pretty accurate!
Pizza Hut is spending the money you gave them, to give you pepsi. You bought the Pepsi, and there was no way to buy the pizza without it...
Point 1: The price you paid for it is most likely negligable, and most people will take the pepsi. If you are so in love with coke throw it out and buy a coke.
Ponit 2: If you prefer coke, just because u got a free (or close to free) pepsi isnt going to make you buy pepsi over coke next time you go shopping.
Point 3: You probably would have been able to buy the pizza without it, and the particular distributor just cant be bothered with it.
Going back to the assumption that 90% of the consumers in the world buy Pizza Hut pizza, what reason could ANYONE have to buy Coke?
Because they prefer it, and becuase they only get pepsi with their pizza. (And only if they buy pizza at Pizza Hut!) Not sure how far this goes with in the analogy.
Besides, noone is forcing you to buy Pizza Hut pizza! If you liek their pizza so much then you are obviously willing to take the pepsi just to have the tasty pizza! If not, then shop at your local pizza takeaway and take whatever drinks you want! If every other outled gets shut down and bought out (a) start your own; or (b) homemade pizza, or (c) dont eat pizza, its only contributing to a heart attack!
(Don't get me wrong here... I love a downing a Pizza Hut pizza...
Yeah same here, and I also live playing around on my Linux box. So I gues were even?
If Pizza Hut was going to force people to buy cola, they should at LEAST give the user the option of taking a competitor's product.
But thats totally ridiculous! Its their company theyll do what they want (the 5 year-old point of view
you don't have the right to a coke..you are free to try to find someone to sell you coke..
exactly! You go to ehm because you like their food, noones forcing you to buy from them though!
3. An Intel-compatible PC is one designed to function with Intel's 80x86/Pentium families of microprocessors or with compatible microprocessors manufactured by Intel or by other firms.
II. THE RELEVANT MARKET
18. Currently there are no products, nor are there likely to be any in the near future, that a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs.
Short and sweet: Personal computers are assumed to be using Intel chips or chips following Intel's lead. Is this our next monopoly?
With the third grade level patchy use of English, and the flame baitesque post. Can't you little turds find something better to do than bug us with Microsoft dogma?
"You can walk into any computer store and see the results. Every day, our industry is creating innovations and providing amazing benefits for consumers -- and prices have never been lower. "
Anyone care to compare the cost of Windows1.x-3.x to the SRP of Windows2000?
We're getting all worried about nothing. George Bush or John McCain stand a good chance of the winning the election (one year from now). Microsoft has spent the last two years buying Washington. When their buddies take over the administration, the suit will be dropped or settled to Microsoft's satisfaction. The only thing left will be a handful of nuisance suits from small companies that were run out of business by Microsoft's subsized, predatory descruction of competition. Bill can pay those guys off with his regular checking account.
I am a beta tester for Win2k (my company is part of the JDP). My laptop running Win2k has 128 MB RAM - the kernel for Win2k Pro takes up around 63MB of RAM! Sheesh! To compensate, I've also got Solaris and Linux machines on my desk....
Libertarianism is a Goot Thing, but not when it goes into the space realm and defends any and all business practices. It is not so much that MS is a monopoly. That in itself might be fine, but they misused their position, and wielded power in direct attacks that are not appropriate for a monopoly. Their acts in the context of their influence makes them criminal acts, just as there is a difference between consensual sex and rape. Perhaps MicroSoft didn't exactly rape anyone, but a lot of companies got f*cked when they would have rather just gone to dinner.
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Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
Now, a career later, I find an annoyingly high frequency of supposedly "libertarian" friends and acquaintances ditching their principles when it comes to exactly one man: Bill Gates. These are the same people who have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get me to read Ayn Rand for years. What would Her-Enlightened-Self-Interestedness have thought of Bill Gates and the "principles" of her followers?
Seastead this.
