Sorry, I don't buy it. A minor inconvenience to a small subset of users who are competent enough to do their own installs but incompetent enough that they lost the OEM CDs and didn't burn a browser to a backup... and you weigh that against fair competition in the browser market and whether or not one company is allowed to basically control Web standards even though that company is committing crimes and was discovered to be intentionally breaking things to keep the Web from being a way to bypass their monopoly. I think your priorities are seriously short-sighted.
Microsoft is not running a monopoly in any way, shape or form.
Gee who should I believe about economics, the courts and economists or a blog commenter called 'Beelzebud'? What a tough call.
Millions of Mac and Linux users would disagree about MS running a monopoly...
How many of MS's customers, you know OEMs like Dell and Sony, feel MS is not a monopolist and that they have a lot of other, practical economic choices for inclusion on the computers they sell? If you were CEO of HP would you feel you have a lot of choices that would not get you fired in your first week?
One could make the argument, though, that they should offer their computers without an OS or with Windows or Linux as an option instead of forcing them to be bundled with OS X.
One could make that argument, but that does not mean it is something law requires. The reason for this is that if you don't like Apple bundling their hardware and software, you can buy different hardware or different software. Those vendor then gain money and Apple loses it, thus providing motivation for change. It's called the competitive free market, which is not undermined by Apple's behavior. If, howver you're an OEM looking to buy an OS to include on your consumer computers for sale, you have no practical choice other than to pay MS. (Which is why the latter action was made illegal).
The fact that you can buy an apple computer with safari and OS-X proves that Microsoft isn't a monopoly.
What was the last computer Microsoft sold you? What they don't sell computers? Your concept of a market is very flawed if you think MS and Apple are direct competitors for OS's.
Not that MS isn't bad for the computer industry, but lawsuits over what MS does...
For the millionth time THIS IS NOT A LAWSUIT! This is the EU prosecuting a crime. Everyone has to obey antitrust laws and MS does not get an exception.
Take your example, If Nvidia (80% of the market in this thought experiment) forced everyone to buy an LCD with it's video cards and ATI(15% of the market in this example) was less compatible with games, charged more for it's hardware, bundled both the monitor and the mother board/processor with it's video cards then nVidia would no longer be a monopoly.
Ummm. How do you figure? If Nvidia has 80% of the market, then they almost certainly still have monopoly influence.
Like it or not MS built an operating system which sets the rules for everyone else, If it doesn't want something else running on it's OS it has every right not to let it run.
So if I build a gun I have every right to violate criminal laws and use it to kill people? And your reasoning for MS or I being given a free pass to ignore the laws is what?
All this anti-trust nonsense just keeps us in a hazy middle-ground where MS is just "not-evil-enough" for most people to avoid changing to Linux.
What does this have to do with Linux? It's a complaint about MS breaking the Web browser market and holding back innovation for financial gain.
These lawsuits are nonexistent since this article is about the EU going after Microsoft for breaking the law, not about anyone being sued.
Windows also ships with a firewall, disk defragmenting tool, notepad, calculator, freecell, solitaire, and a file browser. I guess those are all illegally bundled.
Probably most of them, with the exception of the file browser, yup.
Name one major operating system that does not ship with a browser.
Name one major OS that has monopoly influence on the market in which it is sold.
Ubuntu and the Mac OS both ship with browsers. You can select other browsers, as you can with Microsoft Windows.
Target shooters and hunters both fire guns yet they aren't arrested for murder but the guy who shot a gun and it killed someone is. How unfair.
This lawsuit is ridiculous.
Your understanding of what is going on and the fact that we have to listen to it is ridiculous. There is no lawsuit. MS broke antitrust law. Please learn what antitrust law is or shut up already.
Cool! I love this. I make an alternative text editor, and I would love to make it the default for handling.txt and.log files and replace notepad.exe. How do I sign up to get my text editor in line for this special treatment? After all, if I was forced to compete on the merits of my text editor (which is actually a little better, faster at opening large files, and more secure than notepad) I wouldn't get to deploy many copies because the built in notepad is "good enough" for most people and nobody seems to know about my editor.
First complain about MS's illegal behavior to the EU. Then wait many years for the courts to get around to doing something. Then convince OEMs to include your text editor instead of all the other ones out there. Good luck.
Maybe Opera should sue FF then for somehow wrangling more users away from IE than Opera is?
FF is gaining market share by making a better browser not by breaking the law. Opera hasn't sued anyone, just complained about a blatant violation of criminal law.
