Bottom line is that this will likely be turned over in appeals court, keep in mind the court system in this country is fair and will give Microsoft the opportunity to squash this effort by the DOJ.
Please take a moment to read the Sherman Antitrust Act. If Jackson say "USSC" the case goes directly to the USSC. There the court looks into the "constitutionality" of a case to determine if they should hear a case. They might also look at how the case was tried to see if there were precedural reasons to overturn the courts decision (the fact that Jackson brough Posner in, that he separated the findings, etc show that he tried to do everything to allow settlement rather than decision).
In simple terms, it doesn't look good if Bill and company were relying on the courts.
In case you missed it, sun wins!
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
From the decision...
b. Combating the Java Threat
As part of its grand strategy to protect the applications barrier, Microsoft employed an array of tactics designed to maximize the difficulty with which applications written in Java could be ported from Windows to other platforms, and vice versa. The first of these measures was the creation of a Java implementation for Windows that undermined portability and was incompatible with other implementations.
Please read the decision for the balance.
This is the begining of the end as Sun doesn't have to prove what Microsoft did in a CA court anymore. They can walk to the court with this finding in hand and the court can state that they have won.
What does that mean? A recall of all Microsoft Java products? Billions in costs for Microsoft and billions in gains to Sun.
At the same time Real can start an action to ensure that Microsoft can't Netscape them (hmm, Netscape is now a verb:-) ) and people everywhere can file or join classes of those who feel that Microsoft, through their practices, reduced technology available to them.
The best thing that can happen to Microsoft is to be broken up before everyone can extract their pound of flesh.
As for Scott and Sun, act fast and strike while the iron is hot. The appeal should go straight to the USSC (see how that happens by actually reading the Sherman Antitrust Act). Since there seems to be no "Constitutional" issues expect the court to not hear the case and so the appeal will be dead. Then it's a matter of how fast the remedy can be put into effect. If Sun works fast enough there should still be a big pot of cash that they can grab before the remedy stops them from getting their due.
"You are saying that if Person A writes some software, and Person B writes an independent implementation of it and sells it cheaper than Person A, then Person B is infringing on Person A's rights."
Could you have misread this any more than you have? I think not.
Let's try one more time. I'll type as slowly as possible to make sure you follow this. Stay with the flow.
Fact: Microsoft is a MONOPOLY
Fact: Microsoft owns over 90% of the Intel-based PC Operating System market
Fact: Microsoft spent many MILLIONS developing a web browser
Fact: Microsoft sold the browser as a separate application
Fact: Selling the browser was not generating marketshare of this new computing platform
Fact: In order to gain marketshare Microsoft integrated the browser to the Operating System
Fact: The price of the development of the browser was not reflected in the increase in price of the operating system
In some places that is called "dumping". When you're the little guy and you dump to increase marketshare, people ignore it (and it generally doesn't work. Take a look at Amazon, they have marketshare, but negative income. If they don't stop the dumping and generating positive income soon they will end up just another piece of Superhighway roadkill). When you are the monopoly in your industry, people don't and can't ignore it!
Now, what if you went to get capital to create your new enterprise and the people (angels or VC) were looking at the above facts. They could even point to inclusion of e-mail and calendaring and now multi-media as part of the OS, according to the people in Redmond.
The people in Redmond have made it clear that they consider EVERYTHING a potential part of the OS. Every possible application. They have the deep pockets that allow them to throw as much resource as they want at taking your marketshare, as long as they do it before you can create a lock on peoples data (see Intuit as a company that has actually been able to beat Microsoft because they have locked in your tax data for years). They can dump their OS embedded product for free, while you try to sell yours. They can eliminate your channels one-by-one and choke off your oxygen. They can take your billion dollar marketcap company and reduce it to a fraction of it's worth.
Your "Person B" example is flawed since open source is not a monopoly. The rules are far different for a monopoly than they are in a strictly competitive landscape. In fact, you were able to list at least three competing "People B"'s in your group, and not one owns or controls the market.
You seem to have failed to understand the concept of monopoly power. I suggest that you re-read the findings by Jackson. The law is very clear that a monopoly doesn't have the same rights as others.
