That would completely lose the point of this case--it's not whether or not MS is a monopoly (it is) or whether it abuses that position (it does) but whether or not the US government has the right to tell any software company that it can't use any means necessary to gain market dominance.
This is precisely the issue, except that you are wrong about the correct outcome. The issue *is* whether the government has the right to interfere in the free market and punish successful companies for being "too competitive." It's about whether the high-tech industry will be driven by competition on the merits or by lawyers in smoke-filled rooms. If Microsoft loses this case, it will open the doors for any successful tech company to be assaulted by its lesser competitors for being "anticompetitive" and "predatory."
The success of our industry is largely due to the absense of government meddling. This lawsuit is a dangerous first step into a world in which the tech industry does business the same way as othe industries: concentrating more on legal wrangling and buying government favors than on creating new products and beating competitors to market with them.
One of Microsoft's virtues is that it has been essentially apolitical. Bill Gates has more money than God, yet until this antitrust case he had essentially ignored Washington. If this legal looting succeeds, he may decide that government influence is more important than market leadership, and start buying up influence in Washington. If you think Bill Gates is vicious now, wait until he has several dozen legislators eating out of his hand.
In fact they have not admitted guilt, nor should they. The FoF is a lot of high-sounding nonsense, which shows little more than "Microsoft has a large and stable market share, and works to aggressively defend that market share from competitors." Despite Judge Jackson's contentions, I see nothing immoral or illegal about that. He ignored several viable alternatives (most notably Apple) and more importantly he completely failed to demonstrate harm to consumers. Yes the FoF is bad for them and they will probably lose, but to admit their guilt would be big mistake, both legally and morally, since they are not guilty.
So now when Microsoft takes advatage of its legal right to appeal this case, it is "tying everyone up in court?" Who started this lawsuit? And why is it Microsoft's fault that the courts take forever to get things done?
Anyhow, I think this is a bad thing, because the longer this thing is tied up in court, the less damage the government can do to the computer industry in general and Microsoft in particular. I'd be perfectly happy if the trial drags out to 2010, at which point web browsers and operating systems have all been replaced with wareable computers with voice interfaces. The less control the DOJ has over computer products the better.
They were ATTACKED with FUD, fake "alliances", rumour, innuendo, LIES, threats to OEMs etc.
The question is: how is this a crime? I suppose some of it might constitute libel, but I fail to see how a company saying "X product might not be reliable" or "We cannot guaruntee that X is compatible with existing applications" or "our product is better than X" can be a crime. FUD or not, these kinds of statements are made all the time by pretty much every business. It's called marketing.
If your contention is that MS is sleazy, I might agree with you. But being sleazy is not a crime.
If you think the decision by OEM's to not offer OS/2 was based on merit and/or IBM's missteps but was uncolored by MS tactics you are sorrly fooling yourself.
Again, which of Microsoft's "tactics" were illegal? Perhaps they were sleazy and even unethical, but that does not make them illegal. Laws should be based upon objective actions, not on "tactics" that you don't like. If Microsoft violated the rights of one of its competitors, they are free to sue for damages.
Uhmm it's absolutely *clear* that they intimidated OEM's into buying their product and then used *that* as a lever against ISV's on the Windows platform.
Yes, we call that "salesmanship." Possibly sleazy but again not illegal.
Why do you think GNU and teenaged KDE/GNOME coderz are attracting so much attention?
An interesting question. I think part of the reason is that many of the computer industry's best and brightest have moved away from PC applications to other areas. Very few of the hot startups these days are making word processors or GUI tools these days.
Has it been a good thing that Citrix was so mistreated (at first) and then simply bought by MS?
Again, where is the violation of the law? Agressive competition is not a crime. Neither is buying out other companies. And besides, if this product was such a big deal, what has microsoft gained by sitting on it? If they now control it, wouldn't they want to put it in a box and sell it?
My point is that none of these actions are illegal. You have not told me how Microsoft was to know that these actions were crimes. This sort of thing happens every day in pretty much every industry.
Also, I don't think any of this was in the FOF, so how is this relevant?
They might have used MaOS 8 years ago in junior high or something.
Why does everyone have such a condescending attitude toward MacOS? I'm using OS 9 now, and it works just fine. Anyone who doesn't like Windows is free to purchase a Mac The prices are much more reasonable these days.
Please, tell me, just WTF does ANY part of the statement "consumers have benefitted from MS products" have to with this judgement and MS's MONOPOLISTIC BUSINESS PRACTICES ???
Because the Microsoft's supposed crime is causing "harm to consumers."
but if Sun 64 way RISC servers are "mediocre"... uhh... well we're in different universes.
Agreed. But if they're so great, why are they whining to the government for help?
Then I recommend that you run for Congress and try to repeal the Sherman act.
If I were old enough and I thought I had a shot at succeeding, I would.
In the meantime, it is the law of the land, and I applaud Justice and the court for applying that law fairly to a case.
This is part of my objection: antitrust law is written in a way that makes it impossible to be applied fairly. The things that Microsoft has done were considered perfectly legal when they did them. Exclusive contracts are standard in many industries, and many software companies have been doing them for years.
Antitrust laws do not spell out specific actions that are illegal. Rather, they spell out general patterns of behavior that could be interpreted a thousand different ways. Phrases like "combinations in restraint of trade," and "anticompetitive practices" are so ambiguous as to be all but meaningless. This is why every administration has a new take on what these phrases mean, and why prosecutors are able to twist the meaning of the law to fit the current bad guy.
I would be far less concerned if there were laws banning, for example, exclusive contracts or tying of specific kinds of software packages. But the evil of antitrust law is that its authors deliberately left out the details of what actions are considered crimes. This makes for fluid law in which the standard is not "has Microsoft committed an action that was declared to be against the law," but "has Microsoft done something that resembles the general principles in the law?"
To take this kind of law to its logical conclusion, we should simply have one law in this country: no person shall do bad things. We can then let the courts decide what constitutes a "bad thing." The fact is, *every* large company is guilty of violating the Sherman act. All companies attempt to drive their competition out of business and maximize their profits. The arguments boil down to whether those actions were "fair," but "fair" is a meaningless term. The result is that an enourmous lattitude is given to individual judges, who are free to take down powerful compnaies not for specific actions, but instead because they have done things that look sleazy. I object to that kind of law.
Are you telling me that Blacks in the old South had an obligation to obey Jim Crow laws unless they "want to challenge the law in court?" I suspect that many blacks routinely broke such laws, and did it for the simple reason that they could get awaywith it. And I see nothing wrong with that.
Laws are written by fallible human beings, and we have no obligations but to our own conscience. If we believe that a law is unjust, we have neither a moral obligation to obey it nor to reject it. And our motivations are irrelevant. Enforcement of an unjust law is itself unjust, and violation of such laws is justified no matter what one's motives.
Because for the average Slashdotter, Linux on Intel is the center of the universe, and anything short of a computer built from scratch doesn't count. It doesn't occur to them that most people value a computer for its functions, not the technical merits of its kernal.
Notice how the judge defined the "relevant market" to be commercially viable, desktop OS's that run on Intel. This is an old trick in the antitrust world: define the market so narrowly that there is only a couple of companies selling in it, and use that to "prove" that the company has a monopoly. In MS's case, this required eliminating Macs, all server OS's, Be, OS/2, and Linux. Then the judge looked at what was left, and whatdya know-- Microsoft was the only OS in the market, and hence, a "monopoly."