IE's usage in the wild is down [wikipedia.org] and FF is taking most of that from them. Apparently FF is doing something illegal, and they must be sued into submission!
So let me get this straight, if someone is robbed at gunpoint and reports it to the cops, you think that implies they will also sue the guy down the street who made more money legally than the mugger? That's some "interesting" reasoning you have going on there.
Actually, a lower market share of IE in it's current form is bad for web developers...
Since they now need to produce 2 versions of every page, a standards compliant one and an IE specific one, unless they want to stick to really simple stuff.
That's what people have to do now and it won't change. The reasonable solution is not for all choices to go away and for MS to dominate all browsers on Cell phones and every other device too. Don't you think forcing MS to adhere to the same standards as everyone else is both a better technological solution and better for the free market and more fair?
You don't have any idea what the 'trust' in 'antitrust' is do you?
I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert, no. But rather than educate me, please feel free to belittle my existence and ridicule me. It's far more entertaining, I'm sure.
It's been explained in this article discussion many times now. It's also covered in basic economics textbooks and even wikipedia. A trust is a company or group of companies that has gathered a great deal of influence in a specific market, such that they can undermine competition in that market and leverage that influence into other markets.
In future, if you would like to be belittled less often, you could refrain from making assertions about what companies can and cannot do under the law until you have a basic grasp of what the law is.
The EU confiscated all of Microsoft's IP today including the source code for Windows. From now on Windows is open sourced and free to distribute to all. The US whitehouse secretary of press commented today that they'd like to intervene but MS was lawfully convicted and the Berne treaty binds the US to honor the transfer of IP rights to the EU government. In other news a local woman gives birth to sextuplets....
The courts were wrong! I know it's hard to believe.
The courts were right, both in the legal and economics definitions of 'monopoly'.
When you look at OSX, Ubuntu, iTunes, Firefox, Opera, etc etc etc, it's very hard to see how MS has a monopoly.
First, MS has been convicted of abusing a monopoly in the desktop operating system market to gain unfair advantage in the Web browser market. That means your references to iTunes, Firefox and Opera have nothing to do with whether or not MS is guilty of this offense. That leaves Ubuntu and OS X. To have monopoly influence in a market, the courts usually use 70% as a guideline. Together both those OS's don't come close to 30%. But it gets worse. Monopolies depend upon market definitions. You monopolize a specific market. That is why server OS's do not count, buyers do not choose those as viable alternatives when purchasing OS's. You also have to look at who the customers are. For desktop OS's it is almost entirely OEMs building computer systems they then sell, with a small number of sales going to large site licenses. Guess what that means? Apple will not sell OS X to OEMs or sell site licenses. They only sell upgrades in boxes (in small numbers) while selling complete computer systems in that market, competing against OEMs who are MS's customers. In terms of both economics and the law, that means OS X is not a direct Windows competitor and does not count against MS's market share. Are you beginning to see why the courts ruled against them?
That's exactly where this could lead if Microsoft wanted to push it.
You don't have any idea what the 'trust' in 'antitrust' is do you?
All they would have to do is dust off their old Mac IE browser, give it a new version number, and then "sue" Apple to force them to remove Safari from Mac OS.
Well, they could complain to the EU, but the lawyers involved might worry about being disbarred for gross incompetence.
These are dangerous cans they are about to open...
You just don't have a clue about how these laws work do you?
Sure. Barrier to entry is an easy one. I can go download the Linux kernel and build my own OS.
You're not the market for Windows, OEMs are. OEMs can and do sell Linux, but in tiny numbers because the barrier to entry in the mainstream market is huge. It's hard to sell computers when 90% or more of software including everything in the local stores doesn't run on them and the majority of a users old files and already purchased software doesn't work.
Alternative OS's. Well, that's even easier. There are a myriad Linux-based OS's available, various *BSD OS's, Apple's OS, and a ridiculous number of more specialized OS's I can install.
You forgot the 'commercially viable' part which excludes pretty much everything you listed. Also, you again misinterpreted the market. OS X does not count because Apple doesn't sell it to OEMs and is not in the market.
I know. You'll come up with various ridiculous conditions which basically boil down to "but those aren't Windows OS's!".
That does not describe either of my above comments.
If you want to apply enough silly, specific conditions you can make any product into a monopoly.
Yeah, silly conditions like understanding what the market is and whose buying things in it. Such silliness.
Essentially there exists no rational argument that MS is a monopoly and should be regulated as one other than appeals to authority "well, the DoJ said they were!".
