I would love to hear more about these meetings you say you have been apart of, I am not challenging you per say, but more so the content of those meetings, if they could have interceded in those botnets, they would have already, sending to ISPS all the clients on the list with compromised machines, or emails to each owner of each machine...hell even take over the control until they find something to do with them, legally speaking.
"They" in this case refers to researchers at two different, private, network security firms, one of which was my employer at the time. They provide security devices and services to pretty much every tier 1 ISP in the world. They absolutely do create lists of infected host IPs, by traffic consumption, worm, etc. They can export the data as XML (among other formats) to automatically create mailing lists to notify users that they are infected. I don't know of any major ISPs, however, who actually took that step because they had little or no financial interest in so doing.
The security researchers had no authority to install software on any of the bots and doing so (while it might have helped a little bit) would have opened them and the company up to legal liabilities. For the most part, the researchers did not even report the bots to the authorities, except in one case where it was being used to try to DDoS a block of IP space in Sweden, in the wake of the international incident involving published images of allah. In that particular incident it was "botnet for rent" setup where malicious users were renting time controlling a botnet and the user took multiple tries to get the right commands and ended up attacking a random chunk of cable modems on a rather ineffective port. After they finished the research project, they did report that one to the Swedish authorities. The bots themselves were scattered across Europe and the US for the most part. I don't know what sort of legal background you have, but the researchers and our company's legal council claimed we had no authority to switch the control channel and takover the bots, or to try to patch security holes on those machines.
Except there is nothing anticompetitive about Apple's bundling. Microsoft got in trouble because they threatened to terminate Compaq's Windows licenses for bundling Netscape.
Microsoft got in trouble for numerous antitrust issues. The closest one, however, is their bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows. There certainly is something anticompetitive about antitrust bundling. Do you really think iTunes would be as popular as it is if Apple had not bundled it with every iPod? Apple is clearly gaining benefit from this action at the expense of other companies in the market, benefit above and beyond what the merits of iTunes itself would merit.
See, and this is why it's important to use Microsoft as an example correctly, Microsoft got in trouble for using one monopoly, Windows, to leverage another, Internet Explorer..
Microsoft has been in trouble for using their OS monopoly to influence numerous other markets and discussing them all would be a very long process. Since it is the EU investigating Apple right now, lets look at that case. Microsoft was called out for leveraging a monopoly in "desktop operating systems" to gain and advantage in the markets for "server operating systems" and "software media players." MS was ordered to pay fines. In the first market they were ordered to publish all documentation needed for other server OS vendors to communicate with their desktop OS, including APIs, protocols, and file formats used by Windows Server. In the latter market MS was ordered to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player.
So they bundle iTunes with iPods, how is that any different than Nintendo bundling Wii Play with their Wii?
Haven't we been over this enough times with regard to Windows? Nintendo does not have a monopoly on game consoles. They can bundle anything they want with the Wii. Apple, however, may have a monopoly on portable, digital music players and if the courts find that they do, then bundling items from another, preexisting market is illegal.
See, the point is that when Apple started bundling iTunes with the iPod, seven years ago, they weren't a monopoly.
That doesn't matter. The market existed. Once Apple is found to have a monopoly, they must cease bundling.
They "grew" their monopoly honestly, and in the same vein, they do the same thing everyone else is doing; the Zune comes free with their Zune Jukebox, Sonys come with SonicStage, Creative Zens come with MediaConnect (or whatever they are called), etc.
It doesn't matter how Apple obtained their monopoly. Obtaining a monopoly is not illegal. Leveraging a monopoly into another market is illegal. Apple bundles iTunes with Mac OS X. Microsoft bundles WMP with Windows XP. Why is the former action legal while the latter is not? Apple doesn't have a monopoly in either the software music player or desktop OS markets. MS does have a monopoly in the desktop OS market.
The big difference is that Apple ALSO provides iTunes free to both Windows and Macs, regardless of whether they own an iPod or iPhone.
Again, this doesn't matter. MS provides Windows Media Player free for the Mac, but they still were convicted. Microsoft provided Internet Explorer free for the Mac when MS was convicted of bundling IE with Windows, yet they were still convicted.
So to reiterate; Apple hasn't done anything wrong other than be the most popular MP3 player, music store, and jukebox.
The point is not that they are the most popular. If Apple is found to have monopoly influence in any of those markets, then they are responsible for making sure they are not leveraging it into the other markets. It is a matter of what is legal, not "right". It is also a matter of what actions undermine a free, capitalist market.
As Amazon has proven, DRM free MP3 sales are quite possible, so anyone
But using a pre-existing monopoly in one arena, to suppress competition in another, is.
Actually, it is using a monopoly in on market to gain in another, pre-existing market (not necessarily suppress others). Still, if Apple is ruled to have a monopoly, then yeah the tying is pretty clear cut.
Whether they have a monopoly or not is a different issue. I don't have the relevant figures, and I don't know where courts draw the line. I'd say if iTunes is >75% of the download mp3 market, and the nearest competitor has 10% or less, that's a monopoly.
The "rule of thumb" in many jurisdictions is to look at the market whenever one player gains more than 70%. Apple has about 80% of the US market for flash and hard drive based portable players if you exclude video players and portable game players and cell phones that also play music. If you include all of the above, Apple has about 14% of the market. So a lot of this depends upon how the courts define the market and if they consider buying a cell phone or a Playstation portable a valid alternative for average consumers.The EU seems to be the first jurisdiction to announce investigating, so we'll see what they come up with.
In the first case, Apple may have a monopoly in MP3 players. However they have done nothing anticompetitive...
Actually, Apple may have monopoly influence in the portable, digital music player market (MP3 players), but if they do, then several of their actions are pretty clearly anticompetitive tying. First, they bundle iTunes with every iPod sold. That is classic bundling. The iTunes store sells music that makes use of Fairplay DRM, but competitors cannot either license that DRM or get their own DRM supported, that is clearly tying.
Anticompetitive means it hurts Apple but it hurts their competitors more.
Anticompetitive actions aren't about hurting and given participant in a market. They are about undermining the market. The test for anticompetitive actions is not, "does it hurt the monopolist?" The test is, "are they taking an action to gain share in another market, that competitors in that market cannot also take, because they don't have a monopoly to leverage."
For example: Apple has a share of the music jukebox software market. Apple has gained market share by shipping a copy with each iPod they sell. If Apple is ruled to have an monopoly, can say, Real Media get their software shipped with every iPod? No they can't, hence Apple is leveraging their share of portable music players to gain in the music jukebox software market.
Now before people reply to this trying to defend Apple, or because they don't want to believe this is what the law states, there are several factors that are of concern. First, Microsoft has already been convicted of leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to gain share in the music jukebox software market, but the remedy was completely ineffective and they have not stopped the offending action (bundling). Calling Apple onto the carpet for doing the same thing to leverage into the same market is a bit ridiculous. Second, because Apple's monopoly status is in question, the courts generally would order them to stop the action, and only add punitive damages if they do not stop. Apple could stop shipping iTunes with every iPod or they could include other vendor's software, or they could ship an installer that lets the user choose from among several options. Third, Apple has taken numerous steps to remove any tying between the iPod and other markets. For example, they have been trying to drop DRM from their music offerings, removing the tying between the iPod and the iTunes store.
So, again, how is offering a subscription service for iPods and iPhones anticompetitive?
If Apple is ruled to have a monopoly; offering a subscription service that works with iPods would be anti-competitive if they take advantage of their control of the iPod to gain in the music sales market. This includes using DRM they don't license to other subscription services and refusing to support other DRM on iPods. It might also include bundling a copy of iTunes with every iPod, seeing as iTunes has a connection to Apple's service offering built in.
It doesn't stop Amazon from offering DRM free MP3s, it doesn't stop Microsoft from releasing their own subscriptions, it doesn't stop Sony from partnering with Rhapsody for a similar service.
No it doesn't stop others, but that is not a requirement. MS's bundling of Windows Media Player did not stop RealPlayer from installing, but it did leverage their monopoly on Desktop OS's to gain an unfair advantage, since Real Media could not install their player on all Windows machines. The same applies with Apple. Supporting only Fairplay and not licensing it does not stop Real Media from offering a subscription music service, it just makes it a lot harder since Real Media cannot use DRM to prevent people from downloading all their songs, canceling their subscription, then listening to them anyway.
Honestly, unless these people have TONS of bandwidth (or tons of Linux install CDs) there's no way they can take down these botnets.
I've sat in on talks from several different security researchers who infiltrated botnets and reverse engineered them. That doesn't take a lot of bandwidth. It takes a few honeypots, a decompiler, and and IRC client. They could also have issued a command to redirect the entire botnet to a new control channel under their control and from there disabled the botnet, even patching the vulnerability used to gain control in many cases. People don't do that, not because it isn't possible, or they need more bandwidth. They don't do it because of the legal liability. They have no authority to take control of other people's machines (even if someone else also has control). Worse in many cases, what if they try to patch it and the patch fails? Well, then the researcher is liable for any damage than ensues. No one wants to take that risk.
Stealing bots from other botnet herders is already common practice among crackers. It is perfectly possible for cops to steal them back, it just is a legal nightmare to do so, especially if you aren't even sure whose jurisdiction all those machines are in.
If you do that, the vast majority of people won't care and will just click OK no matter what. Just like when their firewall says, "this is a potentially unsafe Web site".
Or the developers at Microsoft could read one of dozens of user interface design texts that will tell them if they ever provide as uninformative of button as "OK" then they've already failed. Particularly if you make users click needlessly through hundreds of them until they have been operant conditioned to click it.
They click OK anyway because they just don't care.