They pulled the same nonsense when staples and office depot tried to merge. They defined a new market: office supply superstore, and proceeded to show how they had 70% market share. They conveniently ignored the fact that every product that they sold was also sold by several other categories of stores. Office furniture was also sold by traditional office stores, furniture stores, catalogs, etc. It's ludicrous to argue that a combined Office Depot/Staple is going to corner the market on paper clips and legal pads. But there is nothing logical about antitrust law. It is simply an excuse for lawyers with nothing better to do to draw paychecks.
Now, because of the dominant player not wanting any competition, what was once a profitable venture for the store is now unprofitable, and the consumers who wanted Australian must get normal banannas from Chiquita.
But what would happen is this: Some grocery stores would accept the Chiquita bananas, and some would say go to hell and offer nothing but Australian bananas. If the Australian bananas were in fact prefered by a segment of the population, the fans of that type of bananas would patronize that store, and so there would be an incentive to offer that alternative product. The result would be that the proportion of stores that sells the alternative banana brand would be about proportional to the number of people who want each brand of banana.
The issue with OS's is more complicated but the principle is the same. Any computer company is free to accept the higher price of Windows and start selling alternative OS's. If (as you claim) there is a market for those other OS's, that firm will be able to make enough extra selling those other boxen that they can make up for the lower sales of the Win32 boxen. In fact, there are a few Linux-only vendors that do just that. The fact that so few have done so tells me that there must not be many people who really don't want Win32 on their computers.
It tries to be one in many areas, but where the free market treads on the toes of the individual, the free market looses.
Is Bill Gates not an individual? What happened to his toes?
Ant-trust Laws == Injust? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, @02:04PM EST (#313) I think you'll find that you're in the minority on this one...
First of all, the US is NOT a free market. It tries to be one in many areas, but where the free market treads on the toes of the individual, the free market looses.
So you end up with things like government subsidies for businesses that aren't necessarily profitable, but are still useful to the general public at some level that a free market could not sustain.
And when you study those subsidies, you find that in almost every case they are a waste of money and society would be better off without them.
Minimum wage and child labor laws also prop up the economy to protect the individual.
Minimum wage laws protect the individual from what? How does making it illegal for low-wage workers to get jobs help anyone? Child labor laws are worthwhile in some cases, but only because children are not adults and are not capable of making their own decisions. It is not in any way coparable to the case at hand: none of Microsoft's customers or competitors are run by children.
I have a gun and you don't, so give me your money.
That's most emphatically *not* what I am saying, and in fact it is *you* who advocate the use of force to achieve goals. Microsoft has never used a gun to sell its products or hurt its competitors. It is only the government that has the power to force people to bend to its wishes.
I have a monopoly and you don't, so you'll buy my product, like it or not.
You are ignoring the cause of Microsoft's "monopoly." If it had been imposed at gunpoint as you suggest, then I would be the first to condemn it. But it wasn't. It was achieved by years of relentless improvement of their product, and by millions of customers freely choosing to use that product. Throughout the years various competitors have risen up and challeneged Microsoft's dominance. In each case, consumers could have gone with the challenger, and instead freely chose to stick with Microsoft's product. That tells me that even if they don't have perfect products, MS products must be meeting their customers' needs pretty well.
Even today, you are free to go out and buy a Macintosh. That so few do would seem to be an indication that people are not unhappy with MS's products. Please point out to me the specific passages in the FOF that itemizes harms to the consumer. The only ones that I have seen are the ones that allege the lack of choice in the browser market, and/or lousy design of IE. But Netscape is still freely available for download. Where's the harm?
[MS has] achieved a level of power such that they can use their success in some area to prop up ventures that would fail if they were not connected to (that's "tied to") a monopoly.
By "tying" products together, MS has made those products more convenient and better integrated, thus increasing their value to the consumer. Besides, Microsoft has never made any money off of IE, so how does this "tying" harm consumers? if Microsoft wants to throw a freebie into its OS product, how is that a bad thing?
In other words applying the morals you display to relasionships between people is obviously WRONG. But it's okay when those idividuals are companies, and damn the little people that get screwed along the way?
You are obfuscating on the critical difference between economic and political power. Economic power is the power to offer values to others in exchange for values. Political power is the use of force to extort things from people. Microsoft's only "power" is its ability to offer other people Windows. If people don't accept the Windows liscence, MS has no power over them whatsoever.
The real threat is not Microsoft but the government. Microsoft could lose its market dominance in a matter of months from any number of different directions. Once bureaucrats start regulating the PC market, they can do more damage than any OS "monopoly." I would rather have another 10 years of Microsoft's "monopoly" than risk giving the government any power over the industry.
Pardon me for jumping to a conclusion here, but you strike me as a selfish bastard.
Pardon me for jumping to conclusions, but that sounds like an irrelevant ad hom.
You need to remember that under U.S. antitrust law, Microsoft has, as a monopoly, a different set of obligations and a different standard to meet. Practices which might be legal for other companies are not legal for a monopoly.
And this is the heart of my objection to the persecution of Microsoft. I think it's a fundamental injustice to hold a company to a different set of rules because it has a high market share. This is the sense in which they are punished for being successful. They are being punished for things that a perfectly legal until you are declared a monopoly, at which point your interests and rights are irrelevant, and the only consideration is a nebulous concept of "harm to the consumer." I don't believe Microsoft has harmed consumers, but even if they have, that does not justify punishing them when the actions they took are legal to everyone else in the industry. Laws need to be objective and specific, and antitrust law is anything but.
But if I choose to break the law...does that mean I shouldn't be punished?
If it's a bad law, absolutely. I fail to see how a piece of paper trumps morality. Regardless of what the law says, if someone has not done anything immoral, he should not be punished.
That is not to say that it is the job of Judge Jackson to make that determination. I don't fault him so much as Congress and Clinton. But I don't think anyone has an obligation to submit to an unjust law simply because it is the law.
Actually, I've never bought a Microsoft product, and I probably never will. I have a Mac.
But in any event, notice that the price of Windoze has not gone up. It is still around $100, which is what it's been for years, and it's equivalent to what Apple's charging for Mac OS 9. Are they a monopoly too? And if Microsoft is a monopoly, why aren't they charging $500 for Windows? You say that people would buy Macs, avoid upgrading their computers, or go to dealers installing Be or Linux? Well, then, perhaps they don't have such a big monopoly after all.
Is that it's not possible for an OEM to make money unless they can put Windows on their computers. What does that tell you about what consumers want? If there are all these people who want other OS's, why haven't any of the major computer companies told Microsoft to go and screw themselves, taken the higher rate, and made up the extra money by selling lots of Linux-preinstalled OS's. The reason is simple: there are still very few people who want to but computers with only Linux or Be on them. As the Judge ruled, Linux is a fringe operating system.
The fact that no company has decided to take that higher price for Windows, pass it on to consumers, and sell cheaper machines with an alternative OS tells me that there aren't very many people who want those other OS's. If a grocery store won't stock a food that only 3 people buy, are those 3 people being "forced" to buy the more popular brand? No, there is simply no one willing to sell it to them.
And I've seen enough of the argument elsewhere to guess what's in the rest of it. But it is not so much the specific facts that I dispute as it is the principle of antitrust law.
Even if I grant that MS is a bully, that their software is mediocre, and that they used their OS dominance to "leverage" an advantage in the browser market, that does not change the issue. My position is not that these things did not happen. My position is that these things should be legal, and that Microsoft has every right to do them.
