“It’s all over but the shouting. The non-settling states can still appeal, but they’re not going to win. The DC Circuit slapped down Judges Sporkin and Jackson when they tried to give Microsoft a hard time; now that it has the ruling it wants, it’s going to let that ruling stand. That leaves only the Supreme Court, and it’s hard for me to imagine this particular Supreme Court even hearing the Microsoft case.” Editorial.
One Coder’s Opinion of the Microsoft Opinion
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“and it’s hard for me to imagine this particular Supreme Court even hearing the Microsoft case.”
This is the advantage of being rich beyond means, you can do something called “pay people off”.
Damn corruption. Ofcourse not saying Microsoft should die, I just want a fair hearing, and yes I know life isn’t fair.
The fair is in August where I live =-)
I am saddened that there were not stiffer penalties imposed on Microsoft. I do not have any wish to see them destroyed or anything like that. After all these years, I think they have finally put out a really good product in Windows 2000/XP and I would not want to see that disappear.
The fact is, over the years, Microsoft has done a tremendous amount of damage to computing, damage that is intangible in the sense of being legal or illegal. Thankfully, the new century has brought new things to us in OSS, the GPL, Linux in general, OS X, etc. and, now, computing is again fun and filled with passion, as it was in the 80’s.
It is odd how things have turned out. Just as this decision has come down, it is not even Microsoft that is in the public eye as far as big corporations doing bad things. It is the corporate fraud of companies like Enron and the like that the public is outraged about, people having lost their 401k’s, retirement and their stock worth zero. It is funny in a way because these are things that Microsoft, as far as I know, is not guilty of. So, the attention of corporate fraud and the anger directed toward it has left Microsoft seeming almost benevolent compared to some of these corporations. They really did get off easy.
Damn corruption. Ofcourse not saying Microsoft should die, I just want a fair hearing, and yes I know life isn’t fair.
You are not fair yourself, how can you want a fair hearing. You accuse people of corruption without any proof. How fair is that?
I am saddened that there were not stiffer penalties imposed on Microsoft
What stiffer penalties do you want and why do you want them? In judicial system you don’t phunish people with random penalties because they did something wrong, you phunish people according to their crime. You can’t for example give a death penalty to a burglar if he/she didn’t kill anybody.
The fact is, over the years, Microsoft has done a tremendous amount of damage to computing
Yes they introduced Internet Explorer which is the best browser today. If you are working for Netscape, and you failed to do a better browser, that’s a big damage of course, but for consumers that’s a great thing. The fact is that over the years, people who hate Microsoft was able to create a cloud over the issues to depict Microsoft evil for almost all the issues, even the ones which Microsoft was right. Recently so many people got bored about these false claims and distortions that, their number seemed to increased. Once everybody was hating Microsoft, then people realized that most of the claims against Microsoft is like why do they have an “M” in their name? That’s the sort of the damage you are talking about.
Microsoft got what they deserved. End of story.
Predictions
1. If Microsoft continues to get its way we will live to see the complete decimation of the computer industry in the near future. You will see, hear, and view everything through Microsoft’s products. Your ability to roam the internet will be through services dominated by Microsoft and it partners in Hollywood. All your “bases” will belong to them.
2. Or you could grow some testicles (even you ladies out there) and derail Bill’s grand scheme for controlling all digital devices and content. Just quit using Microsoft’s crap. Leave the company without an economic leg to stand on. Its as simple as that. You don’t have to use anything from them at all. Make the choice while you still have a choice to make. Otherwise sites like this will become a fond distant memory of “the good ol days”.
The damage Microsoft has done to computing is that they arm twisted, threatened and coerced computer companies into outrageous OEM deals. Having established a monopoly, they then abused it by continuing these business practices. I am not even a Microsoft basher, but look what happened to AT&T – they were broken up completely when they were found guilty of abusing their monopoly. Microsoft has simply received a slap on the wrist. As I said, I do not want to see them destroyed or anything like that, but what they received is nowhere near being comenserate with what they have done. Because of Microsoft’s attitude and posture on how to do business, I fear that, to them, this is almost a vindication for them and the green light to continue in their merry ways.
“It is the corporate fraud of companies like Enron
and the like that the public is outraged about, people having lost their 401k’s, retirement and their stock
worth zero. It is funny in a way because these are things that
Microsoft, as far as I know, is not guilty of.
”
How about the stock options? Microsoft have been paying their staff in
stock options for years, and not recording those payments as outgoings
in the accounts. That means they have not in fact been making a
profit.
Same basic fraud as Enron.
“Office is not a piece of software. It is an industrial process that occasionally lays eggs.”
Best quote yet 😉
“Yes they introduced Internet Explorer which is the best browser today. If you are working for Netscape, and you failed to do a better browser, that’s a big damage of course, but for consumers that’s a great thing.”
You may be partially right about IE being the better browser (I am not inclined to disagree, as I like IE) which is not a problem in itself, but once MS began to use their OS monopoly to strong-arm OEMs into NOT putting any other browser besides IE on the computer (and doing the same thing with operating systems, office suites, etc), that is a problem, because the competition could no longer compete on a level playing field. And it is this kind of thing that (I believe) the settlement forbids them from doing anymore.
While I think the settlement is good for what it does, it does not go far enough. It solves the problem of what MS was/is doing to OEMs, but AFAIK, it does NOTHING to PUNISH them for what they’ve done in the past, except opening up ‘communication protocols’ ….. ohhhhhh, I bet MS is shaking in their boots over this one.
I think the main reason MS was able to get away with this is because they were able to convince the judge that punishing MS by splitting them up or making a ‘modular’ version of Windows would lead to mass layoffs at MS (etc), hence the ‘bad for the economy’ argument. And in fact, marketing scum use the same arguement. I would imagine that at LEAST 95% percent of Americans would love to see telemarking outlawed, but the marketers say that such a move would be bad for businesses and bad for the economy, and so it goes on ….
America – government of The Corporation, by The Corporation, and for The Corporation.
Maybe I don’t fully understand the crimes Microsoft has committed, but from my point of view I see no harm in MS including IE with Windows…If I own a software company and I want to make my OS work exclusively with my software..so what? I can do that. MS does not break other programs that try to run on it…if you don’t want IE install something else and delete the icon…big deal…as far as MS Office goes, what is the crime in offering discounted prices through OEM’s who bundle the software with the computer system..again if you don’t want MS Office install another office suite and uninstall MS Office…I compare these anit-trust lawsuits to Ford being suite because it uses a Ford motor and parts..or even because it comes with Ford Certified Oil, you can change brands of oil if you want…If I am way off could someone please clarify WHY MS is abusing it’s power by including it’s own software with it’s own OS?
>>”Maybe I don’t fully understand the crimes Microsoft has committed,”
Thanks for that first part. It seems that all of us have lots of opinions on the whole thing but very few of us (certainly myself included) have a real grasp of the whole thing. Maybe instead of one judge who doesn’t know RAM from scrambled eggs these things should be heard in front of a “jury” comprised of tech people.
But where would you find a jury of tech people who aren’t biased in some way?
There are as many “answers” as there are people with opinions, but who is qualified to deliver THE answer? Certainly not me or millions of people like me, certainly not a judge with no tech background, who can’t understand the core concepts or put the infractions into any kind of true perspective. Certainly not a government capable of passing the DMCA into law or allowing corporations (Disney) to buy whatever laws their businesses require (the recent Mickey Mouse protecting copyright extensions).
So who? We can debate it all day long but not ONE of us understands the whole thing, nor could we hope to if we studied every aspect of the case for years on end. We can pick out bits and pieces we THINK we understand (like bundling IE) and expound on those bits endlessly, but unless you can see all those bits as what they are (just small threads in a much greater tapestry) your opinions are worse than useless. Just like mine.
The US government doesn’t presently have a system or body capable of deciding issues like this in anything approaching an informed manner. Technology is rapidly outpacing society’s ability to understand it, let alone legislate it.
Rob, that is an excellent point. It is very disturbing. All I’ve ever wanted was a level playing field. But, with technology, who can provide that and how? That is why I wanted stiffer penalties for Microsoft – not to gig them personally, but something that would hurt, as a warning to them and to all as to how they conduct business. But, as you suggested, it is difficult for so many reasons.
It seems to me that the most telling insight is that all the proposed remedies are appropriate only to past problems: Office will continue to dominate (for a while at least) because it is already dominant, and all you could do is break it off into another company that would still own the desktop office suite monopoly. IE is the browser requesting 98% (or whatever) of hits; opensourcing it won’t change that. MS is a minnow in the online world (by comparison with AOL), but everyone assumes that they will find a way of dominating that arena too, and that is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will reach a certain level of growth, AOL will have lost a comparable portion of market share, and press, PR *and a comparable or better MS product introduced at that time* will open the floodgates to a haemmorhage of AOL customers. (At least, that’s the scenario that everyone seems to anticipate).
Strong-arm negotiating tactics with OEMs and threats of a withdrawal of support are…borderline… if we want to be generous… (Illegal if you agree with the courts). However, that is not the root of MS success. MS’ success is based not on bullying on the one hand, or visionary farsightedness on the other, but on the ability to spot near-to-market technologies, establish brilliant press & PR, and buy themselves time for their extraordinary development teams to either buy in and enhance, or develop, the software (and hardware, if necessary – like the MS Mouse) to a level where it is comparable with, or better than, the early market leaders. Their proven track record encourages people to wait for a v3 product from MS in the knowledge that it will do the job, rather than ‘take the risk’ of another vendor’s V1 product (save for the 1-2% of brave souls who like living on the bleeding edge).
Good examples of this are Windows itself, Excel (and Office thereafter), and .NET.
