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What does that have to do with the decision by a given vendor (Lenovo) to decide what OS it wants to offer its customers? Anti- trust law is about promoting competition. It isn't about picking winners.



Um, no, wrong. I don't know where you got that idea, but MS is FORBIDDEN to have exclusive OEM contracts under the terms of the anti-trust settlement; in fact, the DOJ has a representative on-site at the Microsoft campus who reviews OEM contracts. So, in fact, there is no "illegal anti-competitive behavior" anymore. Microsoft can't get away with that. Of course, that won't stop people like you from spreading this FUD endlessly.

One of the fundamental issues in Antitrust is whether a company with a strong market position in one aspect of the market is excluding competitors illegally, through collusion contracts (agreements which forbid customers from buying or using competitor's products), or whether they are excluding competitiors in other markets through the use of their strong market position in their monopoly market.

For example, IBM has substantial market share in numerous markets, but the corporate organization is specifically designed to prevent exclusion of competitors. For example, Oracle runs well (better when properly tuned) than DB2 on AIX. DB2 runs on Linux and Windows as well as AIX and MVS. This was a deliberate attempt to avoid antitrust actions back in the 1970s, and has turned out to be good business.

Google actually PROMOTES the flow of advertizing revenue directly to other content providers. They don't "frame" or otherwise alter the content displayed by the referenced links.

Microsoft has been trying to get control of companies like Viacom and Yahoo, with the intent of having them attempt to prevent Google from indexing their content (something which anyone can do quite easily).

One plaintiff started to sue Google, and when Google documented how easily they could have their content excluded from Google and You-Tube sites, and offered to do it immediately, they quickly dropped the whole suit, because they only wanted Google to pay them more, rather than loosing the Google references (which accounted for a substantial portion of their advertizing revenue stream).

Microsoft on the other hand, deliberately and willfully excludes competitors through technical provisions in their OEM and Corporate License Agreements.

They are very careful not to write the exclusionary language directly into the licenses, but rather evade prosecution by having the licensee aggree to get "Prior Written Approval from Microsoft" for any alterations to the bootstrap sequence, any advertising which uses the Microsoft trademarks or Logos, and any benchmarks in which Microsoft products are compared and referenced by trademark.

This sounds like a legitimate request. For example, Disney set the precedent when a T-shirt company was printing shirts with Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Goofy stoned out of their minds and smoking a hooka.

Microsoft used this right to "protect the brand" to prevent the publication of benchmarks it didn't like, to prevent advertizing that mentioned a choice of both Microsoft products and competitors products, especially if positive comments (such as product vendor's promotional description) were also contained in the ad.

Microsoft doesn't state emperically that Trademark and Copyright licensees are not allowed to promote competitor products.

Instead, they simply approve "All Microsoft" materials almost immediately, while the meterials promoting a competitor's products seem to get "lost" at the desk or in-box of some lawyer who must spend 80% of his time playing golf or doing something other than approving the requests.

Microsoft knows what the deadlines are for these ads, and all they have to do is delay any requests for revisions until after the deadline has passed, then provide requests for changes that they know the OEM or retailer won't bother to return (since they've already missed the market window).

The same is true with configuration. Microsoft doesn't tell Dell, HP, or Lenovo explicitly that they CANNOT install dual-boot, or desktop virtualization configurations, they just have to delay their response until after the dates required to meet market windows.

It seems that some of the OEMs have begun to adopt the tactic of stating that no response receieved within 7 days of the request will be considered an approval, but even that can be abused by requesting lots of different changes each time a revision is submitted. This would be similar to a consultant's client rejecting the consultant's deliverables and asking for different revisions to delay billing for months or even years.

Perhaps the OEMs should learn the tactics of the major consulting and service providers, for example, any changes must be requested in the first draft review, and any later changes not requested in that first draft constitute a penalty or additional charges to the client. In effect, if all of the changes requested in the first draft are completed, the only valid response is that the change was not implemented properly (misspelled words in the revised copy).

Google's deal with Yahoo are intended to help Yahoo generate more revenue from Google generated leads. It's not an exclusionary deal, yahoo is free to make similar agreements with other search providers or referring sites.

Ironically, Microsoft's attempts to take control of Yahoo have been for the primary purpose of excluding competitors from the Yahoo content, customer base, and content providers.

Google leads the market in revenue because they only show advertizing that is relevant to the search, and offer paid advertizors premium placement on the search result pages. As a result, prospective customers are much more likely to follow the links, and they are also more likely to make a purchase decision from one of the google provided links.