Your understanding of monopolies and economics in general is pathetic. Can't you even read the articles already written on this subject before spouting off this crap?
It isn't bad coding to write pages that work on 70% of computers, even if those 70% are using broken browser.
Erm -- yes it is, and as somebody who seems to have claimed in a previous post that he's a web developer (or at the very least took upon himself authority to speak for them), I would think you'd understand that. Apparently people (you?) "spend 50% of [their] time working around MS's noncompliance," but it's also not bad coding for them to ignore other browsers and standards?
Sorry, but some people simply don't have time to write for the standards so they write for broken IE pages. That doesn't make them bad coders, just practical ones making compromises. For the rest (like me) we write to the standards then waste tons of time throwing in hacks so it looks okay in IE as well. The fact that we're spending that time means we're sane, not that we're bad coders. (Note I do a little Web development as a small part of my job).
As far as stifling innovation goes, I tend to agree in principal. However I'll also note that IE's marketshare has plummeted in the last few years because of competition primarily from Firefox. In other words, the innovation that is now bringing down the 800 pound gorilla actually occurred in large part when IE had market shares in the mid-to-high 90s.
So how many times better of a product should one have to make in order to gain market share from a monopolist with a terrible product but who is willing to break the law?
Simply being a monopoly is not against the law, and with market shares dropping steadily for IE I'd have a hard time claiming with a straight face that they're successfully using their Windows monopoly to secure an IE monoply, however successful the strategy may have been in the past.
If you read the antitrust law, they don't have to be gaining another monopoly in the Web browser market, they just have to be gaining an unfair advantage in that market due to their existing monopoly.
Based on my understanding of how courts worked, an overturned conviction [wikipedia.org] means that the conviction is null and void.
Well for starters, an overturned conviction doesn't mean the person wasn't convicted and the level of corruption that happened for an already convicted company to go into settlement right after people appointed by someone MS contributed huge amounts of money to was elected is a sad joke. More importantly though, MS was also convicted of antitrust abuse in several other countries including the US.
Thus, Microsoft isn't a convicted monopolist because the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that they weren't
But the EU (and other) courts decided they were because they didn't get big enough bribes.
Yup. They've wasted many hours of my life as I worked around things they intentionally broke as a way to illegally profit. They get no sympathy from me when the slow, slow courts finally catch up to them.
Notepad is what it is. And it's perfect for what it is. Sometimes you want a text editor with zero features, and knowing that you can open just about any file to see what is inside is important.
And you don't think there are better ones out there, even for bare bones text editors? Heck, I can think of three free ones right now I'd rather use on Windows.
Why is it better for OEMs to decide what software I should get on a new computer?
Because when OEMs decide there are multiple solutions. People become aware of choices and are more informed. More importantly, when there are multiple choices, there's this thing called 'competition'. People buy what they most like and since this influences their purchasing decision, OEMs act as their agents. This means text editor writers are motivated to make better products and that includes Microsoft. They actually have motivation to make NotePad better and improve it so it no longer screws up that subset of unicode text files it has never properly rendered. Seriously, you grw up without ever learning the benefits of competition in a free market, the #1 reason capitalism works?
I've never seen an OEM machine that wasn't full of absolutely worthless crap.
Stop buying from the crap vendors. Usually their hardware is garbage anyway.
You're on crack... The fact that the IE market share is declining is enough to demonstrate to reasonable people that the public IS aware that there are alternatives to using IE, and they ARE able to use these alternatives.
Actually, it demonstrates some of the public is aware. It is also irrelevant. The test for monopoly abuse is simple. Can Opera bundle their browser with Windows? No. Can Microsoft? Yes. Is it likely that browser gain market share from being bundled with Windows? Yes. Since MS is already a confirmed monopoly in the EU court system, that's all there is to it.
I've read your posts in this thread, and your whining is incredible annoying. You compare Microsoft's web browser to a murderer killing people.
No, I compared an idiotic interpretation of antitrust law to an idiotic interpretation of murder laws. You don't seem to understand the difference, probably because you don't have a clue about antitrust laws.
You also repeat over and over that Microsoft is keeping us 8 years behind in website technology. That's a load of crap. Who added the non-standard features to their browser that makes AJAX possible?
Gee, what one browser on the market doesn't have a "satisfactory" rating for CSS 2.0 support, let alone CSS 2.1? CSS 2.0 was published in its entirety in 1998, that's more than 10 years ago now. Combine that with documents from MS about intentionally avoiding complete support for open Web standards and I don't see a lot of a case on your side here.