I would love to see someone suggest something *effective* (or even define what effective means precisely). My own view is that we want a ‘level playing field’ – something that wouldn’t tolerate OEM-bullying, but equally that wouldn’t favour companies less agile and effective than MS? And wouldn’t damage my own business as an ISV? Any ideas? ‘Cos I haven’t seen any yet.
Is it even a real problem? I used Netscape until IE became a better, faster browser. I used Lotus SmartSuite until Office was better, I used OS/2 until Windows 2k was good enough (and OS/2 withered and died), I used BeOS, and still miss it today – that really was a winner. I try every new Mandrake distro in the hope that it’ll do everything I want, out of the box. We used to *sell* those products to customers; and now we don’t, because MS now offer better products to my customers (on the whole). This is nothing to do with ‘special discounts’ or OEM bullying, but because we can build better solutions on their platforms. Why legislate to bust that up? Why not let the competition spend its billions of dollars (Sun? IBM? Fujitsu?) and offer me something better instead?
“as far as MS Office goes, what is the crime in offering discounted prices through OEM’s who bundle the software with the computer system..again if you don’t want MS Office install another office suite and uninstall MS Office.”
Ok, picture this senerio …
Let’s say you’re an OEM who sells computers with Windows pre-installed. Ok, no problem so far …
But let’s say you wanted to include Word Perfect Office as an office suite instead of MS Office, and then have Microsoft tell you “Ok, you can do that, but every copy of Windows you sell is going to cost you $xyz more than it would if you were to include MS Office.”
And that is where MS got into trouble, because you can’t do those kinds of things if you’re an OS monopoly and use that to unfairly gain an uppper hand in other markets. And it’s the same thing with the browser – it’s ok (IMHO) to bundle your browser in the OS, but it’s not ok to use your monopoly to ensure that OEMs won’t install a competing browser on the computers it sells.
They also did the same thing for competing operating systems .. would you really want to try and sell BeOS with your computers while at the same time having Microsoft breathing down your neck the whole time?
This is how MS got to be as big as they are and AFIAK, the settlement does absolutely nothing to address this.
Great article, great writer. Summed it up to a tee.
“This is nothing to do with ‘special discounts’ or OEM bullying, but because we can build better solutions on their platforms. Why legislate to bust that up? Why not let the competition spend its billions of dollars (Sun? IBM? Fujitsu?) and offer me something better instead?”
‘Better solutions’ doesn’t have anything to do with it really. Let’s say that I was able to sit down and write an OS that was 10x better than Windows (even with some killer apps!) and get it out to market. So, you go out and buy my new whiz-bang OS and everyone is happy .. right?
Ok, so you go out and buy a new DVD movie and you notice that it has some cool extras that require a PC with a DVD-ROM drive. “Ok cool”, you say .. “I have that.” So, you go and pop the disc into the DVD drive and notice … “DAMN, it only works on Windows!” And I bet you there are dozens (if not hundreds) of examples like that, of things that will only run in Windows, making a new whiz-bang OS virtually useless in this Windows-centric world.
The only remedy I could see is to force Windows to open up its APs for its crimes and that way, people building new operating systems could make them 100% inter-operable with Windows software and file formats. That way, I could open up a complex .doc file in my new whiz-bang office suite, and then save it in its native file format, ensuring that I will never have a need to use MS Office if I don’t want to. This way, people could slowly transition (if they want to) away from MS products and onto something else. Otherwise, you’re going to have a really hard time convincing companies to migrate away from an OS with about 97% of the desktop marketshare and to support something new.
Using the above senerio IMHO is a much better solution for consumers than trying to split up MS (thereby possibly breaking the integration that already exists) or making modular versions of Windows.
“Just quit using Microsoft’s crap. Leave the company without an economic leg to stand on. Its as simple as that. ”
For what ? I mean take all anti-Microsoft geeks, make them avoid all of the Microsoft software, and the company will probably even notice a lowering in his income. Seriously, do you know how many people represent the Microsoft market ? I personnaly don’t want to suffer and sacrifice myself for a cause that is just impossible to win. So at the end: no, it’s not “as simple as that”.
“You don’t have to use anything from them at all. ”
How do you know that ? How do you know that everybody in the world don’t need Microsoft product ? Do you know exactly what *I* am doing for living with my PC ?
Well I can tell you that right now there’s absolutely NO way I can be as productive with open source softwares than what I do with the Microsoft product. It may change some day, but today, right now, it’s not.
The problem with this Microsoft case is over and over again the final argument is handed down to some old farts that don’t even know how to use a computer. Sure take it to the supreme court, where only about 5 of them even know how to turn a computer on, and two of them even know how to use the mouse. You want a fair trial America, put IT professionals as the jury, put college CIS professors as the jury, anyone that knows anything about a computer. It’s not fair when most of the time they have no clue what is being talked about. Those old farts don’t know crap thats why nothing happens, if they had some people ruling on this trial that had half a brain about computers things haven’t been dragged on this long.
A couple people have expressed their preference for IE as the best browser around. While that may have been true a couple years ago, a comparision of Mozilla with IE will not show that to be the case today. Mozilla has more features and a better rendering engine. It’s better in every way except one: it’s not tied to the Windows operating system. Microsoft’s monopoly will prevent the widespread adoption of Mozilla or any other standards compliant web browser. Moreover, they will create more of their own standards to make it difficult for open browsers to view pages composed in FrontPage. Nothing has been done about this.
Rob wrote:
Certainly not a government capable of passing the DMCA into law or allowing corporations (Disney) to buy whatever laws their businesses require (the recent Mickey Mouse protecting copyright extensions).
Not to mention that the US Government has completely whored itself out to Microsoft and is utterly dependent on products from Redmond. This isn’t classical capitalism with free markets anymore. Call it crony capitalism, mercantilism, corporatism, or fascism. Any way you want to call it, we’re heading into a nightmare future ruled by megacorps that will mirror B-grade scifi movies like RoboCop or Alien. Who says life doesn’t imitate art?
“I personnaly don’t want to suffer and sacrifice myself for a cause that is just impossible to win. So at the end: no, it’s not “as simple as that”
The above statement is made by a completely gutless individual. Here is an example of someone who does need to “grow testicles”. The above fool thinks he’s going to “suffer and sacrifice” if he doesn’t use Microsoft products. What a wimp.
“Well I can tell you that right now there’s absolutely NO way I can be as productive with open source softwares than what I do with the Microsoft product.”
Call me when your voice deepens sonny.
Does escaping Windows the same as escaping gravity?
Some people think they are like that, while some think otherwise, though.
It all boils down on the person itself, making a choice is a deliberate act requiring the participation of the will.
Although MS tools may look superior if there was a tale-of-the-tape, that won’t matter to a person who has made up his mind moving out of Windows, though.
The thought that ~it does not matter today~ so stop persueing it really does not work for me. Bundling a browser is now common place so drop the suite?
If I rob a bank, and then loose all of it gambling, am I still in trouble? If I drive over the speed limit by 5, then while I am in court the limit is raised by 10, am I off the hook?
NO, I am not so why are they?
I have no prblem with them trying it back in 95, but once they were told to ‘not take cookies from the jar’, they choose to stand there in front of ‘Mom’, break the jar and pick the cookies off the counter. What I have a problem with is that ‘Mom’ let them!
Yes, if Microsoft did violate certain rules, which it seems that’s the case, such as forcing OEMs not to put a particular application or a browser, then yes this phunishment is a very small phunisment.
But whose fault is this? I believe that it is the people who started to distort everything about Microsoft. The states who did not agree with the settlement knowingly missed the point and started to talk about totally unrelated issues. Media doesn’t cover this story fairly, so people was expecting that Microsoft will be phunished more severely. I was saying that this is impossible, because what states want are outrageous. They want Microsoft to write Windows which can be altered anyway other parties want and still function correctly. What is this? This will only hurt consumers and Microsoft. It will be good for competitors only.
I was hating Microsoft too, but then there were so many stupid claims against Microsoft that, I don’t know whether Microsoft really did something that people claimed they did. It is not clear now. Now I think the rate of false claims over all claims is around 99%. There are accusations like why Microsoft has an “M” in its name, or like why their name ends with “t”.
Thanks to greedy competitors Microsoft happily got away with this settlement.
It seems to me that the majority of the people here are confused. They rant and rave about the business practises of Microsoft, and then complain about the courts not knowing anything about computers. I haven’t seen any evidence that the courts know one way or the other about computers, nor that they really honestly need to. They have consultants for these things, and it really is more about Microsoft’s business practises, in which case computer savvy is not really necessary to begin with. One doesn’t have to be all-knowing to make informed decisions about these things …
“Competition, competition, competition”
Everyone talks about competition as if it’s the grand overriding principle. It isn’t. Competition is NOT the most fundamental principle of the economy of a free society — which I’ll call “capitalism” for lack of a better term. Individual rights are. Competition is a consequence of the underlying principles of capitalism. But those principles are more important than competition itself. In fact, capitalism (in a free society) is best defined as “the economic consequences of the system of individual rights,” among which are competition. The right of property — Microsoft’s property rights in their software, in this instance — are more important than competition.
People complain that Microsoft broke the law, and should be punished. I agree — except that I think the law itself, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, is irrational rubbish that gives the government arbitrary power over the successful.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that part of the reason for Windows’ spectacular success on the desktop has nothing whatsoever to do with any marketing, tying, or other so-called “anti-competitive” practices by Microsoft? I think a lot of the reason why Windows dominates is entirely out of Microsoft’s hands. There’s a powerful networking effect that gained critical mass long ago — and I personally think that any effort to disrupt that would be counter-productive to consumers, although it may benefit the egos of the Linux weenies. 99% of people who use Windows couldn’t care less about the option to use another OS. A small but vocal minority of “enthusiasts” wants to foist their alternatives onto an utterly uncaring, unenthusiastic public, and for a while these whining little tech snobs got the government to go along with them.