Obviously, the Judge is not going to make a ruling that says "microsoft is successful and that's why I'm punishing them." But that is in a sense what this is about. It's about whether a company that has earned a dominant position through relentless improvement of its product and aggressive (and perhaps sleazy) marketing has a right to reap the benefits of that success.
Regardless of how "innovative" Microsoft is or is not, the fact is that Microsoft has produced a large number of very useful and popular products. If they engaged in specific acts of code stealing, I fully support their being prosecuted for it. But if they simply took a hot new concept and made a better implementation of it than the original, or they integrate it into an existing product making it more convenient to the user, that should not be a crime.
So they are not being punished for being successful as such, but they *are* being punished for trying to make use of that success to gain further success. In that sense, they *are* being punished for their success: actions that would be perfectly legal if done by a normal company are illegal if done by MS, because MS is a "monopoly."
I have no doubt that they have violated antitrust law, but it is the principle behind that law that I question. In general I do think that the law should be enforced, but that does not mean that I will cheer when someone is railroaded due to an unjust law.
They doubled the price of Windows 98 - because they could.
This is such a load of crap. The argument here is that because MS "could have" sold Win98 at $50 but instead sold it at $90, they have "monopoly power." But that's absurd. *Every* software company charges people at the "revenue maximizing price," and that is usually above the break-even cost. Are you saying it is Microsoft's job to make sure they don't charge "too much" for their products?
Would you like to explain why they shouldn't be prosecuted for breaking the law?
Because I think that law should be repealed. I see no reason why companies should be subject to a different set of rules when they achieve 90% market share. I don't think that they should be punished for being aggressive in promoting their products. In short, I don't think they have done anything that merits their punishment.
Read the FoF. Much of Microsoft's recent "success" was in violation of the law.
I read parts of it. It's long, though. In fact, the Judge has not yet ruled on whether they broke the law. That's what the "findings of law" later in the year are for.
Here's one netizen who doesn't believe that Microsoft is "predatory, ruthless, monopolistic, and greedy." They certainly are greedy, (as are all businesses) but they acquired their position by developing products their customers want and marketing them effectively. They are in essence being punished for their success, for being "too competitive, and making "too much" money. Microsoft has done nothing that other companies don't do on a daily basis. They're just better at it than other companies.
I think that consumers have benefited a great deal from Microsoft's products, and it sickens me that the government would bring them down to please the whiny mediocrities at Netscape and Sun.
Being two rational human beings, do you think it would be fair to say that a majority of consumers have used their bundled "rendering" functionality to peruse the internet?
Sure, everyone probably fired up their browsers a few times to access the 'net. But it's not like the hard drive will gt trashed the moment the first page is downloaded. Consumers *still* have the chance to download another browser within the first few days.
But I still don't see how this is anything but a criticism of IE. If Micrsoft releases a new file system that can cause file corruption, does that constitute "harm to consumers?" It sounds like once you are a monopoly, it becomes a crime to release a buggy product.
The judge pointed to those security problems as one of the proofs that he hopes will support his assertion that MS's actions have harmed consumers.
But again-- no one was forced to use that product. Anyone is free to install another browser. Consumers were only "harmed" because they chose to run the browser. Are you saying consumers would be better off if Microsoft had not included IE with the OS?
Most rational, informed people understand what the Judge was doing.
I do, and I think it's wrong.
I'm glad to see that you have an intimate relationship with the OEM's and have conveyed their happiness with their licenses.
Not that particular clause in the license, but obviously they were willing to agree to those terms as they signed the contract. Again, it points to the great value of Microsoft's product.
I see no reason why you are allowed to use a computer. It is a waste of bandwidth.
Wow, it's a good thing for the government that you're not on their legal team, because brilliant arguments like that would have gotten you thrown out of court.
I too hate to say it, but I've decided that IE 4.5 is better on the Mac side as well. It's a processor hog, it doesn't always render things right, and it has lots of quirky bugs, but it is fast and stable compared with NN. Loading a cached page is much faster, and it renders the page as it's being loaded. IE is the only Microsoft product I've used, but I have to give them credit for doing a decent job with it. I really hope Netscape 5 can win me back.
for consumers who may have not even wanted a browser at all, which left them susceptible to bugs and viruses that could crash their systems.
If they actually used the browser. Like I said, nothing is stopping consumers from downloading and installing another browser. It takes a little work, but not much. Browsers don't magically launch themselves without user control.
Besides, what is an OS but a collection of utilities, drivers, and API's? Purists might argue that only the kernal counts as the OS, but modern operating systems routinely bundle an ever-expanding amount of functionality into the OS. Should we fault Microsoft for "bundling" notepad and minesweeper? I don't see how including a piece of software on a computer can possibly harm consumers, particularly when you can choose not to use it with minimal effort.
That is not a criticism of Internet Explorer
Sure it is. The quoted passage said, in essence, that Microsoft had bundled a product with the OS (IE) that caused it to be insecure. This is most definitely a criticism of the program. Had IE been written to be more secure, this complaint would not have applied. Therefore, the Judge is in fact faulting them for poor software design. How is saying "Microsoft bundled insecure software" anything but a criticism of that software?
Why were OEM's not allowed to place these on the systems they were selling?
Because they signed a liscence stating that they would not.
That's their "choice" ? Explain how the consumer had a "choice" when the system came bundled with Internet explorer and said system was mandated by MS' license to exclude any competitor's browser.
Because there is this thing called the internet, and Netscape provides its browser for free on demand using it. Consumers were free to download and run any web browser their hearts desired. Hence, they had a choice.
Yeah, that makes sense. I can just see Dell saying the hell with MS and then concentrating on locking up the 5% of the PC market that MS does not own.
Which points to the large value of Microsoft's software. The reason that the OEM's accept that clause in the liscence is that that's what most customers want. The big players aren't likely to sell systems preinstalled with other OS's, but some of the small ones can and have. And don't forget Apple, which (contrary to the FOF) has a very viable alternative to Windoze for most home users.
You are offering infantile arguments.
Oh please. I really don't care if you think my arguments are "infantile." I am simply defending MS's right to control the terms on which they offer their products. I see nothing "infantile" about economic freedom.
I apologize for calling you stupid but you are either very young without any understanding of business and law or you are a fan on MS's products with no interest in honestly debating the issue.
Or perhaps I've just thought about this issue more than you have. In any event, I think Windoze is a mediocre product, so that can't be it, and I think I have a reasonable understanding of business and law.
It's interesting that not accepting your premises makes me "uninterested in honestly debating the issues." I see nothing dishonest about the arguments I've offered so far, and I see no basis for making such an ad hom.
Don't be silly. The Judge listened to dozens of technical experts. He is not pulling this information out of his ass. You might be, however.
Most of whom would have a political agenda, since they would be called by one of the two sides. And even if he had dozens of impartial advisors at his side, I still think it's a bad idea for software design to be the subject of court challenge.
Most people just go with what is on their machine.
And that's their choice. Downloading Netscape only takes a couple of hours even with a modem. If people are so lazy as not to do this or so clueless as to not know it's an option, does it really matter what browser they are using? IE works just fine for most purposes. I don't see how Microsoft is responsible for consumer cluelessness.
Once again you are looking at the issue simplistically and are not offering anyting new.
And you are being condescending why? I'm rehashing it because it's still true. The idea that people have been forced to use IE instead of Netscape is still ludicrous.