I am beside myself: I am very pro market forces and competition; I can't stand over regulation or legislation. However, I think Microsoft was using their power unfairly. But, nobody said life (or the market) was fair. We really do want companies (or individuals!) to be able to express their ideas in products that, at least, make it to market. The success in the marketplace of a product, on its own merits, will guide the company in deciding whether or not the product is worthy of investment in continued production. Despite my continued questioning of authority and of over-regulation, we have to 'manage,' even limit, how the existing market leaders exert their influence and tendencies to control their market environment to the extent their actions are 'unfair.' Read the Finding of Facts (http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm ); the unsavoriness exhibited is just amazing and, at the same time, nauseating. Given these facts, we the people should never again put the Microsoft senior executives (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, etc.) in positions of trust. For a laugh, after you've read the FOF, read Microsoft's values at (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/values.htm). I hope the United States breaks up Microsoft and finds their executives criminally liable.
The poll should be here!!! The page is accessible with Lynx. Right now, the results are totally even, 33% thinks MS are evil sh*theads, 33% thinks MS is a monopoly but not malicious and noone has ben harmed, and 33% thinks MS is NOT a monopoly!?
You really need to read the FOF. First, the free IE thing was a short term thing to get rid of Netscape. The judge said that MS would raise the price of windows as soon as it got rid of Netscape and it has. Win2k is priced at over 300 for coporate users. The big corporate users complained so MS then offered an upgrade for only over 200US. Further, if you read the FOF you will find that MS internal documents show that MS top brass thought there was no way for IE to go up from 20 percent market share when Netscape had 80 percent unless they used their windows monolopy. So they told their OEMs like Dell,Compaq, and HP that they would only get windows if they refused to load Netscape and if they preloaded IE. This was a formal clause in their liciencing contract. Further, MS took the code of IE and mixed it into the OS code files to keep users and geeks from uninstalling IE it. The add/delete feature was deleberately made to not work correctly by MS. The delete doesn't delete IE it only deletes the shortcut and the initial startup code. Because the code is mixed with the OS there is no way for the average user to free up the disk space. This was bad for you and me for several reasons. First, the judge said if you had an business where you didn't need net access you would be forced to having a slower machine and less space on your hard drive for storing things you really need. Also, if you had a business with sensitive info floating around and you wanted to have an intranet, but keep certain employees of the Internet it would be harder if each employee had a copy of IE. I know there are ways around this but it is just one more problem for the employer. Also, the big security concern is by mixing the code for IE and the OS the any bug or sercuity hole in IE can be used by an Internet virus to penetrate the OS and wreak havoc on your system. There is no secure wall between the app and the kernel since they get loaded into the same memory space. You need to read the FOF to find out how many different ways you were abused by MS. Most of the stuff done you can't see as consumer was done immediately. Your choices were limited for you by preintalling. While rest was short term benefit, to get you hooked but you will pay later in your next OS upgrade. Remember the price increase. Read the FOF. You will be enlightened.
A few words from Madison against you and what you stand for:
re your comment:
"We like the stuff MS makes"
Is not at all my experience - the people I know who are casual 'appliance' non-geek computer users are more often 'sold' MS products by 'hook or by crook', by hyperinflated claims, marketing tie-ins, preinstalls, etc. What do they end up with? Sometimes a working system, more often a fragile rickety system that starts spewing strange error boxes after the first attempt to install or change something. Like I've always advocated, all the 'friendly' computer expurts should let the egg hit the faces of M$ and stop doing 'free' repairs of friends and acquaintances MS products, at their loss and M$'s gain. Make it patently clear to people that they're paying M$ for a license and they'll need to pay a 3rd party to maintain M$ products, NO MORE FREE SERVICE to owners of M$ licenses (I have even worse things to say about all the M$ pirates who want someone to fix their hosed PC's - heehee), at least not by competant people - let them have the wanna-be's, posers and fakirs to fix their MS stuff - they deserve each other.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
There is aparently an adventure shell which I've never used, but I've always imagined that it would allow you to pick up and drop files like objects, and to manipulate them using spacial metaphors:
$ get group
You take a copy of the group file
$ up
You shimmy up the narrow crawl into the nook in the root. (/)
$ xyzzy
The world shimmers for a moment and is gone. No wait! It's back again. You are in your home directory, a well house for a large spring.
$ inventory
You are carrying:
a red hat (being worn)
a group file
a strange configuration file
$ drop file
Which do you mean: the group file, or the strange configuration file?
$ group
Dropped.
$ examine configuration file
You put the configuration file into the strange emacs machine, which gurgles happily.
You are in a maze of twisty control sequences, all alike...