OK, I think I may have had a few too many Captain & Cokes, but I still stand by my disjointed verbiage.
By the way, I’m writing this on my iMac under OS X.
The damage Microsoft has done to computing is that they arm twisted, threatened and coerced computer companies into outrageous OEM deals.
The only computer companies Microsoft could have coerced into “outrageous OEM deals” are the ones manufacturing IBM compatable PC’s. They cannot effect any sort of an OEM deal against an Apple or a Sun or an Amiga. Now, effectively, what has always been the definition of an IBM compatable? Easy. A computer that runs Microsoft DOS/Windows and associated applications. In other words, the only companies that Microsoft has any control over, are the companies that base their business model on a dependancy on Microsoft in the first place. That is their own decision, and Microsoft doesn’t owe them anything for doing so. If it wasn’t for Microsoft, those companies wouldn’t be in business in the first place.
Just because you decide to go into the business of building boats, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to an ocean.
” and for a while these whining little tech snobs got the government to go along with them.”
So basically your just going to throw out of the illegal things MS did and chalk it up to weenies? Somehow when you completely ignore all of the facts of the case it hurts your argument.
I mean I’m not going to go over all the things they have done, but the bottom line is MS illegally used its monopoly power on the desktop to both pressure OEM’s and crush Netscape. Period end of discussion.
” The right of property — Microsoft’s property rights in their software, in this instance — are more important than competition.”
Well I’ll just assume that’s from the alcohol.
Basically your a MS fan and that’s O.K.. But no matter how much you try to convince yourself that MS is just somehow being targeted because of their success its flat of wrong. The federal government didn’t just make up all the thing MS did illegally.
Lastly
” the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, is irrational rubbish that gives the government arbitrary power over the successful.”
Err that almost sounds like some sorta codespeak. With success comes power, and with unlimited success comes unlimited power. Having a law which prevents one company from limiting choice and harming other companies and consumers is a good thing. There is NOTHING heathly about having a monopoly in a capitalistic society.
“”Well I can tell you that right now there’s absolutely NO way I can be as productive with open source softwares than what I do with the Microsoft product.
Call me when your voice deepens sonny.”
Making the switch from Windows is not as simple for some people as some of you think. I can only guess that some of you are like Joe User who just use your computer to browse the web and read email, where I suppose such things are trivial.
But for many of us, for what we use our computers for, there are simply NOT any (good) alternatives in the open source world for what we do. Why in the bloody hell is this so hard for some people to understand?
The best we can do in this case is have a dual boot thing happening, as I am not about to try and run Sonar 2 with some DXi plugins within VMWware.
Of course, some of us happen to think that the alternatives are not up to par and wouldn’t switch even if we could. I know that the above statement is going to beyond the comprehension for some of you who just can’t understand why somebody would choose Windows over God’s gift to OS’ but I guess you’re just going to have to deal with it.
Of course, some of us happen to think that the alternatives are not up to par and wouldn’t switch even if we could. I know that the above statement is going to beyond the comprehension for some of you who just can’t understand why somebody would choose Windows over God’s gift to OS’ but I guess you’re just going to have to deal with it.
If you can’t do your job without Windoze then it’s time to find a different job…seriously, do you wanna be a drone the rest of your life?
<Quote>That leaves only the Supreme Court, and it’s hard for me to
imagine this particular Supreme Court even hearing the Microsoft case.<Unquote>
Hardly surprizing as the SCOTUS only hears cases that are Constitutionally related, and does not, as a matter of course, actually decide the cases, criminal or civil. It frightens me to think that this guy might actually vote.
Michael
JBett hysterically screached:
“This is the advantage of being rich beyond means, you can do something called ‘pay people off’.”
CNN and FOX would pay grotesquely for such a salacious and juicy scoop as Microsoft paying off the DoJ and a Federal judge (and obviously the Appelate Court as well). You DO have proof do you not, and are not simply some ignorant blowhard of a dweeb whose father’s better part dribbled down his mother’s leg?
And Darius:
” I would imagine that
at LEAST 95% percent of Americans would love to see telemarking outlawed, but the marketers say that such a move would be bad for businesses and bad for the economy, and so it goes on …. America – government of The Corporation, by The Corporation, and for The Corporation.”
I suspect it is more rather because of this rather annoying little passage contained within the document before me.
“Congress shall make no law. . .abridging the freedom of speech.”
Damned Washington, Madison, and Hamilton. On corporate payroll each and all.
And Jay (not John of the above “corporate whores”) wrote:
“It is the corporate fraud of companies like Enron and the like that the public is outraged about, people having lost their 401k’s, retirement and their stock worth zero. It is funny in a way
because these are things that Microsoft, as far as I know, is not guilty of. So, the attention of corporate fraud and the
anger directed toward it has left Microsoft seeming almost benevolent compared to some of these corporations. They
really did get off easy.”
People hereabouts continue to have a rather difficult time grasping the conceptual differences between criminal and civil law. Enron et al are guilty of a breach of the former, while Microsoft the latter (in so far as the anti-trust case goes). While Gates is guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, that in and of itself does not make him a criminal.
Comment of my own. While not entirely pleased with the result, Microsoft did not get away scott free, and this was but one case. There are more, and if MS continues unrepently down this path, then many a lawyer will continue to find gainful employment. This was merely the end of the beginning, and not the end itself. Believe it or not, people, Microsoft did lose.
—
Michael
“You are not fair yourself, how can you want a fair hearing. You accuse people of corruption without any proof. How fair is that?”
Ok, now do I really have to ask Be, Sun, Apple, and various other large software/hardware companies to send me their proof so I can shut your ignorant ass up?
Businesses are in business to crush the competition. That’s part of the phuqking point! And also — it’s just ridiculous to say that by giving IE away for free and including it in the OS that consumers have somehow been harmed. Harmed how? By not having a choice? By getting something for free? By getting a browser even many geeks admit is better than Netscape? But they do have a choice.
I’m sorry, but I think those people who say that Microsoft has limited people’s choices are just dead, flat-out, completely wrong. I’ve never had a problem getting whatever OS I wanted installed on whatever hardware I could afford. No Microsoft police ever busted in on me and told me not to install SuSE or to stop using my iMac.
Windows is the property of Microsoft. Microsoft does not hold a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to use it. As I said, there’s a reason for its prevalence. (By the way, I’m not anti-Linux and I think Windows’ absolute dominance will soon be a thing of the past, although it will always be a major player.)
Bottom line for me is this:
1. Windows is the property of Microsoft Corporation. It is not public property. Microsoft should be allowed to do anything they wish with it that doesn’t involve physical force or fraud. If they want to configure it so it calls you a jackass every fifteen minutes, they should be allowed to do so — but they should also be willing to face the sales consequences of that. Sorry, but the right of property outweighs “competition.” I don’t give a flying phuqk what the courts or Congress may say. Ethically, the right of property is more important than “competition.”
2. Trade is the exchange of value for value. If you don’t like Microsoft, don’t buy their products. If lots of other people do so, and you don’t like that, TOO BAD. Look, I think most American cars — particularly modern Mustangs — are laughably ugly, as if designed by a committee of high school football players drinking Bud Light from a keg. Here in Florida they are as ubiquitous as Bud Light. But if that’s what people want to buy, let ’em. I’ll still drive my BMW’s.
3. There will always be a dominant desktop operating system. It just happened to be Windows. That may not last forever. As I said, there are reasons for this that go far beyond any manipulation of the market by Microsoft.
I have to disagree with some of the comment made before about ‘competition’.
Knowing some of my friends who got bullied by MS herself, I can’t say I am 100% fair against MS in judging what she deserved. But competition per se, is the basis of a fair and open society, not capitalism nor socialism. If capitalism works on its own, why need any rule of laws or regulation to maintain a fair play among various business in the society, at all? Or even some consumer protection acts?
I don’t know Mr. Gates himself, but it’s amusing to me when I read the book, “My Years with General Motors”, from Mr. Alfred Sloan,that Mr. Gates wrote on the cover “I think Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business.” Yet their management style and business strategy are so different.
It is pretty clear by now that MS was engaging a strategy of monopoly to dominate the market. No matter how the customers are serviced, what they did to their competitors or OEMs were found to be illegal and unfair. Remember the case for Stac (Stacker compression), Corel (Corel Office suite in Canada), Softimage (patent infrigement on using others’ 3D technology)…. and various. They just use money to pay off the penalty, but very clearly MS was found guilty.
On the contrast, Mr. Sloan wrote in the introduction in his book “If I have expressed or implied in this book a so-called ideology, it is, I suppose, that I believe in competition as an article of faith, a means of progress, and a way of life.” Mr. Sloan, and General Motors, on the other hand, adopted a tactic of freezing the market at 50% at all times to avoid anti-trust suit from DOJ. Something interesting come from this is that Mr. Sloan, personally, would help his competitors’ financing if he found they were at deep trouble since he believed it’s a bad idea for the government to take over to run the competitor; and also as you might see, freezing the market at 50% and to increase revenue and sales volume requires growth in the industry as a whole. Of course no one can tell how long the growth an industry can sustain, but at least, from a point of view as management and fairness rather than simply greed, Mr. Gates is rather antithetic to Mr. Sloan’s management style. But I must appraise Mr. Gates learned and practiced a lot about how to organize divisions, people and teams, as Mr. Sloan illustrated in his book.
Well if you don’t have any proof why the hell do you accuse? Are you trying to make fool of yourself here? You accuse people without proof. That’s not fair now, is it?
It is not as simple as saying “Microsoft own Windows, so it can do whatever it wants to do”. Once you become a monopoly in an industry there are certain rules that kick in to make sure that there is enough competition.