I guess all those OEM's who had to pay the MS for every machine they sold, regardless of whether it contained MS software enjoyed that practice.
Nonsense. They were free to reject Microsoft's liscence and sell any OS they wanted. You say they couldn't make money without selling computers with Windows on it? Well then it seems that a lot of people must prefer Windows. If there are so few people buying other OS's that a company can't stay in business without buying Microsoft's product, that tell me that it must be a much better desktop OS than the alternatives.
In fact there are a few companies that sell non-Windows PC's. You are free to buy from them. But it's hardly a crime to have a product that is so popular that no company can make a profit without installing it.
Anything else you'd like to ignorantly rehash?
I rehash it because it is true, and your codescending attitude is not called for.
and Microsoft & Intel sprang up as a result of the govt's actions towards IBM. Would you say that it would be a better world if IBM had controlled every aspect of computer?
We can play the "what if" game ad nauseum, but I really don't think that the DOJ can take much credit for IBM's non-dominance of the PC market. IBM's biggest mistake there was liscencing DOS rather than purchasing it. I suppose you could argue that this was somehow caused by the antitrust action, but I doubt it.
As I recall, once Microsoft had the ownership of IBM's OS, (DOS) there was nothing IBM could have done to prevent cloners, even if there was not an antitrust case. IBM went to court to stop the clone makers and lost . The reason that IBM lost so much ground in the PC market had little to do with antitrust lawsuits and lots to do with relentless competition from more nimble competitors. Government agencies tend to see trends after they start and simply hasten the inevitable. IBM was already in decline when the antitrust lawsuit wrapped up. By the same token, Microsoft will not maintain its dominance even if the DOJ loses this case. Market forces are already working their magic-- competition from Soliris, Novell, Linux, *BSD, Netscape, apache, etc are all cutting into their products on the server side. Product delays, possible shifting software paradigms, (away from stand-alone desktops toward thin clients, for example) and the continuing emergence of open standards all point to a decline in their market dominance. Unless they do something truly drastic like splitting them up, this trial is a side show in deciding the future direction of the computer industry.
The point of this wasn't that writing bad software is a crime, but that customers were/are forced to use a buggy, insecure product (and were/are therefore harmed) by the Microsoft monopoly.
So because they have a monopoly, their coding practices and design choices become the purvue of governmental oversight? I'm sorry, but whether Microsoft has a monopoly or not, I don't see how it can justify courts ruling on which software features are "commingled with operating system routines to a greater degree than is necessary to provide any consumer benefit." It strikes me as a terrible idea to even think about letting judges make software engineering choices. When writing an application you have to trade off cost, time-to-market, features, stability, security, etc. This is not a simple process, and there is no one right answer in most cases. Whether they have a monopoly or not, I don't see how getting the courts involved in overseeing that process could possibly cause an improvement.
Consumers have several viable web-browser choices, and so if they don't like Microsoft's product, they can use a different one. Microsoft making a poorly designed product is not grounds for antitrust action, and has no place in an antitrust court case. Even if Microsoft does have a monopoly and IE is demostrably bloated, insecure, and unstable, this should not be relevant to the case. "Harming consumers" is so vague a term that pretty much anything could in principle be construed to fall under that heading. But if the goal is to determine whether MS is guilty of abusing its monopoly position, I fail to see how an analysis of the quality of IE code is relevant.
If MS was/is a monopoly, but also had better software then anyone else, then the anti-trust law would not apply. From what I can tell, a monopoly is only illegal if it harms consumers.
Well, the definition of monopoly and the rules about which ones are illegal change from administration to administration, and from judge to judge. That's the beauty of non-objective law: legislators write in the most general terms possible, and let the courts do the actual work. Antitrust law is full of terms like "combinations in restraint of trade," "anticompetitive practices," and probably something about harm to consumers. In practice these laws are twisted to fit the current bad guy, and practices that were previously considered perfectly legal become crimes when practiced by a large and unpopular company like Microsoft.
Since no one has ever been forced to buy a Microsoft product, I don't see how anyone could have been harmed except through their own poor choices. Yes, MS products have a lot of defects, but so do most computer products made by almost every company. Netscape is equally bloated, and has had its share of security problems as well. Considering that both products (along with Opera, Mosaic, Lynx, Mozilla, and every other browser) are free, I fail to see how consumers are "harmed" by using a buggy product they didn't pay for are free to stop using.
To the extent that browsing-specific routines have been commingled with operating system routines to a greater degree than is necessary to provide any consumer benefit, Microsoft has unjustifiably jeopardized the stability and security of the operating system. Specifically, it has increased the likelihood that a browser crash will cause the entire system to crash and made it easier for malicious viruses that penetrate the system via Internet Explorer to infect non-browsing parts of the system." So now it's a crime to write buggy/insecure/nonmodular code? Excuse me? It seemed the argument was whether MS used its dominant position in OS's to bolster its position in other markets. How exactly does writing buggy code help them sell their software or damage their competitors? And what business is it of the government what kind of code MS writes? If Microsoft wants to write a browser that is completely insecure and blue screens every 10 seconds, how is that a crime? Sure, it's lousy programming, but I don't remember antitrust law saying anything about poor coding practices being a crime.
It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support. That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
There's a *big* difference between the Civil Rights movement and the ADA. The Civil Rights movement was primarily about ending *government* discrimination against blacks. The public schools and public bus systems were government owned, and Jim Crow laws forced many private store owners to discriminate against blacks.
It is true that someprivate businesseswould have discriminated without the actions of the government, but without those laws forcing everyone to do so, those business owners would have been at a disadvantage in the marketplace because they would not get black business. Had I been in Congress in the 60's, I would have voted against the '64 Civil Rights act, because it violated the right of property owners to decide who they wished to do business with.
But in spite of this, the focus of the Civil Rights movement *was* discrimination by government, which I support. The ADA, on the other hand, is about forcing private business owners to do business with people they otherwise would not choose to. It is a fundamentally misguided law, forcing the costs of disabilities on whichever business a disabled person decides to frequent, and denying business owners the right to weigh the costs and benefits of serving disabled customers and hiring disabled employees.
It may be that the government should help the disabled, but if so those costs should be borne by society as a whole, not simply on those businesses that happen to displease a disabled person's lawyer.
Also people should be allowed to make a cost-benefit analysis. If it would cost $10,000 to build a ramp so 5 disabled persons can get into a store, the store owner should have the right to choose not to build that ramp. There are probably other stores that that person could visit, and they could probably get someone else to go into the store and make purchases for them. In many cases, this is much cheaper than building a ramp. Yet the ADA forces businesses to make more expensive accomidations to avoid having disabled people feel bad.
If the government wants to help the disabled, the best means to do this would be simply to give them a welfare check for the average additional cost of living for a person with that disability. This distributes the costs equally among members of society, and it allows market forces to determine the most efficient way of providing these people with services. AOL will have to decide how much business is lost to blind people, and if that cost is larger than the extra membership arising from it, they will not do it. The blind will then have to go to a different ISP, or to hire someone to read those pages for them. If only a small number of blind people use AOL, it is wasteful to force them to spend millions of dollars to clean up their site. Besides, blind people shouldn't be using AOL anyway. Nor should non-blind people, come to think of it. AOL sucks:)
Slashdot Mirror
That would completely lose the point of this case--it's not whether or not MS is a monopoly (it is) or whether it abuses that position (it does) but whether or not the US government has the right to tell any software company that it can't use any means necessary to gain market dominance.