They click "OK" because most of the time they are being given useless or cryptic information and are often asked to click "OK" when not even being presented with any other option. Sorry, but MS absolutely should be blamed for ignoring decades of UI research and insisting on perpetuating the monstrosity that is the "OK/Cancel" dialogue box.
This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around. The question is, how long did it take the WordPerfect Corporation* and/or Novell to add this to WordPerfect?
WordPerfect used marked up text that was easily readable, and provided the specification. MS Word used an intentionally obscured binary format that actually included random data from the hard disk (sometimes including "deleted" files that were recoverable using third party tools). Worse, MS Word also read and wrote Rich Text Files, which they made the standard for file transfers on the Windows OS. They intentionally changed both of these formats constantly to keep third parties from accurately reverse engineering them for compatibility.
Your assertion that this was a problem with WordPerfect is true, but it was an artificial problem Microsoft created using their desktop OS monopoly, which is one of the reasons why MS has been losing their absurdly drawn out case.
As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect.
They were only a year and a half behind Word for GUI (WYSIWYG) but they were another year behind in bringing it to Windows.
When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used
Actually, WordPerfect switched to a tool palette menu that was very highly reviewed and pretty much universally considered superior to Word's later toolbar format, but MS redefined the UI guidelines for Windows such that WordPerfect had to scrap their existing GUI and quickly implement a toolbar. That is, in fact, one of the antitrust complaints.
I think it is pretty easy to see that MS was unfairly creating artificial problems with WordPerfect that were not problems in Word, using their Windows monopoly. They used secret APIs, constantly changed their formats, and repeatedly made changes to Windows that disadvantaged WordPerfect. In short, they are guilty as hell, but such a ruling comes so late that the market is utterly destroyed and there is no real competition. The biggest competitors left for MS Office are WordPerfect (leftover stronghold niches and alternate platforms), OpenOffice (run as a communal copyleft, nonprofit project to exclude it from traditional market pressures), and iWork (only available on a niche platform that has an entire vertical chain of hardware: OS: end-user apps to bypass MS's desktop monopoly influence). It is pretty clear there is no capitalist free market at work for office suites and any monetary compensation may make Novell shareholders a little happier, but is far too late to help consumers. Hopefully the EU courts will prove to be more efficient, faster, and actually do something to make MS create the best product at the lowest price if they actually want to make sales.
iThink you mixed up iPod with iTunes a bit. iPod success had nothing to do with DRM - more like showing up at the time when p2p really exploded and supporting mp3...
The iPod as a huge success for the same reason the iPhone is a big success. The iPod was the first mp3 player that provided an easy and good experience to normal users. That meant more than just hardware. They had the iPod, which could be managed by iTunes. iTunes allowed normal people to rip their CDs (the main source of music on them still, not P2P). iTunes allowed normal people to load playlists onto their iPod. The iTunes store allowed people to buy music (rarely) and give music as gifts (with gift cards). All of them were vital to the iPod's success. I knew people with PhD's that loaded iTunes onto their computers just to rip their CD collections because it was too hard using the software that shipped with their computer and/or MP3 player. If you can't gt your CD collection onto the thing, why buy a portable player? Creative and the like pioneered portable MP3 players. Apple brought a good enough user experience so that the mass market bought it and liked it.
The iPhone is the same thing all over again, except bringing smart phones to the masses. This requires not only good hardware, but also software and services. Without AT&T offering a special plan with unlimited data, etc. and support for iPhone specific services, the overall experience is not good enough.
iTunes took a bit of a haggling and DRM to get off the ground. Still just a technical showcase and podcasts distribution network from last I noticed in apples' financial statements.
Without iTunes, the iPod would have flopped. That is why Apple runs the iTunes store at near break even prices and gives away iTunes free to everyone. They are both facilitators for sales of iPods. Heck, Apple would be perfectly happy if all the music was free, it is just more iPod sales.
If their software was so superior, why did WordPerfect die?
RTFA!!!
I mean are you trolling or what? The article lists about a dozen anticompetitive actions MS took, including intentionally breaking compatibility with their own formats and breaking APIs Wordperfect used while using secret APIs only MS knew about in Word for better performance than any third party application could attain.
They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice, or making it easier for us to transfer information. There was nothing stopping them keeping their product active.
Wordperfect is still an active product. The point of the lawsuit was MS using the fact that they were also developers of Windows to artificially create problems with WordPerfect so it was in consumers' best interests to use Word instead.
I used to use WordPerfect. It was great. Then Microsoft outmaneuvered them, and they lost. Boohoo, get over it.
And the fact that they way they did this was through criminal actions should be ignored? Sorry but it used to be that when you commit a crime for profit, you don't get to keep the profits.
Care to try and convince me that they wouldn't have done exactly the same thing to microsoft, given half a chance?
Yeah and if a cow had a chance it would eat you and your whole family. Whether Novell or Corel would have broken the law if they thought they could get away with it is immaterial. Microsoft did break the law and so the courts are acting against them.
People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day.
They still do. It is called "break the law to profit, then bribe politicians so that the fines and settlements are less than what they made by breaking the law in the first place." It works really well in our crooked system. Paying Novel fines is just part of MS's business plan, so I'm not too broken up about them having to actually return a small portion of what they made through their crimes.
Two reasons. First many very large customers want them to do so. Second, because it provides a level playing field with everyone competing based upon the merits of their offerings.
The problem is, matter of factly, that nothing competes with Office as it stands. Nothing. Not OpenOffice, not Apple's Keynote/Pages, or anything else.
Then what is the harm of implementing ODF natively in MS Office? If MS's offerings are better based upon real merits, then implementing ODF natively improves their offering and should get them more sales. Why would they fight so hard against it?
The truth is, MS word is a very poor choice for a lot of people. People who want to to home publishing of a newsletter on their Mac, are probably better off using Pages, especially given how much cheaper it is. Schools who have limited budgets are probably better off using OpenOffice because it is free and they can run it on Linux based labs as well as Windows and Macs and both in the school and at home, all with the same versions and all without any format incompatibilities. It just isn't practical for a school to provide students with a "standard" version of Word that will run on all the machines in the school and in the home (even old ones). For people who are itinerant minstrels traveling from town to town and writing in public libraries, it is a lot easier to use Google Documents via a Web browser than it is to have a copy of MS Office and try to get it installed by the administrators of the library.
The above are just a few examples. Microsoft has intentionally avoided ODF and are, in fact trying to kill it off as a standard because they want all those people and everyone else to either buy and use MS Office, or use a product that is always going to be second rate as it tries to reverse engineer whatever half-assed format MS is using. They don't want their to be fir competition or for it to be easy for users to buy a product better suited to their needs (which may be inferior in many ways for many uses, but not for that user).
Microsoft has to have its hand forced. Look at Internet Explorer. Firefox came out, was a BETTER browser, and now Microsoft is finally promising standards compliance in IE8.
Firefox has been a better browser for many years and MS has been promising "better" standards compliance forever. That doesn't mean they will actually do it. They haven;'t even made promises to do better for most Web standards, just "better" for a small subset. Both IE and MS Office are examples of the free, capitalism market being undermined and consumers suffering retarded innovation, high prices, and inferior products as a result.
All I am saying is, that if you can beat the MS Office suite of products, then you can win against Microsoft.
Okay, say you're an investor. You have a few hundred million in capital to invest. You can invest in piezoelectrics or office suites. The former maker s not monopolized so if you invest in it, the return is likely to be proportional. The latter market is monopolized and you'll be going up against a competitor who can introduce artificial problems with your product by breaking compatibility. Worse yet, they have a related monopoly and can use hidden APIs to get better performance on pretty much all computers, while they can introduce "bugs" with every service pack that will slow down or break your product. Sure you can invest in that, but it will take a lot more capital to get a lot smaller return, and ost companies that have tried have died (some who even had superior offerings at the time). Where do you put your investment capital?
The courts need to act against MS and provide investors and competitors with some faith that antitrust laws will be effectively enforced and competition will be fair. Right now, investors do not have that opinion because the courts have largely ignored MS's abuses and the settlemen
Lastly Blizzard tends to make the requirements EXTREMELY LOW...
Sure you used all capitals, but even that does not emphasize this point enough. Starcraft is hugely popular overseas because of this. In fact, I used to play it on a 66Mhz Mac, back in the day (with a monitor that kept dropping the R and B from RGB until you hit it enough). It played solidly, without a hitch except for garbling the audio for the cut scenes (which was actually kind of cool I thought, nothing like playing on a system that that changes to all green tints occasionally and spews slowed down gibberish between stages to get that sci-fi grunge sort of feel to come through).
Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone.
While the difference between content and applications (or even between types of content) bear directly on Job's statements, you don't even need to look that far. Jobs said that DRM was a flawed concept and would never work for the long term... but Apple implemented it anyway because the RIAA required it to do business in the music industry and without them the iPod would have never materialized, or at least never gained significant market. The same thing applies here. Apple cannot ever "win" the fight against iPhone modders, nor is that their goal. Their goal is to make it inconvenient enough so that the modding community never makes up significant share of iPhones and so they can meet their contracts with the big players in this industry, particularly AT&T who Apple has to keep happy and who probably has a signed contract (trade secret of course so it will never be public unless the courts make it so) that says Apple has to perform due diligence to lock down applications to prevent VoIP on the cell network as well as other apps that threaten AT&T's money making services.
If he were rational (which is not to say that irrational precludes being brilliant)...
I think Jobs has proved himself rational, nor do I think you're understanding his position. He's made Apple a lot of money while still espousing the opinion that DRM is a flawed concept. That is what he believes and even what he pressures others to accept in deals with Apple, but at the same time he is willing to do what it takes to get a start in a new market; be it music downloads, movies, TV, or smart phones. It is a very reasoned person who can state their opinions consistently, yet at the same time be wiling to bend to the big players in the market who hold the keys to successful entry.