For example, Microsoft shouldn’t force OEMs to work only with Microsoft. That will not allow other companies to compete with Windows, or even Microsoft’s other competing technologies. Just by controlling Windows, Microsoft has too much power. They can literally dictate anything in the industry. They can decide which companies can survive and which companies can not, if they are allowed to force other companies to act the way they want them to act. That is quite dangerous.
The problem is that people exaggarated the issue and now there is a big cloud there. Thanks to the states’ outrageous claims, Microsoft got away with the settlement. 99% of the claims against Microsoft are totally stupid, baseless, distortion and so on. What they tried to do is to create an environment where Microsoft will be perceived as the evil empire, which they are not, and then they thought that they will get whatever they want from the court. Judge Jackson fell into this trick. Probably he read lots of anti-microsoft articles. His judgement became too much biased and he, himself gave interviews to the reporters and showed that he is biased. Obviously the upper court returned this decision and now another court finally approved the settlement.
Microsoft shouldn’t have done certain things. They are found guilt of those actions, but I agree that they got away with it, but I think it is mostly because of outrageous demands from the states. Instead of trying to provide artificial advantage to Sun, Apple they should concentrate on the facts found in the court and go on that issue. But instead they tried to do provide unfair advantage to the competitors, and obviously judge didn’t like that.
So Microsoft has its do-nothing settlement
I almost wish I could believe you on that.
A mandatory auction of Office? Oh, great. Company X has Cherry Office. Gosh, golly gee, isn’t that nice. Microsoft has Office Classic, plus forty billion dollars.
Quite the opposite, my friend. Just say Red Hat wins in the auction for the Linux version. So it ports Office to GTK+, integrating it with Red Hat Linux. Then slowly, Linux gains dominance of the market. What should Microsoft do? Port their apps, especially Office, to Linux.
But could they? When they port it to Linux, Red Hat could easily take the extra features Microsoft has and put it in their own port, and there’s nothing Microsoft can do. So what would become of Microsoft? Sitting idle and collecting royalties of course!
Microsoft is sooo not dependent on them in maintaining its market power.
Currently it is (unless you haven’t realize, TCPA support is only provided by third parties and Palladium isn’t out yet).
On the rest of the arguments, he is discusing a theory as a fact. Interesting. Boring. (Yeah, after awhile, reading this kind of rehashed junk, it gets boring).
I too would have liked them to be split up. As a result, the true value of the company would then be realised. Personally, the most valuable when floated would be the applications devision that is made up of Microsoft Office and other components.
Jay: The damage Microsoft has done to computing is that they arm twisted, threatened and coerced computer companies into outrageous OEM deals.
Outrageous? These OEM deals date back even before Windows 3.x. Back then, nobody didn’t think it was “evil” or see signing the contract as “selling your soul to Satan”. Welcome to the world of sensationalize press. Heck, if Be died when there wasn’t a antitrust suite against MS, you wouldn’t be saying this.
Jay: Having established a monopoly, they then abused it by continuing these business practices.
They have established their monopoly based on their competitor’s mistakes and their own business ingenuinity. They continued their policies up to now, because that’s how they were like all along, even during the time where almost every geek is praising MS for kicking IBM in the ass.
Jay: I am not even a Microsoft basher, but look what happened to AT&T – they were broken up completely when they were found guilty of abusing their monopoly.
If without the previous governments, I doubt AT&T would have been that powerful pre-antitrust. Besides, under antitrust laws, AT&T “crimes” were far, far, far more serious.
Darius: […]but once MS began to use their OS monopoly to strong-arm OEMs into NOT putting any other browser besides IE on the computer (and doing the same thing with operating systems, office suites, etc), that is a problem[…]
Actually, what Microsoft forbid wasn’t bundling other browsers, but removing IE icons and IE itself. They were also previously against HP plan to include their own shell other than Explorer. As for OS, what Microsoft forbids is loading another OS with their OS, which is legitimate enough for me. Plus, for office suites, for a long time (until now, I believe), IBM ship their PCs with SmartSuite. Coincidence?
I think the main reason MS was able to get away with this is because they were able to convince the judge that punishing MS by splitting them up or making a ‘modular’ version of Windows would lead to mass layoffs at MS
Which is true, BTW. Forcing Microsoft to modularize Windows is far worse than spliting the company up, and have more severe economic implications than the split. In fact, I’m sure the opposing states realized that and placed that as the least important condition.
Rob: But where would you find a jury of tech people who aren’t biased in some way?
True. You might find the jury making conditions like the menubar be on top the screen or Microsoft adopt apt-get…
Matthew Adams: but everyone assumes that they will find a way of dominating that arena too, and that is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
True, but I doubt it is Microsoft strong arming. If I get a penny for every complaint I hear against AOL, I would be richer than Gates himself. Plus the fact of a failure merger with Time Warner, accusations of bad accounting practices, low product acceptance – I don’t think AOL can survive all that much. They spread themselves too thin.
Darius: But let’s say you wanted to include Word Perfect Office as an office suite instead of MS Office, and then have Microsoft tell you “Ok, you can do that, but every copy of Windows you sell is going to cost you $xyz more than it would if you were to include MS Office.”
Just one thing I would really want to asked from you: PROOF. Show us proof on this matter. Cause it is easy to make a statment and call it a fact. It is easy to call Bill Gates the Anti Christ. It is easy to call Steve Jobs gay. But it is hard to prove it.
Darius: Let’s say that I was able to sit down and write an OS that was 10x better than Windows (even with some killer apps!)
Making a OS ten times better would never give you market success. Heck, even if it ran Windows apps. Marketing is important. If your marketing skills is good, people would use your OS, certain niches that couldn’t care less about the DVDs they bought. Either that or you can compete on price with Linux.
William Ray Barker: You want a fair trial America, put IT professionals as the jury, put college CIS professors as the jury, anyone that knows anything about a computer.
No, that’s stupid. EVERY geek, even myself on certain cases, are biased something. Chances are that those IT professionals would be pro-MS or anti-MS right before the trial even start. Fair? Never.
Dave: Mozilla has more features and a better rendering engine.
Which is why, unlike Netscape, Mozilla market share is increasing the last time the statistics came out. In fact TechTV now uses it and endorses it. (Oh, BTW, Mozilla’s main target isn’t the Average Joe).
Widespread adoption couldn’t possibly happen without a company with no commercial interest like AOL (Netscape is a billboard, they even clutter your IE favourites), Mozilla might succeed.
Dave: Moreover, they will create more of their own standards to make it difficult for open browsers to view pages composed in FrontPage.
Unless you use ActiveX or a complicated set of tables, or DHTML – you couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, pages made by FrontPage to varying degrees work better in Mozilla than those by Dreamweaver.
Annonymous: This isn’t classical capitalism with free markets anymore.
Read Adam Smith’s and Ayn Rand’s book – America is not 100% capitalist. In fact, the problems you are complaining about are because of the lack of pure capitalism.
Annonymous: Call me when your voice deepens sonny.
Call us when you stop wearing diapers. People rely on Microsoft products in their work. They have features the altenatives don’t have. They aren’t using computers as a idealistic cause, but as a tool.
I mean I’m not going to go over all the things they have done, but the bottom line is MS illegally used its monopoly power on the desktop to both pressure OEM’s and crush Netscape. Period end of discussion.
Pressuring OEMs haven’t been proven in court. As for Netscape, they were a incompetent company. Why the heck did they need to rewrite? Because the whole software was built in a non-modular way that prevents third parties to use its features like they can with IE.
The only reason why Netscape was once dominate was because of the lack of any wahstoever good competitors. But their products suck.
none: There is NOTHING heathly about having a monopoly in a capitalistic society.
No monopoly can sustain its power without the government’s backing.
Getting rid of Microsoft monopoly and allowing the competitors to enter the market easily wouldn’t help the consumer because the competitors didn’t earn their success.
jbett: Ok, now do I really have to ask Be, Sun, Apple, and various other large software/hardware companies to send me their proof so I can shut your ignorant ass up?
Uhmmm, Sun practically bought California.
Zero: […]Corel (Corel Office suite in Canada)
This is a case of patent infrigement, right? Nothing to do with antitrust. (Besides, wasn’t it Novell, nor Corel that sued MS?)
Sergio, I wanted to email you, but you left no email address. The person you are replying to is someone supporting a capitalistic/objectivistic society.
Besides, how can you say Microsoft policies have prevented competition? All the competition that “died” in the hands of Microsoft killed themselves due to their incompetency. MAKING A GOOD PRODUCT DOESN’T GURRENTEE MARKET SUCCESS.
Write that down and stick it around your house. Memorize that. Marketing is the key goal in a product’s success.
Besides, what competition that comes out from the regulation is pseudo-competition. For example, if every Compaq machine came with both BeOS and Windows, most likely I won’t use BeOS. Because it doesn’t have any apps I need (NetPositive, NetOptimist and BeZilla sucks). As a developer I wouldn’t make apps for BeOS because I know people who “own” it might not actually use it, and making a BeOS version of any of my apps would be a waste of money (plus making a app on BeOS isn’t that cheap either).
Besides, notice how Linux is taking the market one step at a time from Microsoft? WITHOUT government intervention? If a competitor wins against Microsoft without the help of the courts, they win with pride. If they couldn’t win without cutting off Microsoft legs with antitrust laws, they win with shame.
Marketing incompetence can kill you.
> Zero: […]Corel (Corel Office suite in Canada)
> This is a case of patent infrigement, right? Nothing to do
> with antitrust. (Besides, wasn’t it Novell, nor Corel that
> sued MS?)
Maybe I was not clear about that before: Stac Electronics and Softimage both were patent infringement. While Corel Office was about anti-competitive practice to Canadian government procurement of Office software. I guess the point is about the proven track record of illegal practices MS engaged, and other business and IP interests being violated, and as a result competition being conducted unfairly.