Back to my point. The ruling in favor of Justice shall actually create an opening of the gates (I have no idea if they are trickle-gates or flood-gates) that will allow people who had ideas that weren't fundable to inovate an opportunity to get funding and innovate. A benefit to all potential consumers of their innovation.
Microsoft still seems to believe that they have the right to include a ham sandwhich in the sale and call it an integrated part of the OS.
Consider the following. I have an application that allows you to hook your computer up with millions and share any file type or directory that you want (call it networked-vision, or better yet, the next generation of napster/gnutella). I have developed this and am seeking to go find someone to fund the development of this as a commercial application.
But every angel and VC I go to says the same thing. Great application, but what if Microsoft decides that this is what they should have as part of the next generation of the operating system, calling it "Internet Neighborhood" and placing it on the desktop?
There goes the incentive for people to build new applications, because no one will give the company a chance to build it. They won't fund the idea until they can be assured that there is an exit strategy beyond that of "being crushed by Micro$oft". [please note that not everyone wants to give their software away as open source, some people still want to build companies that make successful software]
How have we as consumers been harmed by people that had great ideas, but weren't funded because the exit strategy was defaulted to that "Micro$oft would intgrate the technology into the OS" and there is no opportunity here? How much innovation has been kept from the computing (user) community?
It isn't so much what Micro$oft has done in the past and that we are aware of that should bother us, but what they have done by being allowed to incorporate other peoples ideas into thier platform. The innovation that they have killed, even before we were aware of it. Before it had a chance to live.
Do they continue to do it? Sure. look at how little they have put into the browser since they destroyed the competition. No major breakthroughs in developing an open computing application. On the other hand, Ron Glasser and Real are in the sights now. The next "application" to be OS'd.
If you were the little guy (not deep pockets Real) and were thinking of building this cool application, after looking at companies like Netscape, Real and even the ones you don't hear about, like Russell Information Sciences (they used to make the best scheduling system money could buy, until Micro$oft decided that Scheduling and Calendaring were part of the OS), and seeing what happens when the Gorilla of Software decides your product is in their OS space... what are the chances you would leap at building a company to make this application?
The greatest part about Jackson's rulings to date were that he understood the above. We can only hope that he does what is necessary to ensure that these ideas have a chance to live; a chance to bear fruit; a chance to change the face of computing as we know it.
Now I'm far from being an AO-Hell appolgist but we have to consider WHY Micro$oft would even consider Open Standards.
AOL has one IM service with about 40 million subscribers
AOL has one IM service with about 32 million subscribers
AOL owns the messaging space
Microsoft faces an uphill battle to obtain critical mass
M$ has a problem. It sees that people want IM, and it wants to play. It doesn't seem to want to build its own critical mass (which is what you need to make IM work) so, since it is late to the game it insists that "for the users" it must have an Open Standard.
Let's talk about applications that people use a great deal. The one most people use a great deal is a word processor. And what people would really like, more than IM would be a standard that would allow them to use the word processor of their choice because documents could be shared in a Open Standard format.
Of course this would limit MS's ability to sell their word processor to everyone (so that they can share documents). I mean, if there was a Open Standard on documents then someone might actually write a word processor that could read and write to that standard and give it away.
I'm all for open standrds, but let's demand that M$ create one for documents first, and give up their almost monopoly of the desktop word processing space, and then we can talk about opening up IM.
And after modifying their system, the company that admitted that they used the document to access the system (Yahoo!) has not tried to do so again.
The other company has decided that they will subvert the serer owners attempted security and has hacked the server a second and a third time.
Wouldn't you state that AOL has indicated that they do not wish to have Microsoft using their servers in this manner? Haven't they been rather clear in their desire to retain their resources for themselves?
Wouldn't you say that Microsofts refusal to accept that it's AOLs servers and their system (unlike Yahoo!) is akin to a consistant pattern of behavior to attempt to steal services (and if they can not steal the services, to cause a degredation of the services for the rightful owners through a DoS attack)?
Such a stink was made when SATAN was released and all it did was probe servers for vunerabilities. This is a concerted effort to obtain services that were denied by the massive release of software designed to take those services that belong to another company.
How would Microsoft feel if every second 20,000 people on the net started issuing pings or finger request to the MSN servers?