When somebody solders a modchip onto a game console motherboard, he knows very well that he's on his own. But when a hacked up iPhone starts to feel normal to users, then Apple loses the ability to control the release cycle.
I doubt Apple cares that much about locking down iPhones beyond what it takes to keep AT&T happy. Very few people will modify their iPhones to run other software (compared to how many people buy them in total). Sure, Jobs sees an opportunity for more security and stability with whitelists, but they've implemented the same thing to a lesser extent on Macs as well nd you don't see it being used to try to seriously stop users who want to do something and are willing to hack.
They don't want their new products to compete with hacks for their existing ones, because they've discovered the secret of the software subscription model Microsoft toyed with a few years ago: you don't call it a subscription, you call it spiffy new hardware.
I don't really think this is Apple's plan. They've had lots of opportunity in both iPod and Mac markets to artificially break compatibility with older hardware. If a new version of OS X ran more slowly than an old version, pretty much no one would have batted an eye, since MS has them conditioned to think of this as normal. Instead, each revision was faster on old hardware than the previous revision (well maybe 10.4 was break-even in some cases). Apple has always sold their new hardware on new hardware features, not on mandatory upgrades enforced by software (and I have a dual 533 Mhz PPC tower in the corner still running as a media server to prove it). And before you bring up the iPod touch, read about Apple's media codec licenses and Sarbanes-Oxley as interpreted by quite a few (but not all) companies in technology.
the whole iphone dev system is interesting in that it is an attempt to finally invert the usual "blacklisted software" security system that has so often been the rule. rather than the busted concept of allowing all software to run, and then chasing down 'bad' ones with antivirus programs, rootkit detectors, spyware removers etc, they're moving to a whitelist. default deny, selective approve, with revocation.
I think this is a less than ideal approach as well. What would really be ideal is a greylist, combining both known malware signatures to be blacklisted, as well as known "good" software signatures to whitelist along with an ACL as to what behavioral limits the software should be doing properly. More importantly, items and ACLs for the greylist should be "subscribable" from multiple security vendors. Maybe I trust Apple's security recommendations, but maybe I trust Clam AV's more, and would not mind paying $5 a month for Symantec's virus signature's and ACLs. Ideally, users should have a sane default from the OS vendor but also allow administrators to rate vendors and combine lists with each given a certain weight. I hope Apple, Linux vendors, IBM, Sun and other players can create a open protocol and format for such a system, before Microsoft implements a mandatory version of it that is "closed."
I believe leopard has the (currently unused) capability to do this built in as well.
Actually, this functionality is used to some degree. It verifies that an application does not change after the first time you run it (causing problems with Skype and a few other apps). It s also used to lock down some default network services by default (I think all of the network services open on the firewall by default). I'm pretty that includes their Zeroconf implementation.
I can't say i agree with such "mandatory*" restrictions on a computing device I purchased, but as a matter of security philosophy it really is quite interesting.
For a general purpose computing device, I agree. For an appliance, I'm less particular. I would like to avoid confusion right now though, and make a differentiation between what you're calling "mandatory restrictions" and the common description of locking down applications to an ACL which is called "mandatory access controls" and in which the word "mandatory" refers to applying an ACL to every application, not forcing a particular ACL upon a given application.
*well, mandatory if you want to run snazzy new SDK apps. they really should set up an "unsupported, you may be SORRY!!" class of signature that would let you run, at your own risk, anything from that signature.
Better yet, they should have a default, fairly restrictive ACL for applications without signatures, so that even if you run an application from some source you don't really trust, you are not completely unprotected by default. I don't think one warning when loading an application from someone Apple doesn't approve of and another warning when it wants to do anything risky (like access the network or record key presses).
One final comment, I think a lot of people are attributing a lot to "Apple" which is in some ways very accurate, but in another a bit misleading. In order to get a major carrier to carry an iPhone and provide a reasonable plan to let it work well enough to appeal to a mass market (instead of the the then existing market for smart phones) Apple had to sign some contracts. A lot of people forget that Apple had to make a lot of promises to AT&T to get them on board and other providers refused to sell the phone or the phone with a decently easy plan. Some of those promises included exclusivity in the states and restrictions to prevent VoIP over the cell network or other functions that would allow arbitrary software to undercut AT&T's proprietary services. Without AT&T onboard the iPhone would have gone nowhere and it is easy to armchair quarterback things and ignore the tradeoffs Apple had to make to get into the market in the first place.
That's debateable. I'll elaborate. If a resource didn't make sense to present with Flash, it wouldn't make sense to present with Silverlight either. Someone developing a Microsoft solutions version of the site would almost certainly use AJAX in the exact same places.
This is not true. Go take a look at the online resources at the Library of Congress. Many of the resources presented are just fine presented using AJAX technologies. Others use Flash needlessly. Obviously it all depends upon which contractor they used at the time. In any case, the LoC is now replacing all resources with a "Silverlight Kiosk" as they are calling it, meaning all of the resources, even ones that have no need for video are being replaced.
In any case, it's not like the LoC was talking about ripping out their Flash and replacing it with an all-AJAX solution, so it's your choice of disingenuous or wrong to say that Silverlight beat out AJAX there.
No they weren't yet if they were doing an upgrade that would certainly be an option, as other national archives have done just that, for example look at Australia. In any case, as I already stated they are ripping out functioning AJAX and replacing it with Silverlight.
Silverlight runs in any browser on any OS. It could be fairly said that this is a great stride towards openness from Microsoft.
That has nothing to do with openness. Open is the degree which the protocols and code can be viewed and reproduced. Supporting clients on other browsers or OS's is not openess at all, it is just cross-platform support. Unlike openness it provides no assurance that platforms will be supported in future (usually just after MS becomes dominant in a given market).
Right, Adobe isn't Microsoft. We knew that.
There is a big difference that you attempt to trivialize by summing it up as names. Choosing a solution from a vendor who has no leverage to force you to do things in the future is very different from choosing a vendor who does have leverage to force you to do things. Choosing a vendor who has repeatedly been convicted of criminal offences for doing just that, versus a company that has no way to break antitrust laws even if they wanted to is a world of difference.
I don't have sources to cite, but my understanding from people who have worked with both is that this is one of the very few areas where Silverlight blows Flash clean out of the water.
Adobe Flash has long been certified to create, by default, section 508 compliant sites. While it may be possible to do the same with Silverlight, you have to avoid using many of the features at the very least since their zoom support in the last one I looked at had no way to hook into and JAWs or other program for the blind. The last federal acquisitions guidelines published did not list any version of Silverlight as an option, which theoretically means the Library of Congress project unless created very carefully may well violate section 508 acquisition rules.
Eh. I can't agree with "significant" there. We'll have to agree to disagree about that one.
In the last few months Adobe has published the specifications for a large portion of their Flash tool chain under the name "Adobe Air" including even a fully open source HTML rendering engine (WebKit) in use by many other projects. Furthermore, while Adobe supports their Flash servers on Windows and Linux (giving customers choice and allowing competitive bids from vendors) nothing is now stopping any other vendor from offering it on any platform. Silverlight means you buy Microsoft server at whatever they feel like charging since you have no option for any other server vendor. You don't see that as a significant step backwards? I don't see how anyone could claim otherwise, unless perhaps they were an astroturfer being paid to have a certain opinion.
The way I remember that story reading, they were paid to standardize on using Silverlight instead of Flash for their UI, which is also a proprietary standard. AJAX was never even in the picture.
You are incorrect. They currently use a combination of AJAX and Flash depending upon the resource. While Flash is proprietary, it has been making strides towards becoming more open, with most of the specification now public. Flash is not owned by a company with a monopoly to leverage and so the risk of monopolistic lock in is much less. Flash also supports interfaces for the disabled, which Silverlight does not yet. Finally, Silverlight only supports Windows as a server, while Flash supports Linux as well; so even ignoring the AJAX in use, Silverlight is a significant step towards both more proprietary and more potential for abusive lock-in.
I wouldn't care if there were a hundred open document formats, as long as anyone, using just the specs in a cold room could implement software that could open the file.
You make some good points and I agree with most of them. As for multiple standards, I agree in principal, but in this particular instance I think mitigating factors apply. Multiple standards are fine, but when a criminal monopolist completely ignores ongoing development of an open standard and intentionally eschews implementing that standard and waits until that real standard is approved and implemented by potential competitors before attempting to get approval for a different, new standard... well I think that constitutes abuse of their monopoly position to derail the existing standard. Multiple standards are fine, in general, but when dealing with a market where one company is a monopoly, waiting until competitors all have working versions of a different standard before introducing one of their own compromises the free market even if the standard for OOXML itself was legitimately open.
He make some pretty reasonable arguments, and calls the blatant bias against MS, when IBM and sun get a free pass even though their own version of the OSP has the same restrictions as MS.
I'd actually argue that it is reasonable to be biased against MS in this regard by anyone who has viewed their past conduct in this area. A whole lot of MS partners who implemented technologies with Microsoft have since been driven out of business by Microsoft. Further, Microsoft has a history of breaking both contract and criminal law and then tying up the courts with legal maneuvers until the issue is moot. Just look at the number of settlement MS has paid out, knowing that they have made more money than that by breaking a contract or law.
Some of the points made by Mr. Knowlton completely ignore the context of the situation. He claims that other companies have not provided any better promises with regard to ODF. This, for example, ignores that no one company is the sole originator or implementor of ODF and that none of the developers implementing it are monopolists who can leverage that monopoly to undermine the free market. If Sun deviated from open standards in a future version of ODF, nothing stops their customers from migrating to another solution from another vendor. If MS deviates from open standards in a future version of OOXML, they will become a de facto closed standard just as.doc is now since they do have undue influence on the office software and desktop OS markets. Anyone who forks OOXML in future (and by forks I mean uses a version that is not what MS is using, even if MS encumbers their version with patents or DRM or anything else) will be trying to compete fairly against a monopolist which is a losing proposition economically.