Corel once was a legitimate competitor to Microsoft Office. Then WinWord got better, and WordPerfect shift hands so much that one could wonder why is it still available. Until recently, with WordPerfect 2000, WP was crap.
If there was any antitrust suit against Microsoft, it is crap. Unfortunately, I never really paid attention to Canadian civil laws and its usage, so I can’t really condemn it as much as I’m doing now in this case.
> I think they have finally put out a really good product in Windows 2000/XP and I would not want to see that disappear.
Well, if you ain’t a flamebaiter, then we know where you are on the IQ food chain – expect a hungry amoeba to come along any minute now.
> This is how MS got to be as big as they are and AFIAK, the settlement does absolutely nothing to address this.
Yep, Darius, this is correct. This was what it was all about. But I wonder how many of your brethren here took the time to learn about it as you did. Which is why crooks like Bill Gates can get away with things – they tell people it’s only a browser war, and we have to be free to innovate.
I’d sure like Steve Ballmer to cite JUST ONE innovation – true innovation – that is truly Microsoft’s and that they did not steal or buy. That might keep old Ballmer busy for years. Microsoft stinks. They’re not a computer company. They’re a greed company. Gates got no class – he just wants what everybody else’s got.
And now he’s got it. Bastard.
There most certainly has been a trade-off; like a permanent back door into Monopolosoft servers for the Faschipublican government so that they can WATCH all the suckers stupid enough to use MS stuff. This is why nearly all the other countries in the world are moving to Linux/Unix. They do not want an illiterate American red-neck government to have access to their systems.
If there is anyone there is a flamebaiter, it is you, Sune. Both WIndows 2000 and XP are great products. They may be crap for what you do, but to others (genaldar immediately comes to mind), they are great. To a lot of people, Windows 2000 is the best OS out there. To others, it is the worst crap Microsoft have ever made.
Anyway, on the antitrust thing, I’m tired of people emailing me and accusing me of getting something if Microsoft gets scot free. Hell no. In fact, I loose out, because, as I told Robert Renling and Dennis Catt (CattBeMac), I’m planing to compete with certain uses of Windows and ultimately with Office. The stiffer the punishment, the better for me.
But no, I’m not a hypocrite. I won’t allow my personal dreams to take over my moral stand. My moral stand may be very different to all of you – big deal. It is my opinion, and I well deserve to get it.
It has been proposed several times that the MS APIs are opened up for others to exploit, or that the MS Office Suite is made available to 3rd parties to develop. I’m afraid this won’t work, *unless* the companies that pick it up also invest $5.3bn a year (or equiv. in freely donated resources if we are talking about an OpenSource 3rd party) on R&D spending. And with $5.3bn, I suspect that you could probably afford to reverse engineer the MS Office file formats properly, finish WINE (or, more likely, a clean-room OS with Win32 API) and keep it up to date, and implement the whole of the .NET frameworks. You’d also be able make your own innovations, and we could see whether the MS bells’n’whistles were preferred to the 3rd party ones.
However, the organizations that have the resources to do this (the IBMs and Fujitsus and, possibly, Sun), don’t want to. Its not their strategy; they have their own rafts of products (new and legacy) to support. If they were offered the entire Windows source code on a plate, would they even take it? I don’t know.
Actually, Microsoft formats would be already reversed engineered if the rest of the industry, the open source projects, Sun, Corel and a few small ones work together in reverse engineering and documenting .doc format.
Besides, Sun only hires 2 people on reverse engineering Office. I’ll bet if they hired 20, it would be 10 times better than what they have now.
> If there was any antitrust suit against Microsoft, it is
> crap. Unfortunately, I never really paid attention to
> Canadian civil laws and its usage, so I can’t really condemn
> it as much as I’m doing now in this case.
Corel actually did win in the Canadian Court, once again MS paid off the penalty yet to win the market. Nobody is saying MS can’t provide good product, it’s their unfait way to conduct business that’s the point. If they can win the market on their own, why didn’t they compete fairly without bullying at all?
Perhaps to add to that is Corel did score some OEM deals from Dell and HP lately. If Corel can create a new office suite running natively on Linux, perhaps it’s the time to come with some competition. Of course Gobe Productive and Star Office will be here to compete as well.
This was a really well written and well thought out article. I agree that structural remedies were the only ones that would do any good. The states’ proposed remedies did seem quite silly. My main worries for the future are centered around patents/licencing and DRM technologies. I believe that Linux, though not as good as Windows today (on the desktop), will steadily improve and will eventually be better than Windows. However, I fear that through through the use of software patents (licencing policies aimed at shutting out open source) and manipulation of DRM policies, Microsoft may lock Linux out of the desktop market (all in the interest of security, of course).
Rob said: The US government doesn’t presently have a system or body capable of deciding issues like this in anything approaching an informed manner. Technology is rapidly outpacing society’s ability to understand it, let alone legislate it.
I think this is more a fault of the people who make-up the majority of our (US) government, rather than society itself. I’d also like to put some of the blame on technology itself (maybe more than some), as it is far from logically devised and is chaotic to the Nth degree purely for profit maximizing reasons (not technological growth reasons). In the USA, the first goal is to make a profit. The second goal is to maintain status-quo. Actual technological advancement comes probably last, after several other greedy goals are accomplished.
This was a good article, btw. And that’s not from a MS-bashing desire; more a desire to see rational and lucid commentary, written well (despite some typos, but hey, it wasn’t hard to read because of them).
The naivety of several people posting here in quite innocent defence of MS and “freedom from regulation” is frightening to me. I wonder how old these persona are and how long they have been actively paying attention to the computer industry, or if they really pay attention at all. I still think the defenders are people most actively hoping to be a Microsoft of their own one day. And of course the Linux zealots (not all of the Linux community) are no better. Maybe even worse, since they’re hypocrites .
> In the USA, the first goal is to make a profit. The second goal is to
> maintain status-quo. Actual technological advancement comes probably last,
> after several other greedy goals are accomplished.
Making money by providing goods and services is not necessarily greedy. There are people who are born having all the things they could possibly want, but the rest of us need money to pay for housing, put food on the table, and buy better tools. Making money is as basic a need to modern man as learning how to hunt and gather food thousands of years ago.
Putting technology ahead of the desire to survive is, IMO, fairly stupid. There is also a great deal of technology which is not at all useful right now or in the near future. Because of these real-life problems, people are forced to make choices about which technology they wish to improve.
Suppose for a moment that everyone stopped whatever they were doing and donated all their labor to creating an efficient interplanetary transportation system and other devices which would be useful in colonizing mars. Unless someone figured out how to make food, clean water, and shelter out of thin air by simply willing it into existance, the entire world population would die in a few months.
Putting innovation ahead of everything else might sound nice on paper, but it does not put food on the table every night. Heck, if I spent all of my money and years of my life creating a new compression format, some whiny little penguin would demand to know the algorithms so that he can implement them and distribute a free compression program. What do I get out of it? It was my hard labor? Where does the money come from? Oh, you say, the penguins will like you. Well, great.
I would like to understand why profits are evil, but people keep cloning the software which was researched using money from those “evil” profits.
The reason windows and MS is do so well is cause their products are great. Office is so crap compared to… ermmm.. yeah no opposition.. windows XP is so crap compared to… nah sorry OSX and linux both have major shortcommings to users.. Visual studio is sooo crap compared to .. oh erm delphi? or urm…. Internet explorer is soo crap compared to .. netscape.. hahah yer..
The best programs are written by MS thats why ppl buy them.. and thats why so many linux projects go titsup once they make them not free.. cause they arent worth buying.
ppl should go hassle some oil company for maintaining a third world oppressive government and destroying the environment…
Pls find something better to do..
OR how about write a better OS or office or web browser…
go on if its actually good ill use it.. i promise
Microsoft’s monopoly will prevent the widespread adoption of Mozilla or any other standards compliant web browser.
Not true.
Many of my friends still use windows, but are switching to Mozilla / Phoenix
Oil companies shouldn’t care about politics as long as their way to profit isn’t hindered. Plus, oil companies are far more cleaner that many other third world industries.
The old view of separation of business from politics has somewhat become obsolete. Initially, government intervention has been sort of undesirable since their effectiveness in making technical/professional/economic decisions are inferior to those of business and professions. However, it is increasingly became clear that these business and corporations has grown to a scale that already overtake the roles of public interest.
If Dow Chemical operated only for their profit, they probably preferred not to deal with the pollution the chemical industry created; similarly if MS only aimed for profit, and forcing OEMs to bundle what they liked rather than what the customers requested, it will be the undoing of the customers. Even you think IE is better than Netscape or Mozilla, there’s no reason why the OEM can’t bundle them to the customers who requested, and that’s what MS tried to force their OEMs not to do.
I used BeOS, and still miss it today – that really was a winner.
BeOS was in part killed by the strong-arm tactics of OEM deals, which placed the OS out of OEM machines… And yes… they (Be) spent billions in making BeOS…
A level playing field is a requirement to exist competition. Without it, you can have whatever resources you wan’t but you will end up eating the dust!
In the long run… It’s required 25 years of waiting for the field become leveled (when the patents expire)… That is a no-no in the IT Market!
Cheers…
The old view of separation of business from politics has somewhat become obsolete. Initially, government intervention has been sort of undesirable since their effectiveness in making technical/professional/economic decisions are inferior to those of business and professions. However, it is increasingly became clear that these business and corporations has grown to a scale that already overtake the roles of public interest.