It's wrong! It's theft. It's a denial of service attack on their only major threat in the Internet space.
Microsoft write software that accesses those server without AOLs permission.
Microsoft releases the software to 20,000 users.
AOL servers are slowed down by this unauthorized traffic
AOL consumers have reduced response time and other problems associated to server busy issues
Where I come from using software to hammer someone elses computers and reduce their service levels is called a denial of service attack. Releasing over 20,000 copies of software to do that means that the company is knowingly attempting to deny service of registered users of that server access to the resources of the server.
In simple terms, what Microsoft did was attempt to hijack the services of AOLs server, and now they are perfoming no less than a denial of service attack on those servers.
Last time I checked, people go to jail for releasing software designed to damage other peoples servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Please take a moment to read the Sherman Antitrust Act. If Jackson say "USSC" the case goes directly to the USSC. There the court looks into the "constitutionality" of a case to determine if they should hear a case. They might also look at how the case was tried to see if there were precedural reasons to overturn the courts decision (the fact that Jackson brough Posner in, that he separated the findings, etc show that he tried to do everything to allow settlement rather than decision).
In simple terms, it doesn't look good if Bill and company were relying on the courts.
b. Combating the Java Threat
As part of its grand strategy to protect the applications barrier, Microsoft employed an array of tactics designed to maximize the difficulty with which applications written in Java could be ported from Windows to other platforms, and vice versa. The first of these measures was the creation of a Java implementation for Windows that undermined portability and was incompatible with other implementations.
Please read the decision for the balance.
This is the begining of the end as Sun doesn't have to prove what Microsoft did in a CA court anymore. They can walk to the court with this finding in hand and the court can state that they have won.
What does that mean? A recall of all Microsoft Java products? Billions in costs for Microsoft and billions in gains to Sun.
At the same time Real can start an action to ensure that Microsoft can't Netscape them (hmm, Netscape is now a verb :-) ) and people everywhere can file or join classes of those who feel that Microsoft, through their practices, reduced technology available to them.
The best thing that can happen to Microsoft is to be broken up before everyone can extract their pound of flesh.
As for Scott and Sun, act fast and strike while the iron is hot. The appeal should go straight to the USSC (see how that happens by actually reading the Sherman Antitrust Act). Since there seems to be no "Constitutional" issues expect the court to not hear the case and so the appeal will be dead. Then it's a matter of how fast the remedy can be put into effect. If Sun works fast enough there should still be a big pot of cash that they can grab before the remedy stops them from getting their due.
Could you have misread this any more than you have? I think not.
Let's try one more time. I'll type as slowly as possible to make sure you follow this. Stay with the flow.
In some places that is called "dumping". When you're the little guy and you dump to increase marketshare, people ignore it (and it generally doesn't work. Take a look at Amazon, they have marketshare, but negative income. If they don't stop the dumping and generating positive income soon they will end up just another piece of Superhighway roadkill). When you are the monopoly in your industry, people don't and can't ignore it!
Now, what if you went to get capital to create your new enterprise and the people (angels or VC) were looking at the above facts. They could even point to inclusion of e-mail and calendaring and now multi-media as part of the OS, according to the people in Redmond.
The people in Redmond have made it clear that they consider EVERYTHING a potential part of the OS. Every possible application. They have the deep pockets that allow them to throw as much resource as they want at taking your marketshare, as long as they do it before you can create a lock on peoples data (see Intuit as a company that has actually been able to beat Microsoft because they have locked in your tax data for years). They can dump their OS embedded product for free, while you try to sell yours. They can eliminate your channels one-by-one and choke off your oxygen. They can take your billion dollar marketcap company and reduce it to a fraction of it's worth.
Your "Person B" example is flawed since open source is not a monopoly. The rules are far different for a monopoly than they are in a strictly competitive landscape. In fact, you were able to list at least three competing "People B"'s in your group, and not one owns or controls the market.
You seem to have failed to understand the concept of monopoly power. I suggest that you re-read the findings by Jackson. The law is very clear that a monopoly doesn't have the same rights as others.