I'd say the majority of his arguments fall into the same category of fallacy as people here who argue that because Apple bundles Safari with OS X, MS should be able to bundle IE with Windows. It completely ignores that MS's OS constitutes a monopolized market, while Apple's OS X does not. Many people are ignorant on this topic and still others willfully ignore the difference in order to try to make a more persuasive (but flawed) assertion. Basically, the logical flaw being presented by Mr. knowlton is equivocation where someone might argue that everyone should be free to travel anywhere in the US they want, intentionally ignoring the fact that one person is a criminal on parole with a history of being a flight risk, whereas the other people to whom that person is being compared are not convicted criminals and have no reason to flee the courts.
even if OOXML is approved (and lets face it deep wallet large multinationals have a habit of winning these things) its name is MUD everywhere. I really cannot see anybody using it (has MS made it their standard yet?) and the "de facto" standard has a good chance of being ODF. Sooner or later MS will have to accept that.
I disagree. I think your perspective is skewed, being a Slashdot reader you have heard a lot about this issue. You also probably have some understanding of this issue and the reasons why a truly free and open standard is beneficial to users and non-monopolist developers.
The average person (politician or government bureaucrat or corporate purchasing agent) has no understanding of what open standards are or why they are beneficial. Simply naming something Open Office XML is enough to pass muster with most people who have a vague notion that "open standard" is somehow vaguely associated with "good." Making ODF the de facto standard in such an environment is by no means a done deal. For an example of how this sort of thing works, look at MS's influence in various government purchasing decisions for office software. Or, look at the Library of Congress, who MS just paid to standardize on using the proprietary standard "silverlight" instead of the open standard AJAX. They don't know or care about the difference, especially in the face of a fairly small donation from MS. They are now locked into an MS proprietary format and MS only servers for the future unless they want to spend a large sum trying to break free. And what will happen if 5 years down the road MS drops some browsers or OS's or combinations from their supported list (as they have done with IE and Active X for the Mac, or with their proprietary macros on the Mac version of MS Office)?
Just because most people on Slashdot know that OOXML is not a real open standard does not mean the average decision maker does, or if they do, if they care about what happens down the road compared to the public perception of what will happen down the road.
From the business pages of the Wall Street Journal, it appears that many countries in the EU are ditching Microsoft and going with Linux.
It is possible. Choosing to walk away from Windows or at least MS product lock-in formats is the closest thing the EU has done to an effective anti-trust remedy against MS.
So one wonders if this will all become moot at some point, as the invisible hand of the marketplace chooses a wiser solution.
The point of monopolies is that for any given user/consumer the monopolist can make the wisest decision be to choose them, regardless of the real merits of the products offered. A monopolist undermines the free, capitalist market by introducing artificial problems with competing products. Some are very simple such as IE. In a normal, free market IE would fail because it is slow, fails to properly render Web standards, fails to implement the last 6 years of standards at all, is a huge vector for malware, and has lagged behind competitors on features for huge amounts of time (tabs, spellcheck, adblocking, etc.). IE, however, has dominated the market because it is bundled with Windows, and not even easily removable so it is the one target Web developers can count on being on almost every computer. Further it intentionally breaks with standards so that developers in their own best interests must also break standards (thus making all other browser seem as if they are broken). The invisible hand of the market is unlikely to ever correct this problem. The only thing that has really made any difference is the threat of punishment by the EU council.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the "invisible hand" of the market will not stop antitrust abuse, which is why there are antitrust laws in pretty much every country in the world. Without such regulation, economic models show all markets slowly consolidating into small number of giant conglomerate companies, and the situation becomes akin to feudalism, rather than capitalism. Even socialism does not have quite so many drawbacks as the government at least theoretically works in the best interests of the people and can in some ways be held accountable to them, whereas markets dominated by monopolists have just as little incentive to give consumers what they want and work only in the interests of profit and the subset of the people who are majority shareholders
Monopolies in regulated capitalist markets (pretty much all of them in the world today) can be broken up by government action. Monopolies in unregulated capitalist markets (or where the government is easily bribed) end when wealth disparity and quality of life becomes so bad that the people violently revolt and forcibly redistribute wealth, usually accompanied by a lot of needless death, suffering, instability, and injustice.
You missed number 6.5 pay off politicians so the DOJ ignores you.
11. DOJ no longer thinks you are an abusive monopoly
The DOJ has done jack and shit since MS became a huge contributor to both the Democratic and Republican parties. This one should be about the EU commission, who they have not bribed yet.
...and I'm sure I'm going to have half of slashdot jumping down my throat, calling me a Microsoft Sympathiser for saying this, but......shit like third parties having their way with Windows is probably a very big reason why Vista isn't as great as it could be.
I understand your argument and it does make sense. I even agree that some of the new features in Vista are better than what is offered by the competition (I submitted feature requests to both Kubuntu and OS X and Windows asking for those types of audio controls years ago). I think where we disagree is that you seem to have some sort of an idea that antitrust regulation is supposed to be hurting MS and making their products worse or something.
The point of antitrust actions is to force a company to compete and give customers what they want for a fair price. In a competitive market, Microsoft gives OEMs (and through them end users) what they want or they lose money, so it is MS's best interest to give users the features they want. Introducing anti-features like Protected Media Pathway is something that would not happen in a competitive marketplace (or if it did the company would lose money because consumers could switch to alternatives).
The only problems with the EU's antitrust actions to date is that they have been too lenient and have not really made MS hurt in response to breaking the law and hurting users. The US is the one that should really have jumped on MS and solved this problem. The EU has been handling MS with kid gloves for diplomatic reasons. I have one other point to make. Antitrust resolution is about making Windows and alternatives better by forcing them to challenge one another for every dollar of consumers' money.
In my mind, the best way to deal with Microsoft at this point is to stop trying to micromanage every abuse individually (and there are dozens of obvious abuses that have not even been addressed yet). MS needs to be broken up and at least two of the new companies need to be given full access to the intellectual property and half the manpower behind Windows. New company A can start working on Windows A and new company B can start working on Windows B. Both must be forbidden from any collusion or even any nonpublic communications. Think about it. If company A knew consumers would be comparing their offering critically against Windows B, would they add more anti-features for the RIAA and MPAA that annoy customers or would they be financially motivated to get rid of anything that annoys users? Another advantage to this approach is that both companies are free to bundle or tie any products they want, since neither will have a monopoly and such bundling will no longer undermine the operation of the market. If one company pays millions to create some technology that is poorly designed (like IE) while the other company bundles Firefox, the first company will lose all that money and quickly look to either make IE better for users, or drop development and go with something cheaper and better. Finally, because having software work on both versions of Windows is important, developers will develop for whichever new company provides them with the best APIs and tools and developers will probably demand a way to write for both at once, which would have to be a published API, lending itself to cross-platform application development, which means programs that would run not only on both versions of Windows but also Linux, OS X , cell phones, and anything else for less cost... and that benefits everyone. In addition, investors will no longer look at investment in desktop operating systems or office suites as a doomed endeavor and will be able to invest in creating better alternatives (Like Linux distros) which will help to improve all OS's on the market.
...it's just that all this is overshadowed by the stuff it doesn't do well, which is arguably not entirely Microsoft's fault.
the problem with the "let's break up Microsoft into its various components" argument is that the Windows and Office divisions make so much money that they prop up the other divisions.
I don't see why that is a problem. Dozens of promising companies have been purchased by Microsoft and their innovative ideas then never saw the light of day. If MS is using money from their monopolies to prop up unprofitable enterprises in other markets, then it is a good thing for those businesses to be forced to profit or fail on their own as it will drive them to innovate.
Okay, I took the time to RTFA and it was pretty apparent either the author (someone's personal blog) is being intentionally inflammatory and misleading, or they have some seriously misguided ideas about several topics. Allow me to elaborate.
Apple's blocking of Skype and other voice applications raises the same Net neutrality issues as Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent.
Apple is not a network operator. They have not been granted the benefits of being a common carrier and they do not have a government enforced geographical monopoly as a result of being one of only two companies with access to government right of ways needed to connect lines to houses. You'd think the name "network neutrality" would be a tip off as to the requirement that a company needs to be a network provider for network neutrality laws to apply.
I'm not saying there is no room for network neutrality laws to apply, it is just that the scope of them might be to nullify the portion of Apple's contract with AT&T which requires Apple to restrict VoIP applications from other vendors. Even then, that does not mean Apple would have to do so, only that they cannot be required to do so as part of a contract with a network operator.
And while we're on the subject, Comcast's intentional degrading of Bittorrent traffic, while a concern for the FCC, is not a network neutrality issue. Network neutrality laws as conceived and written, to date, are about forcing network operators not to discriminate based on the source or destination of traffic. It does not ban quality of service traffic management. It just ensures that a network provider can't degrade one type of traffic from or to a given person or organization, and not that same type of traffic to or from someone else. i.e., they can slow down all bittorrent or VoIP traffic if they want, they just can't slow down bittorrent traffic from other companies but not from their own servers. They can slow down voice traffic, just not voice traffic using Skype and not a competing VoIP application/service.
Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer back in the late '90s led to major antitrust lawsuits brought by Department of Justice and 20 different states. While consumers were free to install Netscape and other competing browsers, it was the preferential treatment of its own browser that lead to legal problems for Microsoft. Apple is now engaged in an even more egregious practice. It bundles the Safari browser with its iPhone, it makes it impossible for consumers to remove the browser, and the company now forbids competing companies from making their browsers available to the millions of iPhone users.