This is precisely the issue, except that you are wrong about the correct outcome. The issue *is* whether the government has the right to interfere in the free market and punish successful companies for being "too competitive." It's about whether the high-tech industry will be driven by competition on the merits or by lawyers in smoke-filled rooms. If Microsoft loses this case, it will open the doors for any successful tech company to be assaulted by its lesser competitors for being "anticompetitive" and "predatory."
The success of our industry is largely due to the absense of government meddling. This lawsuit is a dangerous first step into a world in which the tech industry does business the same way as othe industries: concentrating more on legal wrangling and buying government favors than on creating new products and beating competitors to market with them.
One of Microsoft's virtues is that it has been essentially apolitical. Bill Gates has more money than God, yet until this antitrust case he had essentially ignored Washington. If this legal looting succeeds, he may decide that government influence is more important than market leadership, and start buying up influence in Washington. If you think Bill Gates is vicious now, wait until he has several dozen legislators eating out of his hand.
Since they are (see the Finding of Fact)
In fact they have not admitted guilt, nor should they. The FoF is a lot of high-sounding nonsense, which shows little more than "Microsoft has a large and stable market share, and works to aggressively defend that market share from competitors." Despite Judge Jackson's contentions, I see nothing immoral or illegal about that. He ignored several viable alternatives (most notably Apple) and more importantly he completely failed to demonstrate harm to consumers. Yes the FoF is bad for them and they will probably lose, but to admit their guilt would be big mistake, both legally and morally, since they are not guilty.
Microsoft can't keep everybody tied up in court!
So now when Microsoft takes advatage of its legal right to appeal this case, it is "tying everyone up in court?" Who started this lawsuit? And why is it Microsoft's fault that the courts take forever to get things done?
Anyhow, I think this is a bad thing, because the longer this thing is tied up in court, the less damage the government can do to the computer industry in general and Microsoft in particular. I'd be perfectly happy if the trial drags out to 2010, at which point web browsers and operating systems have all been replaced with wareable computers with voice interfaces. The less control the DOJ has over computer products the better.
They were ATTACKED with FUD, fake "alliances", rumour, innuendo, LIES, threats to OEMs etc.
... uhh ... well we're in different universes.
The question is: how is this a crime? I suppose some of it might constitute libel, but I fail to see how a company saying "X product might not be reliable" or "We cannot guaruntee that X is compatible with existing applications" or "our product is better than X" can be a crime. FUD or not, these kinds of statements are made all the time by pretty much every business. It's called marketing.
If your contention is that MS is sleazy, I might agree with you. But being sleazy is not a crime.
If you think the decision by OEM's to not offer OS/2 was based on merit and/or IBM's missteps but was uncolored by MS tactics you are sorrly fooling yourself.
Again, which of Microsoft's "tactics" were illegal? Perhaps they were sleazy and even unethical, but that does not make them illegal. Laws should be based upon objective actions, not on "tactics" that you don't like. If Microsoft violated the rights of one of its competitors, they are free to sue for damages.
Uhmm it's absolutely *clear* that they intimidated OEM's into buying their product and then used *that* as a lever against ISV's on the Windows platform.
Yes, we call that "salesmanship." Possibly sleazy but again not illegal.
Why do you think GNU and teenaged KDE/GNOME coderz are attracting so much attention?
An interesting question. I think part of the reason is that many of the computer industry's best and brightest have moved away from PC applications to other areas. Very few of the hot startups these days are making word processors or GUI tools these days.
Has it been a good thing that Citrix was so mistreated (at first) and then simply bought by MS?
Again, where is the violation of the law? Agressive competition is not a crime. Neither is buying out other companies. And besides, if this product was such a big deal, what has microsoft gained by sitting on it? If they now control it, wouldn't they want to put it in a box and sell it?
My point is that none of these actions are illegal. You have not told me how Microsoft was to know that these actions were crimes. This sort of thing happens every day in pretty much every industry.
Also, I don't think any of this was in the FOF, so how is this relevant?
They might have used MaOS 8 years ago in junior high or something.
Why does everyone have such a condescending attitude toward MacOS? I'm using OS 9 now, and it works just fine. Anyone who doesn't like Windows is free to purchase a Mac The prices are much more reasonable these days.
Please, tell me, just WTF does ANY part of the statement "consumers have benefitted from MS products" have to with this judgement and MS's MONOPOLISTIC BUSINESS PRACTICES ???
Because the Microsoft's supposed crime is causing "harm to consumers."
but if Sun 64 way RISC servers are "mediocre"
Agreed. But if they're so great, why are they whining to the government for help?
Then I recommend that you run for Congress and try to repeal the Sherman act.
If I were old enough and I thought I had a shot at succeeding, I would.
In the meantime, it is the law of the land, and I applaud Justice and the court for applying that law fairly to a case.
This is part of my objection: antitrust law is written in a way that makes it impossible to be applied fairly. The things that Microsoft has done were considered perfectly legal when they did them. Exclusive contracts are standard in many industries, and many software companies have been doing them for years.
Antitrust laws do not spell out specific actions that are illegal. Rather, they spell out general patterns of behavior that could be interpreted a thousand different ways. Phrases like "combinations in restraint of trade," and "anticompetitive practices" are so ambiguous as to be all but meaningless. This is why every administration has a new take on what these phrases mean, and why prosecutors are able to twist the meaning of the law to fit the current bad guy.
I would be far less concerned if there were laws banning, for example, exclusive contracts or tying of specific kinds of software packages. But the evil of antitrust law is that its authors deliberately left out the details of what actions are considered crimes. This makes for fluid law in which the standard is not "has Microsoft committed an action that was declared to be against the law," but "has Microsoft done something that resembles the general principles in the law?"
To take this kind of law to its logical conclusion, we should simply have one law in this country: no person shall do bad things. We can then let the courts decide what constitutes a "bad thing." The fact is, *every* large company is guilty of violating the Sherman act. All companies attempt to drive their competition out of business and maximize their profits. The arguments boil down to whether those actions were "fair," but "fair" is a meaningless term. The result is that an enourmous lattitude is given to individual judges, who are free to take down powerful compnaies not for specific actions, but instead because they have done things that look sleazy. I object to that kind of law.
Are you telling me that Blacks in the old South had an obligation to obey Jim Crow laws unless they "want to challenge the law in court?" I suspect that many blacks routinely broke such laws, and did it for the simple reason that they could get awaywith it. And I see nothing wrong with that.
Laws are written by fallible human beings, and we have no obligations but to our own conscience. If we believe that a law is unjust, we have neither a moral obligation to obey it nor to reject it. And our motivations are irrelevant. Enforcement of an unjust law is itself unjust, and violation of such laws is justified no matter what one's motives.
Because for the average Slashdotter, Linux on Intel is the center of the universe, and anything short of a computer built from scratch doesn't count. It doesn't occur to them that most people value a computer for its functions, not the technical merits of its kernal.
Notice how the judge defined the "relevant market" to be commercially viable, desktop OS's that run on Intel. This is an old trick in the antitrust world: define the market so narrowly that there is only a couple of companies selling in it, and use that to "prove" that the company has a monopoly. In MS's case, this required eliminating Macs, all server OS's, Be, OS/2, and Linux. Then the judge looked at what was left, and whatdya know-- Microsoft was the only OS in the market, and hence, a "monopoly."