It was the ubiquity of a browser included in Windows that opened up the web to most of the world. People now realize that there are other browsers available, and they are branching out, no problem.
Most people never install alternative browsers and don't even know it is possible. Before IE, computers already shipped with Netscape on CD and it was distributed by every ISP I ever subscribed to.
If Internet Explorer blocked people from downloading other browsers, I would see the point. But otherwise it's just a bunch of complaining from a few also-rans.
If MS isn't benefitting largely from having IE pre-installed instead of a competitor, what is your objection to competitors being pre-installed instead? After all, since users are so savvy they can just go download IE somewhere.
You're ignorant and opinionated, a poor combination.
I don't think that has been completely established yet, the EU is not done...
No, the case is not done, but it is open and shut. The US convicted them of the same action under nearly identical laws. All the findings of fact are pretty much done from the previous antitrust conviction in the EU. I haven't heard a single legal expert question that they will be convicted, just what the remedy will be.
I would say that Apple wields "monopoly power" in the MP3 market.
The jury is still out. The EU has been investigating if Apple has monopoly influence on the portable, digital music player market. The crux of the matter is if average consumers consider media playing phones when purchasing a player. For the EU, the answer is probably yes and they will rule Apple does not have a monopoly, although it might be different in the states due to restrictive phone contracts.
The ipod touch is BUNDLED with safari last I checked.
I don't think that is exactly true. Does Safari actually ship on the CD with iTunes? I thought iPods were bundled with iTunes which installed an updater which in turn offered to download Safari. If my version is correct that would mean Apple has bundled iPods and iTunes and tied it to the iTunes Music store and very indirectly Safari. Note: tying to a monopolized product is illegal and bundling is one form of tying.
My point being, Apple is being evaluated under the same laws and is subject to them just as much as MS is, but in the case of Apple there is considerable room for opinion as to whether or not they are guilty of such a crime, whereas with MS it is open and shut. As for Apple, they would of course be stopped from bundling Safari and iTunes with iPods, unless they also bundled competing programs.. not be forbidden from bundling anything with OS X.
The slippery slope - I can see it now... *EC Considering Removing Notepad from Windows Based on Monopoly Claims*
It's funny, first because you don't seem to know that "slippery slope" is the name of a famous logical fallacy, and thus doesn't exactly lend weight to your opinion. Secondly, because it would be great if they stripped out NotePad because then OEMs would be motivated to include a text editor of their own choosing and it is hard to find a worse one than NotePad.
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, unless you're trying to argue that Microsoft makes such a good product, that people don't really have a choice to use anything else.
Microsoft has been ruled to be a monopoly and to be abusing the monopoly in the US, EU, and several other countries. In the legal sense, Microsoft is a monopoly. You'd better find a new argument.
What would happen if Microsoft pulled a "standard compliant" IE (or at least one that matched Firefox for complaintness) out of their ass?
Web developers and users would rejoice and the Web would leap forward technologically allowing for many new applications and uses of the Web with a lot less effort and bandwidth. If only
It would force an all new attack position for the anit-MS folks...
If MS stopped breaking this law in this case, gee we'd have to complain about all their other criminal behaviors. Your postulation is like asking what if the mafia stopped extorting money from shopkeepers in the Bronx, then the cops wold have to arrest them one of their other criminal enterprises.
However, when you buy an OEM (with hard disk or motherboard) or retail copy (at Best Buy or so) of Windows, you get just Windows under this new ruling. How do you get out to the internet to download a new web browser like Opera, Firefox or Chrome?
Wait, you're computer savvy enough to know how to buy hardware and OS separately and install the OS and get the drivers working, but you're not smart enough to burn your browser of choice onto a disk before starting this process? Well then I guess you should see a doctor about your rare mental illness.
It's impractical and requires end users to...
End users don't install OS's or do so rarely enough that it doesn't matter.
Probably what Microsoft will end up doing is bundling OEM/Retail Windows copies with an Internet Explorer CD, or putting it in the "addons" directory of the DVD or something...
You think MS will stop illegally bundling IE by bundling IE? I think you're missing the point if you think that would fly with the courts before the judges are bribed.
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Sorry, I don't buy it. A minor inconvenience to a small subset of users who are competent enough to do their own installs but incompetent enough that they lost the OEM CDs and didn't burn a browser to a backup... and you weigh that against fair competition in the browser market and whether or not one company is allowed to basically control Web standards even though that company is committing crimes and was discovered to be intentionally breaking things to keep the Web from being a way to bypass their monopoly. I think your priorities are seriously short-sighted.