Sigh. You'd think by now people would know enough to look up "antitrust" on wikipedia so they know what the hell they're talking about before spouting this sort of uneducated crap. Microsoft did not get prosecuted for antitrust abuse because they "bundled a browser with an OS." They got in trouble because they bundled a product in a market they had monopolized with a product from another, already existing market. The fact that one of those products was an OS and one was a browser is happenstance.
Apple does need to be concerned with antitrust issues, but this is not even close to one of them. Apple may or may not have sufficient influence in the "portable, digital music player market" to face antitrust sanctions. Apple does not have to worry about bundling anything with their browser or their phone or anything other product unless it is with their portable digital music player. Now the iPhone does fit into this category because it could be seen as Apple leveraging their success with iPods to take gain unfair advantage in the cell phone market. Further, they could be guilty of antitrust abuse for tying their iTunes music service to their iPods and bundling iTunes with their iPods. What they won't be facing antitrust problems for is bundling their browser with their OS or with iPhones since none of the products involved comes even c
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"They" in this case refers to researchers at two different, private, network security firms, one of which was my employer at the time. They provide security devices and services to pretty much every tier 1 ISP in the world. They absolutely do create lists of infected host IPs, by traffic consumption, worm, etc. They can export the data as XML (among other formats) to automatically create mailing lists to notify users that they are infected. I don't know of any major ISPs, however, who actually took that step because they had little or no financial interest in so doing.
The security researchers had no authority to install software on any of the bots and doing so (while it might have helped a little bit) would have opened them and the company up to legal liabilities. For the most part, the researchers did not even report the bots to the authorities, except in one case where it was being used to try to DDoS a block of IP space in Sweden, in the wake of the international incident involving published images of allah. In that particular incident it was "botnet for rent" setup where malicious users were renting time controlling a botnet and the user took multiple tries to get the right commands and ended up attacking a random chunk of cable modems on a rather ineffective port. After they finished the research project, they did report that one to the Swedish authorities. The bots themselves were scattered across Europe and the US for the most part. I don't know what sort of legal background you have, but the researchers and our company's legal council claimed we had no authority to switch the control channel and takover the bots, or to try to patch security holes on those machines.
Except there is nothing anticompetitive about Apple's bundling. Microsoft got in trouble because they threatened to terminate Compaq's Windows licenses for bundling Netscape.
Microsoft got in trouble for numerous antitrust issues. The closest one, however, is their bundling of Windows Media Player with Windows. There certainly is something anticompetitive about antitrust bundling. Do you really think iTunes would be as popular as it is if Apple had not bundled it with every iPod? Apple is clearly gaining benefit from this action at the expense of other companies in the market, benefit above and beyond what the merits of iTunes itself would merit.
See, and this is why it's important to use Microsoft as an example correctly, Microsoft got in trouble for using one monopoly, Windows, to leverage another, Internet Explorer. .
Microsoft has been in trouble for using their OS monopoly to influence numerous other markets and discussing them all would be a very long process. Since it is the EU investigating Apple right now, lets look at that case. Microsoft was called out for leveraging a monopoly in "desktop operating systems" to gain and advantage in the markets for "server operating systems" and "software media players." MS was ordered to pay fines. In the first market they were ordered to publish all documentation needed for other server OS vendors to communicate with their desktop OS, including APIs, protocols, and file formats used by Windows Server. In the latter market MS was ordered to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player.
So they bundle iTunes with iPods, how is that any different than Nintendo bundling Wii Play with their Wii?
Haven't we been over this enough times with regard to Windows? Nintendo does not have a monopoly on game consoles. They can bundle anything they want with the Wii. Apple, however, may have a monopoly on portable, digital music players and if the courts find that they do, then bundling items from another, preexisting market is illegal.
See, the point is that when Apple started bundling iTunes with the iPod, seven years ago, they weren't a monopoly.
That doesn't matter. The market existed. Once Apple is found to have a monopoly, they must cease bundling.
They "grew" their monopoly honestly, and in the same vein, they do the same thing everyone else is doing; the Zune comes free with their Zune Jukebox, Sonys come with SonicStage, Creative Zens come with MediaConnect (or whatever they are called), etc.
It doesn't matter how Apple obtained their monopoly. Obtaining a monopoly is not illegal. Leveraging a monopoly into another market is illegal. Apple bundles iTunes with Mac OS X. Microsoft bundles WMP with Windows XP. Why is the former action legal while the latter is not? Apple doesn't have a monopoly in either the software music player or desktop OS markets. MS does have a monopoly in the desktop OS market.
The big difference is that Apple ALSO provides iTunes free to both Windows and Macs, regardless of whether they own an iPod or iPhone.
Again, this doesn't matter. MS provides Windows Media Player free for the Mac, but they still were convicted. Microsoft provided Internet Explorer free for the Mac when MS was convicted of bundling IE with Windows, yet they were still convicted.
So to reiterate; Apple hasn't done anything wrong other than be the most popular MP3 player, music store, and jukebox.
The point is not that they are the most popular. If Apple is found to have monopoly influence in any of those markets, then they are responsible for making sure they are not leveraging it into the other markets. It is a matter of what is legal, not "right". It is also a matter of what actions undermine a free, capitalist market.
As Amazon has proven, DRM free MP3 sales are quite possible, so anyone
Actually, it is using a monopoly in on market to gain in another, pre-existing market (not necessarily suppress others). Still, if Apple is ruled to have a monopoly, then yeah the tying is pretty clear cut.
Whether they have a monopoly or not is a different issue. I don't have the relevant figures, and I don't know where courts draw the line. I'd say if iTunes is >75% of the download mp3 market, and the nearest competitor has 10% or less, that's a monopoly.The "rule of thumb" in many jurisdictions is to look at the market whenever one player gains more than 70%. Apple has about 80% of the US market for flash and hard drive based portable players if you exclude video players and portable game players and cell phones that also play music. If you include all of the above, Apple has about 14% of the market. So a lot of this depends upon how the courts define the market and if they consider buying a cell phone or a Playstation portable a valid alternative for average consumers.The EU seems to be the first jurisdiction to announce investigating, so we'll see what they come up with.
Actually, Apple may have monopoly influence in the portable, digital music player market (MP3 players), but if they do, then several of their actions are pretty clearly anticompetitive tying. First, they bundle iTunes with every iPod sold. That is classic bundling. The iTunes store sells music that makes use of Fairplay DRM, but competitors cannot either license that DRM or get their own DRM supported, that is clearly tying.
Anticompetitive means it hurts Apple but it hurts their competitors more.Anticompetitive actions aren't about hurting and given participant in a market. They are about undermining the market. The test for anticompetitive actions is not, "does it hurt the monopolist?" The test is, "are they taking an action to gain share in another market, that competitors in that market cannot also take, because they don't have a monopoly to leverage."
For example: Apple has a share of the music jukebox software market. Apple has gained market share by shipping a copy with each iPod they sell. If Apple is ruled to have an monopoly, can say, Real Media get their software shipped with every iPod? No they can't, hence Apple is leveraging their share of portable music players to gain in the music jukebox software market.
Now before people reply to this trying to defend Apple, or because they don't want to believe this is what the law states, there are several factors that are of concern. First, Microsoft has already been convicted of leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to gain share in the music jukebox software market, but the remedy was completely ineffective and they have not stopped the offending action (bundling). Calling Apple onto the carpet for doing the same thing to leverage into the same market is a bit ridiculous. Second, because Apple's monopoly status is in question, the courts generally would order them to stop the action, and only add punitive damages if they do not stop. Apple could stop shipping iTunes with every iPod or they could include other vendor's software, or they could ship an installer that lets the user choose from among several options. Third, Apple has taken numerous steps to remove any tying between the iPod and other markets. For example, they have been trying to drop DRM from their music offerings, removing the tying between the iPod and the iTunes store.
So, again, how is offering a subscription service for iPods and iPhones anticompetitive?If Apple is ruled to have a monopoly; offering a subscription service that works with iPods would be anti-competitive if they take advantage of their control of the iPod to gain in the music sales market. This includes using DRM they don't license to other subscription services and refusing to support other DRM on iPods. It might also include bundling a copy of iTunes with every iPod, seeing as iTunes has a connection to Apple's service offering built in.
It doesn't stop Amazon from offering DRM free MP3s, it doesn't stop Microsoft from releasing their own subscriptions, it doesn't stop Sony from partnering with Rhapsody for a similar service.No it doesn't stop others, but that is not a requirement. MS's bundling of Windows Media Player did not stop RealPlayer from installing, but it did leverage their monopoly on Desktop OS's to gain an unfair advantage, since Real Media could not install their player on all Windows machines. The same applies with Apple. Supporting only Fairplay and not licensing it does not stop Real Media from offering a subscription music service, it just makes it a lot harder since Real Media cannot use DRM to prevent people from downloading all their songs, canceling their subscription, then listening to them anyway.
I've sat in on talks from several different security researchers who infiltrated botnets and reverse engineered them. That doesn't take a lot of bandwidth. It takes a few honeypots, a decompiler, and and IRC client. They could also have issued a command to redirect the entire botnet to a new control channel under their control and from there disabled the botnet, even patching the vulnerability used to gain control in many cases. People don't do that, not because it isn't possible, or they need more bandwidth. They don't do it because of the legal liability. They have no authority to take control of other people's machines (even if someone else also has control). Worse in many cases, what if they try to patch it and the patch fails? Well, then the researcher is liable for any damage than ensues. No one wants to take that risk.