They pulled the same nonsense when staples and office depot tried to merge. They defined a new market: office supply superstore, and proceeded to show how they had 70% market share. They conveniently ignored the fact that every product that they sold was also sold by several other categories of stores. Office furniture was also sold by traditional office stores, furniture stores, catalogs, etc. It's ludicrous to argue that a combined Office Depot/Staple is going to corner the market on paper clips and legal pads. But there is nothing logical about antitrust law. It is simply an excuse for lawyers with nothing better to do to draw paychecks.
Now, because of the dominant player not wanting any competition, what was once a profitable venture for the store is now unprofitable, and the consumers who wanted Australian must get normal banannas from Chiquita.
But what would happen is this: Some grocery stores would accept the Chiquita bananas, and some would say go to hell and offer nothing but Australian bananas. If the Australian bananas were in fact prefered by a segment of the population, the fans of that type of bananas would patronize that store, and so there would be an incentive to offer that alternative product. The result would be that the proportion of stores that sells the alternative banana brand would be about proportional to the number of people who want each brand of banana.
The issue with OS's is more complicated but the principle is the same. Any computer company is free to accept the higher price of Windows and start selling alternative OS's. If (as you claim) there is a market for those other OS's, that firm will be able to make enough extra selling those other boxen that they can make up for the lower sales of the Win32 boxen. In fact, there are a few Linux-only vendors that do just that. The fact that so few have done so tells me that there must not be many people who really don't want Win32 on their computers.
It tries to be one in many areas, but where the free market treads on the toes of the individual, the free market looses.
Is Bill Gates not an individual? What happened to his toes?
Ant-trust Laws == Injust? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 08, @02:04PM EST (#313)
I think you'll find that you're in the minority on this one...
First of all, the US is NOT a free market. It tries to be one in many areas, but where the free market treads on the
toes of the individual, the free market looses.
So you end up with things like government subsidies for businesses that aren't necessarily profitable, but are still useful to the general public at some level that a free market could not sustain.
And when you study those subsidies, you find that in almost every case they are a waste of money and society would be better off without them.
Minimum wage and child labor laws also prop up the economy to protect the individual.
Minimum wage laws protect the individual from what? How does making it illegal for low-wage workers to get jobs help anyone? Child labor laws are worthwhile in some cases, but only because children are not adults and are not capable of making their own decisions. It is not in any way coparable to the case at hand: none of Microsoft's customers or competitors are run by children.
I have a gun and you don't, so give me your money.
That's most emphatically *not* what I am saying, and in fact it is *you* who advocate the use of force to achieve goals. Microsoft has never used a gun to sell its products or hurt its competitors. It is only the government that has the power to force people to bend to its wishes.
I have a monopoly and you don't, so you'll buy my product, like it or not.
You are ignoring the cause of Microsoft's "monopoly." If it had been imposed at gunpoint as you suggest, then I would be the first to condemn it. But it wasn't. It was achieved by years of relentless improvement of their product, and by millions of customers freely choosing to use that product. Throughout the years various competitors have risen up and challeneged Microsoft's dominance. In each case, consumers could have gone with the challenger, and instead freely chose to stick with Microsoft's product. That tells me that even if they don't have perfect products, MS products must be meeting their customers' needs pretty well.
Even today, you are free to go out and buy a Macintosh. That so few do would seem to be an indication that people are not unhappy with MS's products. Please point out to me the specific passages in the FOF that itemizes harms to the consumer. The only ones that I have seen are the ones that allege the lack of choice in the browser market, and/or lousy design of IE. But Netscape is still freely available for download. Where's the harm?
[MS has] achieved a level of power such that they can use their success in some area to prop up ventures that would fail if they were not connected to (that's "tied to") a monopoly.
By "tying" products together, MS has made those products more convenient and better integrated, thus increasing their value to the consumer. Besides, Microsoft has never made any money off of IE, so how does this "tying" harm consumers? if Microsoft wants to throw a freebie into its OS product, how is that a bad thing?
In other words applying the morals you display to relasionships between people is obviously WRONG. But it's okay when those idividuals are companies, and damn the little people that get screwed along the way?
You are obfuscating on the critical difference between economic and political power. Economic power is the power to offer values to others in exchange for values. Political power is the use of force to extort things from people. Microsoft's only "power" is its ability to offer other people Windows. If people don't accept the Windows liscence, MS has no power over them whatsoever.
The real threat is not Microsoft but the government. Microsoft could lose its market dominance in a matter of months from any number of different directions. Once bureaucrats start regulating the PC market, they can do more damage than any OS "monopoly." I would rather have another 10 years of Microsoft's "monopoly" than risk giving the government any power over the industry.
Pardon me for jumping to a conclusion here, but you strike me as a selfish bastard.
Pardon me for jumping to conclusions, but that sounds like an irrelevant ad hom.
You need to remember that under U.S. antitrust law, Microsoft has, as a monopoly, a different set of obligations and a different standard to meet. Practices which might be legal for other companies are not legal for a monopoly.
And this is the heart of my objection to the persecution of Microsoft. I think it's a fundamental injustice to hold a company to a different set of rules because it has a high market share. This is the sense in which they are punished for being successful. They are being punished for things that a perfectly legal until you are declared a monopoly, at which point your interests and rights are irrelevant, and the only consideration is a nebulous concept of "harm to the consumer." I don't believe Microsoft has harmed consumers, but even if they have, that does not justify punishing them when the actions they took are legal to everyone else in the industry. Laws need to be objective and specific, and antitrust law is anything but.
But if I choose to break the law...does that mean I shouldn't be punished?
If it's a bad law, absolutely. I fail to see how a piece of paper trumps morality. Regardless of what the law says, if someone has not done anything immoral, he should not be punished.
That is not to say that it is the job of Judge Jackson to make that determination. I don't fault him so much as Congress and Clinton. But I don't think anyone has an obligation to submit to an unjust law simply because it is the law.
Actually, I've never bought a Microsoft product, and I probably never will. I have a Mac.
But in any event, notice that the price of Windoze has not gone up. It is still around $100, which is what it's been for years, and it's equivalent to what Apple's charging for Mac OS 9. Are they a monopoly too? And if Microsoft is a monopoly, why aren't they charging $500 for Windows? You say that people would buy Macs, avoid upgrading their computers, or go to dealers installing Be or Linux? Well, then, perhaps they don't have such a big monopoly after all.
Is that it's not possible for an OEM to make money unless they can put Windows on their computers. What does that tell you about what consumers want? If there are all these people who want other OS's, why haven't any of the major computer companies told Microsoft to go and screw themselves, taken the higher rate, and made up the extra money by selling lots of Linux-preinstalled OS's. The reason is simple: there are still very few people who want to but computers with only Linux or Be on them. As the Judge ruled, Linux is a fringe operating system.
The fact that no company has decided to take that higher price for Windows, pass it on to consumers, and sell cheaper machines with an alternative OS tells me that there aren't very many people who want those other OS's. If a grocery store won't stock a food that only 3 people buy, are those 3 people being "forced" to buy the more popular brand? No, there is simply no one willing to sell it to them.
Can't find a labtop without Windoze installed? you obviously didn't look hard enough. Try this little company.
And I've seen enough of the argument elsewhere to guess what's in the rest of it. But it is not so much the specific facts that I dispute as it is the principle of antitrust law.