I think the primary problem is that government moves too slowly and with too little true understanding of the markets in which they try to intervene. This antitrust case started over Windows 98, and now here we are 4 years later with an almost completely different environment and a very different operating system in Windows XP. The other problem is that public interest is only served by antitrust law in a trickle-down effect, that business interests (on the part of competitors to the monopoly) are served first, and this only serves the public in the long run, and are not always clear to the public. In this case specifically, the government had a hard time making their case for any type of remedy beyond what is made in the DoJ’s settlement proposal. What competitors and some consumers would like to see happen goes well beyond a remedy for the actions that were proven in the case.
If Dow Chemical operated only for their profit, they probably preferred not to deal with the pollution the chemical industry created; similarly if MS only aimed for profit, and forcing OEMs to bundle what they liked rather than what the customers requested, it will be the undoing of the customers. Even you think IE is better than Netscape or Mozilla, there’s no reason why the OEM can’t bundle them to the customers who requested, and that’s what MS tried to force their OEMs not to do.
But then, you fall into the same problem that the DoJ fell into. It’s easy to show where contracts prohibited competitors from having full use of normal distribution channels. Showing that anything further than opening up those distribution channels (by limiting Microsoft’s contracts with distributors) would actually help is significantly harder.
As an additional bonus, nothing prevents Microsoft’s competitors from making the same kind of contracts that got MS in trouble in the first place, because none of them are considered to be monopolies in the same field. So, while it isn’t possible for Microsoft to bring in a contractual requirement to ship only one of their products (such as Office), it is possible for a competitor to do the same with their own products. The only real issue there is whether or not a distributor would, at some point, be willing to sign such a contract, because at least some of their customers actually want the MS product.
BeOS was in part killed by the strong-arm tactics of OEM deals, which placed the OS out of OEM machines… And yes… they (Be) spent billions in making BeOS…
A level playing field is a requirement to exist competition. Without it, you can have whatever resources you wan’t but you will end up eating the dust!
Unfortunately, I’d have to say that BeOS was really more a matter of poor business decisions than anything else. If you’re going to make a business around an operating system, you’d better look into the current market and what your distribution options are before you invest in the R&D. You shouldn’t spend billions (or even millions) making an operating system before you find out that you can’t make deals with OEMs to get it pre-installed because of their existing contracts. They were very far into their money-burning cycle before they even found this out. Granted, the legality of what Microsoft did has been questioned and shown in the wrong, but that market existed in that state when BeOS started, and it should’ve been properly researched before the money was put into the project.
In the long run… It’s required 25 years of waiting for the field become leveled (when the patents expire)… That is a no-no in the IT Market!
Personally, I think patent terms should be based on the market in which those patents apply (ie you shouldn’t have 25 years of coverage for a product that has a 5 year maximum profitability). Still, any market is based around new ideas and the ability to bring forward something that people want. You shouldn’t have to rely on your competitors’ patents expiring before you can go to market. Even antitrust law isn’t about levelling the playing field, it’s about preventing the playing field from being walled off and owned by one particular company.
Well, I would dispute that Be spent *billions* developing BeOS; one of the most interesting things about it was the relatively low cost of development of the platform. It was also still a couple of years away from being a genuine replacement for Windows. I could do, maybe 80% of my work in BeOS (and really, really enjoyed the experience – chiefly borne of the responsiveness of the system), but it had a heck of a way to go before I could use it at work – multi-user, modern browser, better network performance all round.
And yes, the OEM thing was a major hurdle for Be – but I think it was already too late. Until the last public release of BeOS, it was not really suitable for OEMs (it was still too much of a work-in-progress). At that point, maybe OEM deals could have saved Be? And yes, the courts appear to say, MS did act illegally in the OEM market at that stage. But Be was already expiring; it had exhausted its cash on R&D already. That is a really weak position to be in to make OEM deals. (And an OEM is not going to commit to a company which looks like it is about to duck under). Really, Be’s mistake was not selling up to Apple at the time of asking.
Anyway, this has been hashed over very many times, so I’ll stop there!
A wholly different kettle of fish is IBM or Sun. They are not likely to duck under, but equally, they both have strategic reasons for *not* pushing OEM deals for their OSes. Corel also look like they may be around for a few more years yet (indeed, it is in MS interest to ensure that they don’t go away). This has not been the case these past several years, and may be another reason why OEMs have not touched them (until recently).
Anyway, MS bullying is not the only reason OEM deals don’t get made.
> In this case specifically, the government had a hard time
> making their case for any type of remedy beyond what is
> made in the DoJ’s settlement proposal. What competitors
> and some consumers would like to see happen goes well
> beyond a remedy for the actions that were proven in the
> case.
Agree. Even the infamous management consultant, thinker and “guru of all guru”, Peter Drucker, would suggest MS breakup into two business, which will be a better solution to the monopoly problem and restore competition among the industry.
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,13967|4,FF.html
(Check out section: Any thoughts on the Microsoft antitrust trial?)
> it is possible for a competitor to do the same with their
> own products. The only real issue there is whether or not
> a distributor would, at some point, be willing to sign
> such a contract, because at least some of their customers
> actually want the MS product.
Good point, I believe consumers should raise their voice over this issue, that at least they can demand OEMs to bundle the software they like to use, at least for those popular, freely available ones. Increasingly I see the separation of bundle and support contract taking place among OEMs and other service support companies. The way the settlement being handled now is not effective, or too limited/limiting at best. As others have raised the point repeatedly, until recently there wasn’t a viable alternative to Windows as a productive desktop.
Even now Linux and Mac OS X (and the software running on them) are improving, the support still remains an issue. I do believe however, with better knowledge base, open source forum engine and PHP scripting system, they can be handled gradually, bit by bit. As customers learn of a diversity of choices, hopefully the market may find its own solution to this problem.
Agree. Even the infamous management consultant, thinker and “guru of all guru”, Peter Drucker, would suggest MS breakup into two business, which will be a better solution to the monopoly problem and restore competition among the industry.
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,13967|4,FF.html
(Check out section: Any thoughts on the Microsoft antitrust trial?)
The article you link and your statement seem to be in disagreement with one another, though perhaps I’m reading things incorrectly. The article appears to state that breaking up MS would actually be beneficial to MS, though the leaders of MS may not think so at this time, and shows examples of how previous monopolies were benefitted by government intervention, by being forced to think of the markets in different ways. To restate one point made in that small portion of the article: a monopoly left alone bloats and stagnates to the point where it’s opponents easily outdo it in the market. A monopoly broken by antitrust actions benefits by new growth and new ways of looking at the existing market. Just imagine Microsoft like AT&T: as a giant monolith it is slowly stagnating and competitors are slowly growing to replace it, but if broken up it becomes a collection of smaller companies that can more easily adapt to the changing market, and maintain it’s leadership position in the market. In many areas the baby Bells are considered far worse than ‘Ma Bell’ ever was.
>The only real issue there is whether or not
> a distributor would, at some point, be willing to sign
> such a contract, because at least some of their customers
> actually want the MS product.
Good point, I believe consumers should raise their voice over this issue, that at least they can demand OEMs to bundle the software they like to use, at least for those popular, freely available ones. Increasingly I see the separation of bundle and support contract taking place among OEMs and other service support companies. The way the settlement being handled now is not effective, or too limited/limiting at best. As others have raised the point repeatedly, until recently there wasn’t a viable alternative to Windows as a productive desktop.
The real issue is making consumers aware that there are choices, and improving those choices over time so that they are better alternatives, rather than just viable alternatives. There was a time when more people used WordPerfect than Word, but once the products were comparable to one another marketing and market infiltration won out. In order to beat Microsoft’s dominant position, you really need a significantly better product, then you can make that product widely available and start the marketing machine. One thing Microsoft’s rise to it’s current position should show it’s competitors is that marketing, pricing, and swift product improvement can do much more as a combined front than just making the better product. Most of MS’ competitors at the time of Office’ (and it’s individual products’) rise were very slow to react, and often ended up selling an inferior product at a higher price than that which MS offered. Today, Microsoft is often the slower company and often has the higher prices, but they still have the marketing and the feature list which remains unmatched by most competitors.
Even now Linux and Mac OS X (and the software running on them) are improving, the support still remains an issue. I do believe however, with better knowledge base, open source forum engine and PHP scripting system, they can be handled gradually, bit by bit. As customers learn of a diversity of choices, hopefully the market may find its own solution to this problem.
Over time I think the market will even things out a bit, but I doubt MS will ever completely go away, unless they make some severely bad decisions. I think they’ll slowly lose ground in the operating systems market, and be relegated mostly to the areas of applications and development products, meaning that you’ll see them mostly as the developers of the .Net framework, Visual Studio, and possibly the Office family of applications. They might also manage to maintain some of their server-side applications, such as Exchange and SQL Server. Windows itself is bound to lose market share, and though it may never become a minority share of the market, there’ll be far too much profit to gain by developing cross-platform versions of Office and Visual Studio to let the market go to someone else in favour of supporting a diminishing Windows platform. Building a version of Windows that truly maximizes the capabilities of the .Net Framework may save it for a while, but I think over time open source alternatives to the operating system will really make even that irrelevant. Of course, if the .Net framework itself is a failure, Microsoft could really be in serious trouble in the long run.
The article you link and your statement seem to be in disagreement with one another, though perhaps I’m reading things incorrectly. The article appears to state that breaking up MS would actually be beneficial to MS, though the leaders of MS may not think so at this time, and shows examples of how previous monopolies were benefitted by government intervention, by being forced to think of the markets in different ways.
As long as competition is healthy and alive among the industry if breakup is carried out, I believe it is a sound decision, disregarding MS can be benefited from it or not. To be clear, anti-monopoly is different from anti-business. And by and large, monopoly was and is proven existent, both in the court and in history. I personally don’t think hurting large business is by itself any good, and like some of my previous posts, I truly adopted the view of competition as an article of faith, just as Mr. Sloan the CEO of GM at 40s (rumored) to help financing Ford personally to prevent it from collapsing and taken over by the government (for the labor interest, possibly). And as Peter Drucker pointed out, monopoly will get itself destroyed, and I believe, to a point of reasonable public interest, it should be.