Stealing bots from other botnet herders is already common practice among crackers. It is perfectly possible for cops to steal them back, it just is a legal nightmare to do so, especially if you aren't even sure whose jurisdiction all those machines are in.
Or the developers at Microsoft could read one of dozens of user interface design texts that will tell them if they ever provide as uninformative of button as "OK" then they've already failed. Particularly if you make users click needlessly through hundreds of them until they have been operant conditioned to click it.
They click OK anyway because they just don't care.They click "OK" because most of the time they are being given useless or cryptic information and are often asked to click "OK" when not even being presented with any other option. Sorry, but MS absolutely should be blamed for ignoring decades of UI research and insisting on perpetuating the monstrosity that is the "OK/Cancel" dialogue box.
WordPerfect used marked up text that was easily readable, and provided the specification. MS Word used an intentionally obscured binary format that actually included random data from the hard disk (sometimes including "deleted" files that were recoverable using third party tools). Worse, MS Word also read and wrote Rich Text Files, which they made the standard for file transfers on the Windows OS. They intentionally changed both of these formats constantly to keep third parties from accurately reverse engineering them for compatibility.
Your assertion that this was a problem with WordPerfect is true, but it was an artificial problem Microsoft created using their desktop OS monopoly, which is one of the reasons why MS has been losing their absurdly drawn out case.
As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect.They were only a year and a half behind Word for GUI (WYSIWYG) but they were another year behind in bringing it to Windows.
When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself usedActually, WordPerfect switched to a tool palette menu that was very highly reviewed and pretty much universally considered superior to Word's later toolbar format, but MS redefined the UI guidelines for Windows such that WordPerfect had to scrap their existing GUI and quickly implement a toolbar. That is, in fact, one of the antitrust complaints.
I think it is pretty easy to see that MS was unfairly creating artificial problems with WordPerfect that were not problems in Word, using their Windows monopoly. They used secret APIs, constantly changed their formats, and repeatedly made changes to Windows that disadvantaged WordPerfect. In short, they are guilty as hell, but such a ruling comes so late that the market is utterly destroyed and there is no real competition. The biggest competitors left for MS Office are WordPerfect (leftover stronghold niches and alternate platforms), OpenOffice (run as a communal copyleft, nonprofit project to exclude it from traditional market pressures), and iWork (only available on a niche platform that has an entire vertical chain of hardware: OS: end-user apps to bypass MS's desktop monopoly influence). It is pretty clear there is no capitalist free market at work for office suites and any monetary compensation may make Novell shareholders a little happier, but is far too late to help consumers. Hopefully the EU courts will prove to be more efficient, faster, and actually do something to make MS create the best product at the lowest price if they actually want to make sales.
Actually, the beta version of WordPerfect does support ODF. You can sign up for the beta test here.
The iPod as a huge success for the same reason the iPhone is a big success. The iPod was the first mp3 player that provided an easy and good experience to normal users. That meant more than just hardware. They had the iPod, which could be managed by iTunes. iTunes allowed normal people to rip their CDs (the main source of music on them still, not P2P). iTunes allowed normal people to load playlists onto their iPod. The iTunes store allowed people to buy music (rarely) and give music as gifts (with gift cards). All of them were vital to the iPod's success. I knew people with PhD's that loaded iTunes onto their computers just to rip their CD collections because it was too hard using the software that shipped with their computer and/or MP3 player. If you can't gt your CD collection onto the thing, why buy a portable player? Creative and the like pioneered portable MP3 players. Apple brought a good enough user experience so that the mass market bought it and liked it.
The iPhone is the same thing all over again, except bringing smart phones to the masses. This requires not only good hardware, but also software and services. Without AT&T offering a special plan with unlimited data, etc. and support for iPhone specific services, the overall experience is not good enough.
iTunes took a bit of a haggling and DRM to get off the ground. Still just a technical showcase and podcasts distribution network from last I noticed in apples' financial statements.Without iTunes, the iPod would have flopped. That is why Apple runs the iTunes store at near break even prices and gives away iTunes free to everyone. They are both facilitators for sales of iPods. Heck, Apple would be perfectly happy if all the music was free, it is just more iPod sales.
RTFA!!!
I mean are you trolling or what? The article lists about a dozen anticompetitive actions MS took, including intentionally breaking compatibility with their own formats and breaking APIs Wordperfect used while using secret APIs only MS knew about in Word for better performance than any third party application could attain.
They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice, or making it easier for us to transfer information. There was nothing stopping them keeping their product active.Wordperfect is still an active product. The point of the lawsuit was MS using the fact that they were also developers of Windows to artificially create problems with WordPerfect so it was in consumers' best interests to use Word instead.
I used to use WordPerfect. It was great. Then Microsoft outmaneuvered them, and they lost. Boohoo, get over it.And the fact that they way they did this was through criminal actions should be ignored? Sorry but it used to be that when you commit a crime for profit, you don't get to keep the profits.
Care to try and convince me that they wouldn't have done exactly the same thing to microsoft, given half a chance?Yeah and if a cow had a chance it would eat you and your whole family. Whether Novell or Corel would have broken the law if they thought they could get away with it is immaterial. Microsoft did break the law and so the courts are acting against them.
People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day.They still do. It is called "break the law to profit, then bribe politicians so that the fines and settlements are less than what they made by breaking the law in the first place." It works really well in our crooked system. Paying Novel fines is just part of MS's business plan, so I'm not too broken up about them having to actually return a small portion of what they made through their crimes.
But why does MS have to adopt to the standard?
Two reasons. First many very large customers want them to do so. Second, because it provides a level playing field with everyone competing based upon the merits of their offerings.
The problem is, matter of factly, that nothing competes with Office as it stands. Nothing. Not OpenOffice, not Apple's Keynote/Pages, or anything else.
Then what is the harm of implementing ODF natively in MS Office? If MS's offerings are better based upon real merits, then implementing ODF natively improves their offering and should get them more sales. Why would they fight so hard against it?
The truth is, MS word is a very poor choice for a lot of people. People who want to to home publishing of a newsletter on their Mac, are probably better off using Pages, especially given how much cheaper it is. Schools who have limited budgets are probably better off using OpenOffice because it is free and they can run it on Linux based labs as well as Windows and Macs and both in the school and at home, all with the same versions and all without any format incompatibilities. It just isn't practical for a school to provide students with a "standard" version of Word that will run on all the machines in the school and in the home (even old ones). For people who are itinerant minstrels traveling from town to town and writing in public libraries, it is a lot easier to use Google Documents via a Web browser than it is to have a copy of MS Office and try to get it installed by the administrators of the library.
The above are just a few examples. Microsoft has intentionally avoided ODF and are, in fact trying to kill it off as a standard because they want all those people and everyone else to either buy and use MS Office, or use a product that is always going to be second rate as it tries to reverse engineer whatever half-assed format MS is using. They don't want their to be fir competition or for it to be easy for users to buy a product better suited to their needs (which may be inferior in many ways for many uses, but not for that user).
Microsoft has to have its hand forced. Look at Internet Explorer. Firefox came out, was a BETTER browser, and now Microsoft is finally promising standards compliance in IE8.
Firefox has been a better browser for many years and MS has been promising "better" standards compliance forever. That doesn't mean they will actually do it. They haven;'t even made promises to do better for most Web standards, just "better" for a small subset. Both IE and MS Office are examples of the free, capitalism market being undermined and consumers suffering retarded innovation, high prices, and inferior products as a result.
All I am saying is, that if you can beat the MS Office suite of products, then you can win against Microsoft.
Okay, say you're an investor. You have a few hundred million in capital to invest. You can invest in piezoelectrics or office suites. The former maker s not monopolized so if you invest in it, the return is likely to be proportional. The latter market is monopolized and you'll be going up against a competitor who can introduce artificial problems with your product by breaking compatibility. Worse yet, they have a related monopoly and can use hidden APIs to get better performance on pretty much all computers, while they can introduce "bugs" with every service pack that will slow down or break your product. Sure you can invest in that, but it will take a lot more capital to get a lot smaller return, and ost companies that have tried have died (some who even had superior offerings at the time). Where do you put your investment capital?
The courts need to act against MS and provide investors and competitors with some faith that antitrust laws will be effectively enforced and competition will be fair. Right now, investors do not have that opinion because the courts have largely ignored MS's abuses and the settlemen
Sure you used all capitals, but even that does not emphasize this point enough. Starcraft is hugely popular overseas because of this. In fact, I used to play it on a 66Mhz Mac, back in the day (with a monitor that kept dropping the R and B from RGB until you hit it enough). It played solidly, without a hitch except for garbling the audio for the cut scenes (which was actually kind of cool I thought, nothing like playing on a system that that changes to all green tints occasionally and spews slowed down gibberish between stages to get that sci-fi grunge sort of feel to come through).
While the difference between content and applications (or even between types of content) bear directly on Job's statements, you don't even need to look that far. Jobs said that DRM was a flawed concept and would never work for the long term... but Apple implemented it anyway because the RIAA required it to do business in the music industry and without them the iPod would have never materialized, or at least never gained significant market. The same thing applies here. Apple cannot ever "win" the fight against iPhone modders, nor is that their goal. Their goal is to make it inconvenient enough so that the modding community never makes up significant share of iPhones and so they can meet their contracts with the big players in this industry, particularly AT&T who Apple has to keep happy and who probably has a signed contract (trade secret of course so it will never be public unless the courts make it so) that says Apple has to perform due diligence to lock down applications to prevent VoIP on the cell network as well as other apps that threaten AT&T's money making services.