Back to my point. The ruling in favor of Justice shall actually create an opening of the gates (I have no idea if they are trickle-gates or flood-gates) that will allow people who had ideas that weren't fundable to inovate an opportunity to get funding and innovate. A benefit to all potential consumers of their innovation.
Consider the following. I have an application that allows you to hook your computer up with millions and share any file type or directory that you want (call it networked-vision, or better yet, the next generation of napster/gnutella). I have developed this and am seeking to go find someone to fund the development of this as a commercial application.
But every angel and VC I go to says the same thing. Great application, but what if Microsoft decides that this is what they should have as part of the next generation of the operating system, calling it "Internet Neighborhood" and placing it on the desktop?
There goes the incentive for people to build new applications, because no one will give the company a chance to build it. They won't fund the idea until they can be assured that there is an exit strategy beyond that of "being crushed by Micro$oft". [please note that not everyone wants to give their software away as open source, some people still want to build companies that make successful software]
How have we as consumers been harmed by people that had great ideas, but weren't funded because the exit strategy was defaulted to that "Micro$oft would intgrate the technology into the OS" and there is no opportunity here? How much innovation has been kept from the computing (user) community?
It isn't so much what Micro$oft has done in the past and that we are aware of that should bother us, but what they have done by being allowed to incorporate other peoples ideas into thier platform. The innovation that they have killed, even before we were aware of it. Before it had a chance to live.
Do they continue to do it? Sure. look at how little they have put into the browser since they destroyed the competition. No major breakthroughs in developing an open computing application. On the other hand, Ron Glasser and Real are in the sights now. The next "application" to be OS'd.
If you were the little guy (not deep pockets Real) and were thinking of building this cool application, after looking at companies like Netscape, Real and even the ones you don't hear about, like Russell Information Sciences (they used to make the best scheduling system money could buy, until Micro$oft decided that Scheduling and Calendaring were part of the OS), and seeing what happens when the Gorilla of Software decides your product is in their OS space... what are the chances you would leap at building a company to make this application?
The greatest part about Jackson's rulings to date were that he understood the above. We can only hope that he does what is necessary to ensure that these ideas have a chance to live; a chance to bear fruit; a chance to change the face of computing as we know it.
Make a difference. Hurt them where it counts, their pocketbook.
M$ has a problem. It sees that people want IM, and it wants to play. It doesn't seem to want to build its own critical mass (which is what you need to make IM work) so, since it is late to the game it insists that "for the users" it must have an Open Standard.
Let's talk about applications that people use a great deal. The one most people use a great deal is a word processor. And what people would really like, more than IM would be a standard that would allow them to use the word processor of their choice because documents could be shared in a Open Standard format.
Of course this would limit MS's ability to sell their word processor to everyone (so that they can share documents). I mean, if there was a Open Standard on documents then someone might actually write a word processor that could read and write to that standard and give it away.
I'm all for open standrds, but let's demand that M$ create one for documents first, and give up their almost monopoly of the desktop word processing space, and then we can talk about opening up IM.
The other company has decided that they will subvert the serer owners attempted security and has hacked the server a second and a third time.
Wouldn't you state that AOL has indicated that they do not wish to have Microsoft using their servers in this manner? Haven't they been rather clear in their desire to retain their resources for themselves?
Wouldn't you say that Microsofts refusal to accept that it's AOLs servers and their system (unlike Yahoo!) is akin to a consistant pattern of behavior to attempt to steal services (and if they can not steal the services, to cause a degredation of the services for the rightful owners through a DoS attack)?
Such a stink was made when SATAN was released and all it did was probe servers for vunerabilities. This is a concerted effort to obtain services that were denied by the massive release of software designed to take those services that belong to another company.
How would Microsoft feel if every second 20,000 people on the net started issuing pings or finger request to the MSN servers?
It's wrong! It's theft. It's a denial of service attack on their only major threat in the Internet space.
Where I come from using software to hammer someone elses computers and reduce their service levels is called a denial of service attack. Releasing over 20,000 copies of software to do that means that the company is knowingly attempting to deny service of registered users of that server access to the resources of the server.
In simple terms, what Microsoft did was attempt to hijack the services of AOLs server, and now they are perfoming no less than a denial of service attack on those servers.
Last time I checked, people go to jail for releasing software designed to damage other peoples servers.