Today, Microsoft is often the slower company and often has the higher prices, but they still have the marketing and the feature list which remains unmatched by most competitors.
Again MS did make good product, it’s just that the way they got their products sold in question. Perhaps I should say it more clearly, locking OEMs to exclusive OS/browser distribution should be regarded as unfair contract because they hurt customers. It’s more like asking supermarket only to sell exclusively either Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola, but not both.
Over time I think the market will even things out a bit, but I doubt MS will ever completely go away, unless they make some severely bad decisions.
Agree, even Linus Torvald pointed out MS will become another IBM, with specialized market and provide more professional services, rather than controlling over 90% of the (business and consumer) market like she did now. But of course, it could still be too early to tell, since nobody knew Gates or Ballmer would embrace the open source reality, or choose to fight until the end, just as others who fought against anti-trust suit to avoid breakup and maintain their monopoly until defeated.
Again MS did make good product, it’s just that the way they got their products sold in question. Perhaps I should say it more clearly, locking OEMs to exclusive OS/browser distribution should be regarded as unfair contract because they hurt customers. It’s more like asking supermarket only to sell exclusively either Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola, but not both.
It’s a slightly different situation, though. Pepsi and Coca-cola regularly make contracts that only permit people to sell one or the other, but not both, especially in restaraunts. Any company is permitted to make those kinds of deals. The problem is that Microsoft made those deals with most of the available distributors (more like all of the large distributors), and this settlement means they can no longer do so. I, personally, do not agree that such deals should be illegal, but since they are, I feel it’s a proper settlement that restricts them from doing exactly what they did to break the law in the first place. It should be left to competitors to take advantage of the situation, now.
I agree with the rest, without much to add, just thought I’d say that much because people sometimes accuse me (mostly on other boards) of ignoring things too often
Rajan, I didn’t say Microsoft prevented a particular competition. Because there are various reasons of the faiulre of several competitiors of Microsoft. What I said is that, court found Microsoft guilty of abusing its monopoly and I believe that verdict, and my understanding is that it is mostly related with the deals with OEMs. Any verdict which is related with bundling Explorer with Windows I don’t believe that it hurt Netscape. Though I believe that bundling may be ok, but there should be a way for competitiors to compete with such bundled products. The settlement addresses that problem.
There are two issues here I believe. Microsoft is too strong and it can crush any competition it wants. They have too much money, and they are very good at what they are doing. I don’t say anything about these, but if Microsoft uses its Windows monopoly to gain unfair advantage, then that’s wrong. Such as forcing OEMs not to use competitiors’ products and so on.
Now according to the court Microsoft did something wrong and they are phunished for that. It seems to me the phunisment is not big one, but I am not an expert on this issue, maybe it is the perfect phunishment. Anyway the problem is that, competitors started to blame Microsoft for almost anything. For example Intel accused Windows XP for its failure in wireless network equipment, the reason is very stupid. They say that Windows XP made it extremely easy to setup a wireless network, so the market became a commodity market and Intel doesn’t make much money on it. Now that’s stupid, but apparently web sites like CNet News take these accusations seriously, not that it is serious of course, but to say something against Microsoft. So that’s the other issue in this case, and these are wrong too. Nowadays number of claims against Microsoft are false in such a high rate that, Microsoft become the victim here.
That’s my standing on this issue.
It’s a slightly different situation, though. Pepsi and Coca-cola regularly make contracts that only permit people to sell one or the other, but not both, especially in restaraunts.
It makes sense for a single or a small group of restaurant to adopt one brand of coke over the other. After all it will be rather weird if customers ordered lemon coke and found that it might taste different, varied order by order (if both cokes are used occasionally…). If however, this exclusive contract is forced on large retail chains of supermarkets/shops, or over 90% of them, then I see a problem here. Perhaps it goes back to the negotiating power, after all supermarket didn’t sell coke alone, nor coke is considered such a neccessity like an operating system for a computer.
Another interesting thing is about the Windows Refund issue, as well as resale of unused Windows OEM package. As Linux Journal has reported, those who installed Linux on their laptop, and had no use for the OEM version of Windows OS bundled, found that they cannot get refund from it, yet the EULA prevented the resale of it (if I am right about this) to others. Users are hence stucked with unused product, and even unable to make it useful for others. This is something very rare and unusual for a consumer product, but it’s probably not about anti-trust, but about the product policy to the customers.
> If however, this exclusive contract is forced on large retail chains of
> supermarkets/shops, or over 90% of them, then I see a problem here. Perhaps
> it goes back to the negotiating power, after all supermarket didn’t sell
> coke alone, nor coke is considered such a neccessity like an operating
> system for a computer.
Interestingly enough, Pepsi became very successful while Coca-Cola had nearly the entire soft drink market cornered because a small business man began selling Pepsi in bottles that were twice as large as Coke’s for the same price. It tasted better; it cost less, and this coupled with the great depression at the time enabled Pepsi to slowly build up its market share until it was about even with Coke.
BeOS was in part killed by the strong-arm tactics of OEM deals, which placed the OS out of OEM machines… And yes… they (Be) spent billions in making BeOS…
I would detest the “billions”, but the OEMs was their second last hope for profitablity. First they tried selling machines ala XBOX, making profits from developers. Hardly anyone bought it because of the lack of apps. Then they went for Apple’s PPC market. Which Apple wasn’t too happy with. Then the PC market. Then the IA market.
What I can say is that this was the cause of lack of marketing skills. Before you even make a prototype, you have to survey your competitors and you target market. Then make a product that is sure to customers. What Be did was create a nice geek toy, couple it with cheap geek toy hardware hoping people other than geeks would adopt it.
A level playing field is a requirement to exist competition. Without it, you can have whatever resources you wan’t but you will end up eating the dust!
There is no such thing as a level playing field. If you want a level playing field, you have to set limits on everybody’s maximum (and minimum sales), preventing one to be more dominant than the other.
Competition is only good when the competitor gets its success without using a stupid law against its competitor. That’s what I call competent competition. Think I don’t know what I’m tking about? My dream is to create a company that among other things would compete with Microsoft. Sure, it would be easier if you get the antitrust hounds get on them, but for me it isn’t ethical.
In the long run… It’s required 25 years of waiting for the field become leveled (when the patents expire)… That is a no-no in the IT Market!
There are some patents that are legitimate. However, patents should only be made available for the software industry once the patent office understands the market and moves as fast as technology itself. Now patents are used to buly other players. With a competent patent office, patents would push competitors for innovation. But this isn’t the case for software where renaming a DLL gives you a patent.
PainkilleR: As an additional bonus, nothing prevents Microsoft’s competitors from making the same kind of contracts that got MS in trouble in the first place, because none of them are considered to be monopolies in the same field.
Which would be what exactly I would do. People scoff at the contracts, but if the media haven’t sensationalize on it, or if there wasn’t any antitrust suit against it, those who know of it would look up to it.
Granted, the legality of what Microsoft did has been questioned and shown in the wrong
The legality of it is questioned, but whether it is illegal or legal haven’t been proven in the courts (meaning Microsoft is not guilty until proven so).
But Be was already expiring; it had exhausted its cash on R&D already.
And the fact that they could make to very well with their capital if they used some marketing skills in advance.
A wholly different kettle of fish is IBM or Sun. They are not likely to duck under, but equally, they both have strategic reasons for *not* pushing OEM deals for their OSes.
Since when Sun ever wanted a OEM deal for its OS? Anyway, IBM themselves killed OS/2 by being shortsighted. They charged a price too high for clone makers where they, if they used OS/2, wouldn’t be in a position to compete with IBM.
Corel also look like they may be around for a few more years yet (indeed, it is in MS interest to ensure that they don’t go away).
Even if Microsoft turns against them, Corel would survive because its profitablity is in a market Microsoft is not involved in. Plus, WordPerfect fits niches Office can’t, business-wise, can’t fill.
This has not been the case these past several years, and may be another reason why OEMs have not touched them (until recently).
WordPerfect and Quartro Pro 2002 and only been considered by OEMs when the price war started, where MS Works doesn’t really allow their prices to be even lower. Microsoft never forbid competitors to Office to be bundled with Windows, they forbid competitors to certain parts of Windows (i.e. IE, explorer.exe, OE).
Zero: Agree. Even the infamous management consultant, thinker and “guru of all guru”, Peter Drucker, would suggest MS breakup into two business, which will be a better solution to the monopoly problem and restore competition among the industry.
Might be that way, but breaking up the company wouldn’t put a stop to the “anti-competitive” stuff in question now. Plus, under Jackson’s remedy, Microsoft (or Windows Inc.) can make new components of Windows, components similar in nature as Internet Explorer. It doesn’t really solve anything today. Maybe in 1998, but now it is 2002.
Zero: Good point, I believe consumers should raise their voice over this issue, that at least they can demand OEMs to bundle the software they like to use, at least for those popular, freely available ones.
Consumers have no right to say what goes in and what doesn’t. If they don’t like the bundle for one reason or another, their ultimate consumer power is not to buy it.
Zero: As customers learn of a diversity of choices, hopefully the market may find its own solution to this problem.
And it will. Linux is playing Microsoft’s own game. No cooperation with its rivals, pricing something much cheaper than their competitors. Which is exactly the way Windows won. Within the next decade or so, we would see Linux becoming more and more dominant.
As long as competition is healthy and alive among the industry if breakup is carried out, I believe it is a sound decision, disregarding MS can be benefited from it or not.
Microsoft would still be able to maintain their monopoly in Office and Windows with the breakup, which is why it was thrown up. If the breakup was to do with two companies making Windows, Office, Encarta, Works, MSN, etc., things might be different. But the breakup was Windows vs. everything else.