If he were rational (which is not to say that irrational precludes being brilliant)...I think Jobs has proved himself rational, nor do I think you're understanding his position. He's made Apple a lot of money while still espousing the opinion that DRM is a flawed concept. That is what he believes and even what he pressures others to accept in deals with Apple, but at the same time he is willing to do what it takes to get a start in a new market; be it music downloads, movies, TV, or smart phones. It is a very reasoned person who can state their opinions consistently, yet at the same time be wiling to bend to the big players in the market who hold the keys to successful entry.
When somebody solders a modchip onto a game console motherboard, he knows very well that he's on his own. But when a hacked up iPhone starts to feel normal to users, then Apple loses the ability to control the release cycle.I doubt Apple cares that much about locking down iPhones beyond what it takes to keep AT&T happy. Very few people will modify their iPhones to run other software (compared to how many people buy them in total). Sure, Jobs sees an opportunity for more security and stability with whitelists, but they've implemented the same thing to a lesser extent on Macs as well nd you don't see it being used to try to seriously stop users who want to do something and are willing to hack.
They don't want their new products to compete with hacks for their existing ones, because they've discovered the secret of the software subscription model Microsoft toyed with a few years ago: you don't call it a subscription, you call it spiffy new hardware.I don't really think this is Apple's plan. They've had lots of opportunity in both iPod and Mac markets to artificially break compatibility with older hardware. If a new version of OS X ran more slowly than an old version, pretty much no one would have batted an eye, since MS has them conditioned to think of this as normal. Instead, each revision was faster on old hardware than the previous revision (well maybe 10.4 was break-even in some cases). Apple has always sold their new hardware on new hardware features, not on mandatory upgrades enforced by software (and I have a dual 533 Mhz PPC tower in the corner still running as a media server to prove it). And before you bring up the iPod touch, read about Apple's media codec licenses and Sarbanes-Oxley as interpreted by quite a few (but not all) companies in technology.
I think this is a less than ideal approach as well. What would really be ideal is a greylist, combining both known malware signatures to be blacklisted, as well as known "good" software signatures to whitelist along with an ACL as to what behavioral limits the software should be doing properly. More importantly, items and ACLs for the greylist should be "subscribable" from multiple security vendors. Maybe I trust Apple's security recommendations, but maybe I trust Clam AV's more, and would not mind paying $5 a month for Symantec's virus signature's and ACLs. Ideally, users should have a sane default from the OS vendor but also allow administrators to rate vendors and combine lists with each given a certain weight. I hope Apple, Linux vendors, IBM, Sun and other players can create a open protocol and format for such a system, before Microsoft implements a mandatory version of it that is "closed."
I believe leopard has the (currently unused) capability to do this built in as well.Actually, this functionality is used to some degree. It verifies that an application does not change after the first time you run it (causing problems with Skype and a few other apps). It s also used to lock down some default network services by default (I think all of the network services open on the firewall by default). I'm pretty that includes their Zeroconf implementation.
I can't say i agree with such "mandatory*" restrictions on a computing device I purchased, but as a matter of security philosophy it really is quite interesting.For a general purpose computing device, I agree. For an appliance, I'm less particular. I would like to avoid confusion right now though, and make a differentiation between what you're calling "mandatory restrictions" and the common description of locking down applications to an ACL which is called "mandatory access controls" and in which the word "mandatory" refers to applying an ACL to every application, not forcing a particular ACL upon a given application.
*well, mandatory if you want to run snazzy new SDK apps. they really should set up an "unsupported, you may be SORRY!!" class of signature that would let you run, at your own risk, anything from that signature.Better yet, they should have a default, fairly restrictive ACL for applications without signatures, so that even if you run an application from some source you don't really trust, you are not completely unprotected by default. I don't think one warning when loading an application from someone Apple doesn't approve of and another warning when it wants to do anything risky (like access the network or record key presses).
One final comment, I think a lot of people are attributing a lot to "Apple" which is in some ways very accurate, but in another a bit misleading. In order to get a major carrier to carry an iPhone and provide a reasonable plan to let it work well enough to appeal to a mass market (instead of the the then existing market for smart phones) Apple had to sign some contracts. A lot of people forget that Apple had to make a lot of promises to AT&T to get them on board and other providers refused to sell the phone or the phone with a decently easy plan. Some of those promises included exclusivity in the states and restrictions to prevent VoIP over the cell network or other functions that would allow arbitrary software to undercut AT&T's proprietary services. Without AT&T onboard the iPhone would have gone nowhere and it is easy to armchair quarterback things and ignore the tradeoffs Apple had to make to get into the market in the first place.
This is not true. Go take a look at the online resources at the Library of Congress. Many of the resources presented are just fine presented using AJAX technologies. Others use Flash needlessly. Obviously it all depends upon which contractor they used at the time. In any case, the LoC is now replacing all resources with a "Silverlight Kiosk" as they are calling it, meaning all of the resources, even ones that have no need for video are being replaced.
In any case, it's not like the LoC was talking about ripping out their Flash and replacing it with an all-AJAX solution, so it's your choice of disingenuous or wrong to say that Silverlight beat out AJAX there.No they weren't yet if they were doing an upgrade that would certainly be an option, as other national archives have done just that, for example look at Australia. In any case, as I already stated they are ripping out functioning AJAX and replacing it with Silverlight.
Silverlight runs in any browser on any OS. It could be fairly said that this is a great stride towards openness from Microsoft.That has nothing to do with openness. Open is the degree which the protocols and code can be viewed and reproduced. Supporting clients on other browsers or OS's is not openess at all, it is just cross-platform support. Unlike openness it provides no assurance that platforms will be supported in future (usually just after MS becomes dominant in a given market).
Right, Adobe isn't Microsoft. We knew that.There is a big difference that you attempt to trivialize by summing it up as names. Choosing a solution from a vendor who has no leverage to force you to do things in the future is very different from choosing a vendor who does have leverage to force you to do things. Choosing a vendor who has repeatedly been convicted of criminal offences for doing just that, versus a company that has no way to break antitrust laws even if they wanted to is a world of difference.
I don't have sources to cite, but my understanding from people who have worked with both is that this is one of the very few areas where Silverlight blows Flash clean out of the water.Adobe Flash has long been certified to create, by default, section 508 compliant sites. While it may be possible to do the same with Silverlight, you have to avoid using many of the features at the very least since their zoom support in the last one I looked at had no way to hook into and JAWs or other program for the blind. The last federal acquisitions guidelines published did not list any version of Silverlight as an option, which theoretically means the Library of Congress project unless created very carefully may well violate section 508 acquisition rules.
Eh. I can't agree with "significant" there. We'll have to agree to disagree about that one.In the last few months Adobe has published the specifications for a large portion of their Flash tool chain under the name "Adobe Air" including even a fully open source HTML rendering engine (WebKit) in use by many other projects. Furthermore, while Adobe supports their Flash servers on Windows and Linux (giving customers choice and allowing competitive bids from vendors) nothing is now stopping any other vendor from offering it on any platform. Silverlight means you buy Microsoft server at whatever they feel like charging since you have no option for any other server vendor. You don't see that as a significant step backwards? I don't see how anyone could claim otherwise, unless perhaps they were an astroturfer being paid to have a certain opinion.
You are incorrect. They currently use a combination of AJAX and Flash depending upon the resource. While Flash is proprietary, it has been making strides towards becoming more open, with most of the specification now public. Flash is not owned by a company with a monopoly to leverage and so the risk of monopolistic lock in is much less. Flash also supports interfaces for the disabled, which Silverlight does not yet. Finally, Silverlight only supports Windows as a server, while Flash supports Linux as well; so even ignoring the AJAX in use, Silverlight is a significant step towards both more proprietary and more potential for abusive lock-in.
You make some good points and I agree with most of them. As for multiple standards, I agree in principal, but in this particular instance I think mitigating factors apply. Multiple standards are fine, but when a criminal monopolist completely ignores ongoing development of an open standard and intentionally eschews implementing that standard and waits until that real standard is approved and implemented by potential competitors before attempting to get approval for a different, new standard... well I think that constitutes abuse of their monopoly position to derail the existing standard. Multiple standards are fine, in general, but when dealing with a market where one company is a monopoly, waiting until competitors all have working versions of a different standard before introducing one of their own compromises the free market even if the standard for OOXML itself was legitimately open.
I'd actually argue that it is reasonable to be biased against MS in this regard by anyone who has viewed their past conduct in this area. A whole lot of MS partners who implemented technologies with Microsoft have since been driven out of business by Microsoft. Further, Microsoft has a history of breaking both contract and criminal law and then tying up the courts with legal maneuvers until the issue is moot. Just look at the number of settlement MS has paid out, knowing that they have made more money than that by breaking a contract or law.
Some of the points made by Mr. Knowlton completely ignore the context of the situation. He claims that other companies have not provided any better promises with regard to ODF. This, for example, ignores that no one company is the sole originator or implementor of ODF and that none of the developers implementing it are monopolists who can leverage that monopoly to undermine the free market. If Sun deviated from open standards in a future version of ODF, nothing stops their customers from migrating to another solution from another vendor. If MS deviates from open standards in a future version of OOXML, they will become a de facto closed standard just as .doc is now since they do have undue influence on the office software and desktop OS markets. Anyone who forks OOXML in future (and by forks I mean uses a version that is not what MS is using, even if MS encumbers their version with patents or DRM or anything else) will be trying to compete fairly against a monopolist which is a losing proposition economically.
I'd say the majority of his arguments fall into the same category of fallacy as people here who argue that because Apple bundles Safari with OS X, MS should be able to bundle IE with Windows. It completely ignores that MS's OS constitutes a monopolized market, while Apple's OS X does not. Many people are ignorant on this topic and still others willfully ignore the difference in order to try to make a more persuasive (but flawed) assertion. Basically, the logical flaw being presented by Mr. knowlton is equivocation where someone might argue that everyone should be free to travel anywhere in the US they want, intentionally ignoring the fact that one person is a criminal on parole with a history of being a flight risk, whereas the other people to whom that person is being compared are not convicted criminals and have no reason to flee the courts.