Microsoft is not running a monopoly in any way, shape or form.
Gee who should I believe about economics, the courts and economists or a blog commenter called 'Beelzebud'? What a tough call.
Millions of Mac and Linux users would disagree about MS running a monopoly...
How many of MS's customers, you know OEMs like Dell and Sony, feel MS is not a monopolist and that they have a lot of other, practical economic choices for inclusion on the computers they sell? If you were CEO of HP would you feel you have a lot of choices that would not get you fired in your first week?
One could make the argument, though, that they should offer their computers without an OS or with Windows or Linux as an option instead of forcing them to be bundled with OS X.
One could make that argument, but that does not mean it is something law requires. The reason for this is that if you don't like Apple bundling their hardware and software, you can buy different hardware or different software. Those vendor then gain money and Apple loses it, thus providing motivation for change. It's called the competitive free market, which is not undermined by Apple's behavior. If, howver you're an OEM looking to buy an OS to include on your consumer computers for sale, you have no practical choice other than to pay MS. (Which is why the latter action was made illegal).
The fact that you can buy an apple computer with safari and OS-X proves that Microsoft isn't a monopoly.
What was the last computer Microsoft sold you? What they don't sell computers? Your concept of a market is very flawed if you think MS and Apple are direct competitors for OS's.
Not that MS isn't bad for the computer industry, but lawsuits over what MS does...
For the millionth time THIS IS NOT A LAWSUIT! This is the EU prosecuting a crime. Everyone has to obey antitrust laws and MS does not get an exception.
Take your example, If Nvidia (80% of the market in this thought experiment) forced everyone to buy an LCD with it's video cards and ATI(15% of the market in this example) was less compatible with games, charged more for it's hardware, bundled both the monitor and the mother board/processor with it's video cards then nVidia would no longer be a monopoly.
Ummm. How do you figure? If Nvidia has 80% of the market, then they almost certainly still have monopoly influence.
Like it or not MS built an operating system which sets the rules for everyone else, If it doesn't want something else running on it's OS it has every right not to let it run.
So if I build a gun I have every right to violate criminal laws and use it to kill people? And your reasoning for MS or I being given a free pass to ignore the laws is what?
All this anti-trust nonsense just keeps us in a hazy middle-ground where MS is just "not-evil-enough" for most people to avoid changing to Linux.
What does this have to do with Linux? It's a complaint about MS breaking the Web browser market and holding back innovation for financial gain.
These lawsuits are ridiculous.
These lawsuits are nonexistent since this article is about the EU going after Microsoft for breaking the law, not about anyone being sued.
Windows also ships with a firewall, disk defragmenting tool, notepad, calculator, freecell, solitaire, and a file browser. I guess those are all illegally bundled.
Probably most of them, with the exception of the file browser, yup.
Name one major operating system that does not ship with a browser.
Name one major OS that has monopoly influence on the market in which it is sold.
Ubuntu and the Mac OS both ship with browsers. You can select other browsers, as you can with Microsoft Windows.
Target shooters and hunters both fire guns yet they aren't arrested for murder but the guy who shot a gun and it killed someone is. How unfair.
This lawsuit is ridiculous.
Your understanding of what is going on and the fact that we have to listen to it is ridiculous. There is no lawsuit. MS broke antitrust law. Please learn what antitrust law is or shut up already.
Cool! I love this. I make an alternative text editor, and I would love to make it the default for handling .txt and .log files and replace notepad.exe. How do I sign up to get my text editor in line for this special treatment? After all, if I was forced to compete on the merits of my text editor (which is actually a little better, faster at opening large files, and more secure than notepad) I wouldn't get to deploy many copies because the built in notepad is "good enough" for most people and nobody seems to know about my editor.
First complain about MS's illegal behavior to the EU. Then wait many years for the courts to get around to doing something. Then convince OEMs to include your text editor instead of all the other ones out there. Good luck.
Maybe Opera should sue FF then for somehow wrangling more users away from IE than Opera is?
FF is gaining market share by making a better browser not by breaking the law. Opera hasn't sued anyone, just complained about a blatant violation of criminal law.
IE's usage in the wild is down [wikipedia.org] and FF is taking most of that from them. Apparently FF is doing something illegal, and they must be sued into submission!