Even if I grant that MS is a bully, that their software is mediocre, and that they used their OS dominance to "leverage" an advantage in the browser market, that does not change the issue. My position is not that these things did not happen. My position is that these things should be legal, and that Microsoft has every right to do them.
Obviously, the Judge is not going to make a ruling that says "microsoft is successful and that's why I'm punishing them." But that is in a sense what this is about. It's about whether a company that has earned a dominant position through relentless improvement of its product and aggressive (and perhaps sleazy) marketing has a right to reap the benefits of that success.
Regardless of how "innovative" Microsoft is or is not, the fact is that Microsoft has produced a large number of very useful and popular products. If they engaged in specific acts of code stealing, I fully support their being prosecuted for it. But if they simply took a hot new concept and made a better implementation of it than the original, or they integrate it into an existing product making it more convenient to the user, that should not be a crime.
So they are not being punished for being successful as such, but they *are* being punished for trying to make use of that success to gain further success. In that sense, they *are* being punished for their success: actions that would be perfectly legal if done by a normal company are illegal if done by MS, because MS is a "monopoly."
I have no doubt that they have violated antitrust law, but it is the principle behind that law that I question. In general I do think that the law should be enforced, but that does not mean that I will cheer when someone is railroaded due to an unjust law.
They doubled the price of Windows 98 - because they could.
This is such a load of crap. The argument here is that because MS "could have" sold Win98 at $50 but instead sold it at $90, they have "monopoly power." But that's absurd. *Every* software company charges people at the "revenue maximizing price," and that is usually above the break-even cost. Are you saying it is Microsoft's job to make sure they don't charge "too much" for their products?
Would you like to explain why they shouldn't be prosecuted for breaking the law?
Because I think that law should be repealed. I see no reason why companies should be subject to a different set of rules when they achieve 90% market share. I don't think that they should be punished for being aggressive in promoting their products. In short, I don't think they have done anything that merits their punishment.
Read the FoF. Much of Microsoft's recent "success" was in violation of the law.
I read parts of it. It's long, though. In fact, the Judge has not yet ruled on whether they broke the law. That's what the "findings of law" later in the year are for.
Here's one netizen who doesn't believe that Microsoft is "predatory, ruthless, monopolistic, and greedy." They certainly are greedy, (as are all businesses) but they acquired their position by developing products their customers want and marketing them effectively. They are in essence being punished for their success, for being "too competitive, and making "too much" money. Microsoft has done nothing that other companies don't do on a daily basis. They're just better at it than other companies.
I think that consumers have benefited a great deal from Microsoft's products, and it sickens me that the government would bring them down to please the whiny mediocrities at Netscape and Sun.
Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Flame away.
Being two rational human beings, do you think it would be fair to say that a majority of consumers have used their bundled "rendering" functionality to peruse the internet?
Sure, everyone probably fired up their browsers a few times to access the 'net. But it's not like the hard drive will gt trashed the moment the first page is downloaded. Consumers *still* have the chance to download another browser within the first few days.
But I still don't see how this is anything but a criticism of IE. If Micrsoft releases a new file system that can cause file corruption, does that constitute "harm to consumers?" It sounds like once you are a monopoly, it becomes a crime to release a buggy product.
The judge pointed to those security problems as one of the proofs that he hopes will support his assertion that MS's actions have harmed consumers.
But again-- no one was forced to use that product. Anyone is free to install another browser. Consumers were only "harmed" because they chose to run the browser. Are you saying consumers would be better off if Microsoft had not included IE with the OS?
Most rational, informed people understand what the Judge was doing.
I do, and I think it's wrong.
I'm glad to see that you have an intimate relationship with the OEM's and have conveyed their happiness with their licenses.
Not that particular clause in the license, but obviously they were willing to agree to those terms as they signed the contract. Again, it points to the great value of Microsoft's product.
I see no reason why you are allowed to use a computer. It is a waste of bandwidth.
Wow, it's a good thing for the government that you're not on their legal team, because brilliant arguments like that would have gotten you thrown out of court.
I too hate to say it, but I've decided that IE 4.5 is better on the Mac side as well. It's a processor hog, it doesn't always render things right, and it has lots of quirky bugs, but it is fast and stable compared with NN. Loading a cached page is much faster, and it renders the page as it's being loaded. IE is the only Microsoft product I've used, but I have to give them credit for doing a decent job with it. I really hope Netscape 5 can win me back.
for consumers who may have not even wanted a browser at all, which left them susceptible to bugs and viruses that could crash their systems.
If they actually used the browser. Like I said, nothing is stopping consumers from downloading and installing another browser. It takes a little work, but not much. Browsers don't magically launch themselves without user control.
Besides, what is an OS but a collection of utilities, drivers, and API's? Purists might argue that only the kernal counts as the OS, but modern operating systems routinely bundle an ever-expanding amount of functionality into the OS. Should we fault Microsoft for "bundling" notepad and minesweeper? I don't see how including a piece of software on a computer can possibly harm consumers, particularly when you can choose not to use it with minimal effort.
That is not a criticism of Internet Explorer
Sure it is. The quoted passage said, in essence, that Microsoft had bundled a product with the OS (IE) that caused it to be insecure. This is most definitely a criticism of the program. Had IE been written to be more secure, this complaint would not have applied. Therefore, the Judge is in fact faulting them for poor software design. How is saying "Microsoft bundled insecure software" anything but a criticism of that software?
Why were OEM's not allowed to place these on the systems they were selling?
Because they signed a liscence stating that they would not.
That's their "choice" ? Explain how the consumer had a "choice" when the system came bundled with Internet explorer and said system was mandated by MS' license to exclude any competitor's browser.
Because there is this thing called the internet, and Netscape provides its browser for free on demand using it. Consumers were free to download and run any web browser their hearts desired. Hence, they had a choice.
Yeah, that makes sense. I can just see Dell saying the hell with MS and then concentrating on locking up the 5% of the PC market that MS does not own.
Which points to the large value of Microsoft's software. The reason that the OEM's accept that clause in the liscence is that that's what most customers want. The big players aren't likely to sell systems preinstalled with other OS's, but some of the small ones can and have. And don't forget Apple, which (contrary to the FOF) has a very viable alternative to Windoze for most home users.
You are offering infantile arguments.
Oh please. I really don't care if you think my arguments are "infantile." I am simply defending MS's right to control the terms on which they offer their products. I see nothing "infantile" about economic freedom.
I apologize for calling you stupid but you are either very young without any understanding of business and law or you are a fan on MS's products with no interest in honestly debating the issue.
Or perhaps I've just thought about this issue more than you have. In any event, I think Windoze is a mediocre product, so that can't be it, and I think I have a reasonable understanding of business and law.
It's interesting that not accepting your premises makes me "uninterested in honestly debating the issues." I see nothing dishonest about the arguments I've offered so far, and I see no basis for making such an ad hom.
Don't be silly. The Judge listened to dozens of technical experts. He is not pulling this information out of his ass. You might be, however.
Most of whom would have a political agenda, since they would be called by one of the two sides. And even if he had dozens of impartial advisors at his side, I still think it's a bad idea for software design to be the subject of court challenge.
Most people just go with what is on their machine.
And that's their choice. Downloading Netscape only takes a couple of hours even with a modem. If people are so lazy as not to do this or so clueless as to not know it's an option, does it really matter what browser they are using? IE works just fine for most purposes. I don't see how Microsoft is responsible for consumer cluelessness.