I disagree. I think your perspective is skewed, being a Slashdot reader you have heard a lot about this issue. You also probably have some understanding of this issue and the reasons why a truly free and open standard is beneficial to users and non-monopolist developers.
The average person (politician or government bureaucrat or corporate purchasing agent) has no understanding of what open standards are or why they are beneficial. Simply naming something Open Office XML is enough to pass muster with most people who have a vague notion that "open standard" is somehow vaguely associated with "good." Making ODF the de facto standard in such an environment is by no means a done deal. For an example of how this sort of thing works, look at MS's influence in various government purchasing decisions for office software. Or, look at the Library of Congress, who MS just paid to standardize on using the proprietary standard "silverlight" instead of the open standard AJAX. They don't know or care about the difference, especially in the face of a fairly small donation from MS. They are now locked into an MS proprietary format and MS only servers for the future unless they want to spend a large sum trying to break free. And what will happen if 5 years down the road MS drops some browsers or OS's or combinations from their supported list (as they have done with IE and Active X for the Mac, or with their proprietary macros on the Mac version of MS Office)?
Just because most people on Slashdot know that OOXML is not a real open standard does not mean the average decision maker does, or if they do, if they care about what happens down the road compared to the public perception of what will happen down the road.
It is possible. Choosing to walk away from Windows or at least MS product lock-in formats is the closest thing the EU has done to an effective anti-trust remedy against MS.
So one wonders if this will all become moot at some point, as the invisible hand of the marketplace chooses a wiser solution.The point of monopolies is that for any given user/consumer the monopolist can make the wisest decision be to choose them, regardless of the real merits of the products offered. A monopolist undermines the free, capitalist market by introducing artificial problems with competing products. Some are very simple such as IE. In a normal, free market IE would fail because it is slow, fails to properly render Web standards, fails to implement the last 6 years of standards at all, is a huge vector for malware, and has lagged behind competitors on features for huge amounts of time (tabs, spellcheck, adblocking, etc.). IE, however, has dominated the market because it is bundled with Windows, and not even easily removable so it is the one target Web developers can count on being on almost every computer. Further it intentionally breaks with standards so that developers in their own best interests must also break standards (thus making all other browser seem as if they are broken). The invisible hand of the market is unlikely to ever correct this problem. The only thing that has really made any difference is the threat of punishment by the EU council.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the "invisible hand" of the market will not stop antitrust abuse, which is why there are antitrust laws in pretty much every country in the world. Without such regulation, economic models show all markets slowly consolidating into small number of giant conglomerate companies, and the situation becomes akin to feudalism, rather than capitalism. Even socialism does not have quite so many drawbacks as the government at least theoretically works in the best interests of the people and can in some ways be held accountable to them, whereas markets dominated by monopolists have just as little incentive to give consumers what they want and work only in the interests of profit and the subset of the people who are majority shareholders
Monopolies in regulated capitalist markets (pretty much all of them in the world today) can be broken up by government action. Monopolies in unregulated capitalist markets (or where the government is easily bribed) end when wealth disparity and quality of life becomes so bad that the people violently revolt and forcibly redistribute wealth, usually accompanied by a lot of needless death, suffering, instability, and injustice.
You missed number 6.5 pay off politicians so the DOJ ignores you.
11. DOJ no longer thinks you are an abusive monopolyThe DOJ has done jack and shit since MS became a huge contributor to both the Democratic and Republican parties. This one should be about the EU commission, who they have not bribed yet.
...hat the government shouldn't be putting its eggs and our tax dollars in the Microsoft basket.Don't forget their deal with the Library of Congress to put the national archives into proprietary formats.
...and I'm sure I'm going to have half of slashdot jumping down my throat, calling me a Microsoft Sympathiser for saying this, but... ...shit like third parties having their way with Windows is probably a very big reason why Vista isn't as great as it could be.
I understand your argument and it does make sense. I even agree that some of the new features in Vista are better than what is offered by the competition (I submitted feature requests to both Kubuntu and OS X and Windows asking for those types of audio controls years ago). I think where we disagree is that you seem to have some sort of an idea that antitrust regulation is supposed to be hurting MS and making their products worse or something.
The point of antitrust actions is to force a company to compete and give customers what they want for a fair price. In a competitive market, Microsoft gives OEMs (and through them end users) what they want or they lose money, so it is MS's best interest to give users the features they want. Introducing anti-features like Protected Media Pathway is something that would not happen in a competitive marketplace (or if it did the company would lose money because consumers could switch to alternatives).
The only problems with the EU's antitrust actions to date is that they have been too lenient and have not really made MS hurt in response to breaking the law and hurting users. The US is the one that should really have jumped on MS and solved this problem. The EU has been handling MS with kid gloves for diplomatic reasons. I have one other point to make. Antitrust resolution is about making Windows and alternatives better by forcing them to challenge one another for every dollar of consumers' money.
In my mind, the best way to deal with Microsoft at this point is to stop trying to micromanage every abuse individually (and there are dozens of obvious abuses that have not even been addressed yet). MS needs to be broken up and at least two of the new companies need to be given full access to the intellectual property and half the manpower behind Windows. New company A can start working on Windows A and new company B can start working on Windows B. Both must be forbidden from any collusion or even any nonpublic communications. Think about it. If company A knew consumers would be comparing their offering critically against Windows B, would they add more anti-features for the RIAA and MPAA that annoy customers or would they be financially motivated to get rid of anything that annoys users? Another advantage to this approach is that both companies are free to bundle or tie any products they want, since neither will have a monopoly and such bundling will no longer undermine the operation of the market. If one company pays millions to create some technology that is poorly designed (like IE) while the other company bundles Firefox, the first company will lose all that money and quickly look to either make IE better for users, or drop development and go with something cheaper and better. Finally, because having software work on both versions of Windows is important, developers will develop for whichever new company provides them with the best APIs and tools and developers will probably demand a way to write for both at once, which would have to be a published API, lending itself to cross-platform application development, which means programs that would run not only on both versions of Windows but also Linux, OS X , cell phones, and anything else for less cost... and that benefits everyone. In addition, investors will no longer look at investment in desktop operating systems or office suites as a doomed endeavor and will be able to invest in creating better alternatives (Like Linux distros) which will help to improve all OS's on the market.
...it's just that all this is overshadowed by the stuff it doesn't do well, which is arguably not entirely Microsoft's fault.
I mostly disagree with this
I don't see why that is a problem. Dozens of promising companies have been purchased by Microsoft and their innovative ideas then never saw the light of day. If MS is using money from their monopolies to prop up unprofitable enterprises in other markets, then it is a good thing for those businesses to be forced to profit or fail on their own as it will drive them to innovate.
Okay, I took the time to RTFA and it was pretty apparent either the author (someone's personal blog) is being intentionally inflammatory and misleading, or they have some seriously misguided ideas about several topics. Allow me to elaborate.
Apple's blocking of Skype and other voice applications raises the same Net neutrality issues as Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent.
Apple is not a network operator. They have not been granted the benefits of being a common carrier and they do not have a government enforced geographical monopoly as a result of being one of only two companies with access to government right of ways needed to connect lines to houses. You'd think the name "network neutrality" would be a tip off as to the requirement that a company needs to be a network provider for network neutrality laws to apply.
I'm not saying there is no room for network neutrality laws to apply, it is just that the scope of them might be to nullify the portion of Apple's contract with AT&T which requires Apple to restrict VoIP applications from other vendors. Even then, that does not mean Apple would have to do so, only that they cannot be required to do so as part of a contract with a network operator.
And while we're on the subject, Comcast's intentional degrading of Bittorrent traffic, while a concern for the FCC, is not a network neutrality issue. Network neutrality laws as conceived and written, to date, are about forcing network operators not to discriminate based on the source or destination of traffic. It does not ban quality of service traffic management. It just ensures that a network provider can't degrade one type of traffic from or to a given person or organization, and not that same type of traffic to or from someone else. i.e., they can slow down all bittorrent or VoIP traffic if they want, they just can't slow down bittorrent traffic from other companies but not from their own servers. They can slow down voice traffic, just not voice traffic using Skype and not a competing VoIP application/service.
Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer back in the late '90s led to major antitrust lawsuits brought by Department of Justice and 20 different states. While consumers were free to install Netscape and other competing browsers, it was the preferential treatment of its own browser that lead to legal problems for Microsoft. Apple is now engaged in an even more egregious practice. It bundles the Safari browser with its iPhone, it makes it impossible for consumers to remove the browser, and the company now forbids competing companies from making their browsers available to the millions of iPhone users.
Sigh. You'd think by now people would know enough to look up "antitrust" on wikipedia so they know what the hell they're talking about before spouting this sort of uneducated crap. Microsoft did not get prosecuted for antitrust abuse because they "bundled a browser with an OS." They got in trouble because they bundled a product in a market they had monopolized with a product from another, already existing market. The fact that one of those products was an OS and one was a browser is happenstance.
Apple does need to be concerned with antitrust issues, but this is not even close to one of them. Apple may or may not have sufficient influence in the "portable, digital music player market" to face antitrust sanctions. Apple does not have to worry about bundling anything with their browser or their phone or anything other product unless it is with their portable digital music player. Now the iPhone does fit into this category because it could be seen as Apple leveraging their success with iPods to take gain unfair advantage in the cell phone market. Further, they could be guilty of antitrust abuse for tying their iTunes music service to their iPods and bundling iTunes with their iPods. What they won't be facing antitrust problems for is bundling their browser with their OS or with iPhones since none of the products involved comes even c