So let me get this straight, if someone is robbed at gunpoint and reports it to the cops, you think that implies they will also sue the guy down the street who made more money legally than the mugger? That's some "interesting" reasoning you have going on there.
Actually, a lower market share of IE in it's current form is bad for web developers... Since they now need to produce 2 versions of every page, a standards compliant one and an IE specific one, unless they want to stick to really simple stuff.
That's what people have to do now and it won't change. The reasonable solution is not for all choices to go away and for MS to dominate all browsers on Cell phones and every other device too. Don't you think forcing MS to adhere to the same standards as everyone else is both a better technological solution and better for the free market and more fair?
So in a discussion about abuse of a monopoly you start off with a car analogy that includes no monopolies. FAIL! I didn't even continue reading.
You don't have any idea what the 'trust' in 'antitrust' is do you?
I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert, no. But rather than educate me, please feel free to belittle my existence and ridicule me. It's far more entertaining, I'm sure.
It's been explained in this article discussion many times now. It's also covered in basic economics textbooks and even wikipedia. A trust is a company or group of companies that has gathered a great deal of influence in a specific market, such that they can undermine competition in that market and leverage that influence into other markets.
In future, if you would like to be belittled less often, you could refrain from making assertions about what companies can and cannot do under the law until you have a basic grasp of what the law is.
The EU confiscated all of Microsoft's IP today including the source code for Windows. From now on Windows is open sourced and free to distribute to all. The US whitehouse secretary of press commented today that they'd like to intervene but MS was lawfully convicted and the Berne treaty binds the US to honor the transfer of IP rights to the EU government. In other news a local woman gives birth to sextuplets....
The courts were wrong! I know it's hard to believe.
The courts were right, both in the legal and economics definitions of 'monopoly'.
When you look at OSX, Ubuntu, iTunes, Firefox, Opera, etc etc etc, it's very hard to see how MS has a monopoly.
First, MS has been convicted of abusing a monopoly in the desktop operating system market to gain unfair advantage in the Web browser market. That means your references to iTunes, Firefox and Opera have nothing to do with whether or not MS is guilty of this offense. That leaves Ubuntu and OS X. To have monopoly influence in a market, the courts usually use 70% as a guideline. Together both those OS's don't come close to 30%. But it gets worse. Monopolies depend upon market definitions. You monopolize a specific market. That is why server OS's do not count, buyers do not choose those as viable alternatives when purchasing OS's. You also have to look at who the customers are. For desktop OS's it is almost entirely OEMs building computer systems they then sell, with a small number of sales going to large site licenses. Guess what that means? Apple will not sell OS X to OEMs or sell site licenses. They only sell upgrades in boxes (in small numbers) while selling complete computer systems in that market, competing against OEMs who are MS's customers. In terms of both economics and the law, that means OS X is not a direct Windows competitor and does not count against MS's market share. Are you beginning to see why the courts ruled against them?
Has there been a similar suit against Macintosh?
That's exactly where this could lead if Microsoft wanted to push it.
You don't have any idea what the 'trust' in 'antitrust' is do you?
All they would have to do is dust off their old Mac IE browser, give it a new version number, and then "sue" Apple to force them to remove Safari from Mac OS.
Well, they could complain to the EU, but the lawyers involved might worry about being disbarred for gross incompetence.
These are dangerous cans they are about to open...
You just don't have a clue about how these laws work do you?
Sure. Barrier to entry is an easy one. I can go download the Linux kernel and build my own OS.
You're not the market for Windows, OEMs are. OEMs can and do sell Linux, but in tiny numbers because the barrier to entry in the mainstream market is huge. It's hard to sell computers when 90% or more of software including everything in the local stores doesn't run on them and the majority of a users old files and already purchased software doesn't work.
Alternative OS's. Well, that's even easier. There are a myriad Linux-based OS's available, various *BSD OS's, Apple's OS, and a ridiculous number of more specialized OS's I can install.
You forgot the 'commercially viable' part which excludes pretty much everything you listed. Also, you again misinterpreted the market. OS X does not count because Apple doesn't sell it to OEMs and is not in the market.
I know. You'll come up with various ridiculous conditions which basically boil down to "but those aren't Windows OS's!".
That does not describe either of my above comments.
If you want to apply enough silly, specific conditions you can make any product into a monopoly.
Yeah, silly conditions like understanding what the market is and whose buying things in it. Such silliness.
Essentially there exists no rational argument that MS is a monopoly and should be regulated as one other than appeals to authority "well, the DoJ said they were!".