Once again you are looking at the issue simplistically and are not offering anyting new.
And you are being condescending why? I'm rehashing it because it's still true. The idea that people have been forced to use IE instead of Netscape is still ludicrous.
I guess all those OEM's who had to pay the MS for every machine they sold, regardless of whether it contained MS software enjoyed that practice.
Nonsense. They were free to reject Microsoft's liscence and sell any OS they wanted. You say they couldn't make money without selling computers with Windows on it? Well then it seems that a lot of people must prefer Windows. If there are so few people buying other OS's that a company can't stay in business without buying Microsoft's product, that tell me that it must be a much better desktop OS than the alternatives.
In fact there are a few companies that sell non-Windows PC's. You are free to buy from them. But it's hardly a crime to have a product that is so popular that no company can make a profit without installing it.
Anything else you'd like to ignorantly rehash?
I rehash it because it is true, and your codescending attitude is not called for.
and Microsoft & Intel sprang up as a result of the govt's actions towards IBM. Would you say that it would be a better world if IBM had controlled every aspect of computer?
We can play the "what if" game ad nauseum, but I really don't think that the DOJ can take much credit for IBM's non-dominance of the PC market. IBM's biggest mistake there was liscencing DOS rather than purchasing it. I suppose you could argue that this was somehow caused by the antitrust action, but I doubt it.
As I recall, once Microsoft had the ownership of IBM's OS, (DOS) there was nothing IBM could have done to prevent cloners, even if there was not an antitrust case. IBM went to court to stop the clone makers and lost . The reason that IBM lost so much ground in the PC market had little to do with antitrust lawsuits and lots to do with relentless competition from more nimble competitors. Government agencies tend to see trends after they start and simply hasten the inevitable. IBM was already in decline when the antitrust lawsuit wrapped up. By the same token, Microsoft will not maintain its dominance even if the DOJ loses this case. Market forces are already working their magic-- competition from Soliris, Novell, Linux, *BSD, Netscape, apache, etc are all cutting into their products on the server side. Product delays, possible shifting software paradigms, (away from stand-alone desktops toward thin clients, for example) and the continuing emergence of open standards all point to a decline in their market dominance. Unless they do something truly drastic like splitting them up, this trial is a side show in deciding the future direction of the computer industry.
The point of this wasn't that writing bad software is a crime, but that customers were/are forced to use a buggy, insecure product (and were/are therefore harmed) by the Microsoft monopoly.
So because they have a monopoly, their coding practices and design choices become the purvue of governmental oversight? I'm sorry, but whether Microsoft has a monopoly or not, I don't see how it can justify courts ruling on which software features are "commingled with operating system routines to a greater degree than is necessary to provide any consumer benefit." It strikes me as a terrible idea to even think about letting judges make software engineering choices. When writing an application you have to trade off cost, time-to-market, features, stability, security, etc. This is not a simple process, and there is no one right answer in most cases. Whether they have a monopoly or not, I don't see how getting the courts involved in overseeing that process could possibly cause an improvement.
Consumers have several viable web-browser choices, and so if they don't like Microsoft's product, they can use a different one. Microsoft making a poorly designed product is not grounds for antitrust action, and has no place in an antitrust court case. Even if Microsoft does have a monopoly and IE is demostrably bloated, insecure, and unstable, this should not be relevant to the case. "Harming consumers" is so vague a term that pretty much anything could in principle be construed to fall under that heading. But if the goal is to determine whether MS is guilty of abusing its monopoly position, I fail to see how an analysis of the quality of IE code is relevant.
If MS was/is a monopoly, but also had better software then anyone else, then the anti-trust law would not apply. From what I can tell, a monopoly is only illegal if it harms consumers.
Well, the definition of monopoly and the rules about which ones are illegal change from administration to administration, and from judge to judge. That's the beauty of non-objective law: legislators write in the most general terms possible, and let the courts do the actual work. Antitrust law is full of terms like "combinations in restraint of trade," "anticompetitive practices," and probably something about harm to consumers. In practice these laws are twisted to fit the current bad guy, and practices that were previously considered perfectly legal become crimes when practiced by a large and unpopular company like Microsoft.
Since no one has ever been forced to buy a Microsoft product, I don't see how anyone could have been harmed except through their own poor choices. Yes, MS products have a lot of defects, but so do most computer products made by almost every company. Netscape is equally bloated, and has had its share of security problems as well. Considering that both products (along with Opera, Mosaic, Lynx, Mozilla, and every other browser) are free, I fail to see how consumers are "harmed" by using a buggy product they didn't pay for are free to stop using.
To the extent that browsing-specific routines have been commingled with operating system routines to a greater degree than is necessary to provide any consumer benefit, Microsoft has unjustifiably jeopardized the stability and security of the operating system. Specifically, it has increased the likelihood that a browser crash will cause the entire system to crash and made it easier for malicious viruses that penetrate the system via Internet Explorer to infect non-browsing parts of the system." So now it's a crime to write buggy/insecure/nonmodular code? Excuse me? It seemed the argument was whether MS used its dominant position in OS's to bolster its position in other markets. How exactly does writing buggy code help them sell their software or damage their competitors? And what business is it of the government what kind of code MS writes? If Microsoft wants to write a browser that is completely insecure and blue screens every 10 seconds, how is that a crime? Sure, it's lousy programming, but I don't remember antitrust law saying anything about poor coding practices being a crime.
It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support. That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
:)
There's a *big* difference between the Civil Rights movement and the ADA. The Civil Rights movement was primarily about ending *government* discrimination against blacks. The public schools and public bus systems were government owned, and Jim Crow laws forced many private store owners to discriminate against blacks.
It is true that someprivate businesseswould have discriminated without the actions of the government, but without those laws forcing everyone to do so, those business owners would have been at a disadvantage in the marketplace because they would not get black business. Had I been in Congress in the 60's, I would have voted against the '64 Civil Rights act, because it violated the right of property owners to decide who they wished to do business with.
But in spite of this, the focus of the Civil Rights movement *was* discrimination by government, which I support. The ADA, on the other hand, is about forcing private business owners to do business with people they otherwise would not choose to. It is a fundamentally misguided law, forcing the costs of disabilities on whichever business a disabled person decides to frequent, and denying business owners the right to weigh the costs and benefits of serving disabled customers and hiring disabled employees.
It may be that the government should help the disabled, but if so those costs should be borne by society as a whole, not simply on those businesses that happen to displease a disabled person's lawyer.
Also people should be allowed to make a cost-benefit analysis. If it would cost $10,000 to build a ramp so 5 disabled persons can get into a store, the store owner should have the right to choose not to build that ramp. There are probably other stores that that person could visit, and they could probably get someone else to go into the store and make purchases for them. In many cases, this is much cheaper than building a ramp. Yet the ADA forces businesses to make more expensive accomidations to avoid having disabled people feel bad.
If the government wants to help the disabled, the best means to do this would be simply to give them a welfare check for the average additional cost of living for a person with that disability. This distributes the costs equally among members of society, and it allows market forces to determine the most efficient way of providing these people with services. AOL will have to decide how much business is lost to blind people, and if that cost is larger than the extra membership arising from it, they will not do it. The blind will then have to go to a different ISP, or to hire someone to read those pages for them. If only a small number of blind people use AOL, it is wasteful to force them to spend millions of dollars to clean up their site. Besides, blind people shouldn't be using AOL anyway. Nor should non-blind people, come to think of it. AOL sucks