Your understanding of monopolies and economics in general is pathetic. Can't you even read the articles already written on this subject before spouting off this crap?
Honest question, what browser (if any) comes on a new Mac? What about if I install a Linux distro?
Macs come with Safari. Linux boxes ship with whatever browser the distro decides to include, usually Firefox, Konqueror, or Epiphany.
It isn't bad coding to write pages that work on 70% of computers, even if those 70% are using broken browser.
Erm -- yes it is, and as somebody who seems to have claimed in a previous post that he's a web developer (or at the very least took upon himself authority to speak for them), I would think you'd understand that. Apparently people (you?) "spend 50% of [their] time working around MS's noncompliance," but it's also not bad coding for them to ignore other browsers and standards?
Sorry, but some people simply don't have time to write for the standards so they write for broken IE pages. That doesn't make them bad coders, just practical ones making compromises. For the rest (like me) we write to the standards then waste tons of time throwing in hacks so it looks okay in IE as well. The fact that we're spending that time means we're sane, not that we're bad coders. (Note I do a little Web development as a small part of my job).
As far as stifling innovation goes, I tend to agree in principal. However I'll also note that IE's marketshare has plummeted in the last few years because of competition primarily from Firefox. In other words, the innovation that is now bringing down the 800 pound gorilla actually occurred in large part when IE had market shares in the mid-to-high 90s.
So how many times better of a product should one have to make in order to gain market share from a monopolist with a terrible product but who is willing to break the law?
Simply being a monopoly is not against the law, and with market shares dropping steadily for IE I'd have a hard time claiming with a straight face that they're successfully using their Windows monopoly to secure an IE monoply, however successful the strategy may have been in the past.
If you read the antitrust law, they don't have to be gaining another monopoly in the Web browser market, they just have to be gaining an unfair advantage in that market due to their existing monopoly.
Based on my understanding of how courts worked, an overturned conviction [wikipedia.org] means that the conviction is null and void.
Well for starters, an overturned conviction doesn't mean the person wasn't convicted and the level of corruption that happened for an already convicted company to go into settlement right after people appointed by someone MS contributed huge amounts of money to was elected is a sad joke. More importantly though, MS was also convicted of antitrust abuse in several other countries including the US.
Thus, Microsoft isn't a convicted monopolist because the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that they weren't
But the EU (and other) courts decided they were because they didn't get big enough bribes.
So you have a lot of hate for Microsoft.
Yup. They've wasted many hours of my life as I worked around things they intentionally broke as a way to illegally profit. They get no sympathy from me when the slow, slow courts finally catch up to them.
Notepad is what it is. And it's perfect for what it is. Sometimes you want a text editor with zero features, and knowing that you can open just about any file to see what is inside is important.
And you don't think there are better ones out there, even for bare bones text editors? Heck, I can think of three free ones right now I'd rather use on Windows.
Why is it better for OEMs to decide what software I should get on a new computer?
Because when OEMs decide there are multiple solutions. People become aware of choices and are more informed. More importantly, when there are multiple choices, there's this thing called 'competition'. People buy what they most like and since this influences their purchasing decision, OEMs act as their agents. This means text editor writers are motivated to make better products and that includes Microsoft. They actually have motivation to make NotePad better and improve it so it no longer screws up that subset of unicode text files it has never properly rendered. Seriously, you grw up without ever learning the benefits of competition in a free market, the #1 reason capitalism works?
I've never seen an OEM machine that wasn't full of absolutely worthless crap.
Stop buying from the crap vendors. Usually their hardware is garbage anyway.
You're on crack... The fact that the IE market share is declining is enough to demonstrate to reasonable people that the public IS aware that there are alternatives to using IE, and they ARE able to use these alternatives.
Actually, it demonstrates some of the public is aware. It is also irrelevant. The test for monopoly abuse is simple. Can Opera bundle their browser with Windows? No. Can Microsoft? Yes. Is it likely that browser gain market share from being bundled with Windows? Yes. Since MS is already a confirmed monopoly in the EU court system, that's all there is to it.
I've read your posts in this thread, and your whining is incredible annoying. You compare Microsoft's web browser to a murderer killing people.
No, I compared an idiotic interpretation of antitrust law to an idiotic interpretation of murder laws. You don't seem to understand the difference, probably because you don't have a clue about antitrust laws.
You also repeat over and over that Microsoft is keeping us 8 years behind in website technology. That's a load of crap. Who added the non-standard features to their browser that makes AJAX possible?
Gee, what one browser on the market doesn't have a "satisfactory" rating for CSS 2.0 support, let alone CSS 2.1? CSS 2.0 was published in its entirety in 1998, that's more than 10 years ago now. Combine that with documents from MS about intentionally avoiding complete support for open Web standards and I don't see a lot of a case on your side here.
It was the ubiquity of a browser included in Windows that opened up the web to most of the world. People now realize that there are other browsers available, and they are branching out, no problem.
Most people never install alternative browsers and don't even know it is possible. Before IE, computers already shipped with Netscape on CD and it was distributed by every ISP I ever subscribed to.
If Internet Explorer blocked people from downloading other browsers, I would see the point. But otherwise it's just a bunch of complaining from a few also-rans.
If MS isn't benefitting largely from having IE pre-installed instead of a competitor, what is your objection to competitors being pre-installed instead? After all, since users are so savvy they can just go download IE somewhere.
You're ignorant and opinionated, a poor combination.
If MS stopped breaking this law in this case...
I don't think that has been completely established yet, the EU is not done...
No, the case is not done, but it is open and shut. The US convicted them of the same action under nearly identical laws. All the findings of fact are pretty much done from the previous antitrust conviction in the EU. I haven't heard a single legal expert question that they will be convicted, just what the remedy will be.
I would say that Apple wields "monopoly power" in the MP3 market.
The jury is still out. The EU has been investigating if Apple has monopoly influence on the portable, digital music player market. The crux of the matter is if average consumers consider media playing phones when purchasing a player. For the EU, the answer is probably yes and they will rule Apple does not have a monopoly, although it might be different in the states due to restrictive phone contracts.
The ipod touch is BUNDLED with safari last I checked.
I don't think that is exactly true. Does Safari actually ship on the CD with iTunes? I thought iPods were bundled with iTunes which installed an updater which in turn offered to download Safari. If my version is correct that would mean Apple has bundled iPods and iTunes and tied it to the iTunes Music store and very indirectly Safari. Note: tying to a monopolized product is illegal and bundling is one form of tying.
My point being, Apple is being evaluated under the same laws and is subject to them just as much as MS is, but in the case of Apple there is considerable room for opinion as to whether or not they are guilty of such a crime, whereas with MS it is open and shut. As for Apple, they would of course be stopped from bundling Safari and iTunes with iPods, unless they also bundled competing programs.. not be forbidden from bundling anything with OS X.
The slippery slope - I can see it now... *EC Considering Removing Notepad from Windows Based on Monopoly Claims*
It's funny, first because you don't seem to know that "slippery slope" is the name of a famous logical fallacy, and thus doesn't exactly lend weight to your opinion. Secondly, because it would be great if they stripped out NotePad because then OEMs would be motivated to include a text editor of their own choosing and it is hard to find a worse one than NotePad.
Microsoft isn't a monopoly, unless you're trying to argue that Microsoft makes such a good product, that people don't really have a choice to use anything else.
Microsoft has been ruled to be a monopoly and to be abusing the monopoly in the US, EU, and several other countries. In the legal sense, Microsoft is a monopoly. You'd better find a new argument.
What would happen if Microsoft pulled a "standard compliant" IE (or at least one that matched Firefox for complaintness) out of their ass?
Web developers and users would rejoice and the Web would leap forward technologically allowing for many new applications and uses of the Web with a lot less effort and bandwidth. If only
It would force an all new attack position for the anit-MS folks...
If MS stopped breaking this law in this case, gee we'd have to complain about all their other criminal behaviors. Your postulation is like asking what if the mafia stopped extorting money from shopkeepers in the Bronx, then the cops wold have to arrest them one of their other criminal enterprises.
However, when you buy an OEM (with hard disk or motherboard) or retail copy (at Best Buy or so) of Windows, you get just Windows under this new ruling. How do you get out to the internet to download a new web browser like Opera, Firefox or Chrome?
Wait, you're computer savvy enough to know how to buy hardware and OS separately and install the OS and get the drivers working, but you're not smart enough to burn your browser of choice onto a disk before starting this process? Well then I guess you should see a doctor about your rare mental illness.
It's impractical and requires end users to...
End users don't install OS's or do so rarely enough that it doesn't matter.
Probably what Microsoft will end up doing is bundling OEM/Retail Windows copies with an Internet Explorer CD, or putting it in the "addons" directory of the DVD or something...
You think MS will stop illegally bundling IE by bundling IE? I think you're missing the point if you think that would fly with the courts before the judges are bribed.