It’s more like asking supermarket only to sell exclusively either Coca Cola or Pepsi Cola, but not both.
It is possible, but Coca Cola might never benefit out of it (or Pepsi if they are making the demands). The OEM deals was not that OEMs can’t bundle other stuff other than Windows, it forbid them for bundle them WITH Windows. So I’m quite sure Coca Cola doesn’t really allow selling Cokes and Pepsis in one package.
Besides, in restraunts, they have such contracts.
Character limit up 🙂
Consumers have no right to say what goes in and what doesn’t. If they don’t like the bundle for one reason or another, their ultimate consumer power is not to buy it.
It’s the willingness of the company to serve the customers, and I believe it’s the attitude of one differed from the others. If corporate became another power control center and rule-making body just like the government, what is the functioning of market? To provide choices or to limit choices? If customers are demanding new products, or different combinations of products, it’s up to the company to decide if to support of course; but then as other pointed out, it’s the point of exclusive contract limiting over 90% of market to offer one type of OS product on the market. Where are the choices, even if the OEMs want to provide? If consumers’ undoing is justified for the corporate America, this is not the America I’ve known, perhaps there are some changes in the freedom and choice culture I don’t know so far.
The reason company decided to support one product over the other is financial, resource use, and perhaps contract terms. In the past, supporting more than one type of product with the same number of customers is counter-productive, economic wise, since you need to train the same support team two systems with different setting and knowledges, and the training cost went up which is no good otherwise. Limiting to support one platform has its own merit, disregarding locking contract due to monopoly.
Nowadays to implement a knowledge base using open source tools, is much more feasible and economically cost-effective. Perhaps the debate of whether supporting only one type of products by major OEMs would become obsolete, as major stores will start to bundle Linux on Desktop. Furthermore, the settlement now render exclusive contract for MS illegal. If one controls over 90% over other people’s way to conduct work (on computer), it is no longer a private business behavior, since over 90% of the people were involved – it becomes public interest – like it or not.
Microsoft would still be able to maintain their monopoly in Office and Windows with the breakup, which is why it was thrown up. If the breakup was to do with two companies making Windows, Office, Encarta, Works, MSN, etc., things might be different. But the breakup was Windows vs. everything else.
Hmm… I thought the breakup is Windows vs others, meaning we could be seeing MS Office on Linux, now I believe that will be a big boost to migration from Windows. Of course the Office monopoly might still exist, but as for now other low cost alternative will be there, Star Office, and Gobe Productive, hopefully some products from Corel as well.
So I’m quite sure Coca Cola doesn’t really allow selling Cokes and Pepsis in one package.
Probably not, but like PainKilleR said before, small restaurants probably will face an exclusive procurement contract demanded by either Coca Cola or Pepsi; moreover it’s not like one does not drink Coke/Pepsi will die or cease to function or anything; but without an functioning OS, users will stuck; from the control of OS onwards to other extensions such as browsers and Office, it clearly enjoyed an unparalled advantage; I am not asking MS to allow customers to demand a dual-boot bundle where two OSes are installed on the same PC, I am asking them to allow programs to be installed on the OS in the bundle if the OEMs are willing; however, to be fair, I see it’s not up to MS to support a competing product, or any other product not from them; hence my point that separation of bundle and support contract in the future, where product mix with greater diversity will hopefully take place.
Software is unlike any other product, combination of various tools (office, graphic, 3D, video-editing, developing your own programs) to work on a single project is very common. Increasingly, to the benefit of knowledge workers as the majority of this society, and the ability of knowledge to create even more innovation (rather than just capital), restraining product mixes and choices because these products compete with each other is simply too inflexible and limiting. I do admit, however, this goes beyond simply defending or bashing business value, but to the reality that, I believe, the rapid innovation of knowledge will even benefit us more than the pure defend of business values, as long as productivity, freedom and fairness, as well as living standard getting improved.
What I don’t understand about Be issue is that, some people accuse Microsoft for Be’s failure, but they never question Apple for Be’s failure in PowerPC market. Isn’t bundling your OS with hardware a bigger sin than any OEM deal Microsoft may have?
The reason company decided to support one product over the other is financial, resource use, and perhaps contract terms. In the past, supporting more than one type of product with the same number of customers is counter-productive, economic wise, since you need to train the same support team two systems with different setting and knowledges, and the training cost went up which is no good otherwise. Limiting to support one platform has its own merit, disregarding locking contract due to monopoly.
Nowadays to implement a knowledge base using open source tools, is much more feasible and economically cost-effective. Perhaps the debate of whether supporting only one type of products by major OEMs would become obsolete, as major stores will start to bundle Linux on Desktop. Furthermore, the settlement now render exclusive contract for MS illegal. If one controls over 90% over other people’s way to conduct work (on computer), it is no longer a private business behavior, since over 90% of the people were involved – it becomes public interest – like it or not.
Implementing a knowledge base isn’t the only issue at hand with supporting multiple operating systems as far as major OEMs are concerned. There’s also the training of tech support staff, as well as maintaining that staff on hand for support calls. Remember that the OEMs don’t just provide pre-installation, but also support. At best they can contract the support to the vendor they use for their distribution of Linux, or whatever other OS they decide to install, but most of the time the OEMs take the support burden themselves. An added problem is that the OEM might have to support more hardware platforms if there are problems under one operating system with certain pieces of hardware where there are not problems under Windows (and there’s the additional burden of testing the systems under multiple operating systems, as, believe it or not, most major OEMs do extensive testing on their hardware configurations to reduce their support costs).
Hmm… I thought the breakup is Windows vs others, meaning we could be seeing MS Office on Linux, now I believe that will be a big boost to migration from Windows. Of course the Office monopoly might still exist, but as for now other low cost alternative will be there, Star Office, and Gobe Productive, hopefully some products from Corel as well.
They didn’t define the line very well, but it was basically applications and operating systems. However, I don’t think it would’ve caused MS AppsCo. to develop for new platforms any more than the applications divisions would today. The key focus was to prevent MS from tying the applications into the operating system. Essentially, I believe the operating systems arm of the business would’ve gone under because it would’ve been the only operating system shipping without applications that most people expect to have installed on their computers (media players, internet browsers, all that crap MS has been bundling since 95 and earlier, and integrating over the last few years).
Probably not, but like PainKilleR said before, small restaurants probably will face an exclusive procurement contract demanded by either Coca Cola or Pepsi;
Actually, maybe you didn’t notice, but large restaurants and fast food chains sign exclusive contracts with one or the other. In fact, you can’t get Pepsi in most restaurants, the primary exceptions being fast food places previously owned by Pepsi (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut). Since both companies own numerous other soft drinks, it’s very normal for every drink in the restaurant to be supplied by Coke or Pepsi, including water and tea in extreme cases. They also do the same thing with many venues for sporting events and other public events. The difference is that neither Coke nor Pepsi has an extremely large share of the market, they’re fairly equal though one is usually slightly ahead.
moreover it’s not like one does not drink Coke/Pepsi will die or cease to function or anything; but without an functioning OS, users will stuck; from the control of OS onwards to other extensions such as browsers and Office, it clearly enjoyed an unparalled advantage; I am not asking MS to allow customers to demand a dual-boot bundle where two OSes are installed on the same PC, I am asking them to allow programs to be installed on the OS in the bundle if the OEMs are willing; however, to be fair, I see it’s not up to MS to support a competing product, or any other product not from them; hence my point that separation of bundle and support contract in the future, where product mix with greater diversity will hopefully take place.
Of course, the allowance for other applications to be bundled with the operating system exists in the current OEM contracts which were drawn up for this settlement. Microsoft doesn’t have most of the support burden for their operating system anyway, and usually charge on a per-incident basis.
Software is unlike any other product, combination of various tools (office, graphic, 3D, video-editing, developing your own programs) to work on a single project is very common. Increasingly, to the benefit of knowledge workers as the majority of this society, and the ability of knowledge to create even more innovation (rather than just capital), restraining product mixes and choices because these products compete with each other is simply too inflexible and limiting. I do admit, however, this goes beyond simply defending or bashing business value, but to the reality that, I believe, the rapid innovation of knowledge will even benefit us more than the pure defend of business values, as long as productivity, freedom and fairness, as well as living standard getting improved.
Of course, you have to have a limitation on the depth to which you support a particular product. I can build a spell-checker component that I use in multiple applications, but should I have to support it if someone else hooks into it for their application? Should I support the applications I made when someone else’s spell-checker is hooked into it? Granted a spell-checker isn’t likely to cause major faults, but it’s one of many components that MS actually has in their system (in Office actually), and is little different from the various IE components that were heavily debated in the case.
Sergio, if only I had you email address. Email me, will ya?
Implementing a knowledge base isn’t the only issue at hand with supporting multiple operating systems as far as major OEMs are concerned. There’s also the training of tech support staff, as well as maintaining that staff on hand for support calls. Remember that the OEMs don’t just provide pre-installation, but also support. At best they can contract the support to the vendor they use for their distribution of Linux, or whatever other OS they decide to install, but most of the time the OEMs take the support burden themselves. An added problem is that the OEM might have to support more hardware platforms if there are problems under one operating system with certain pieces of hardware where there are not problems under Windows (and there’s the additional burden of testing the systems under multiple operating systems, as, believe it or not, most major OEMs do extensive testing on their hardware configurations to reduce their support costs).
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Of course, you have to have a limitation on the depth to which you support a particular product. I can build a spell-checker component that I use in multiple applications, but should I have to support it if someone else hooks into it for their application? Should I support the applications I made when someone else’s spell-checker is hooked into it? Granted a spell-checker isn’t likely to cause major faults, but it’s one of many components that MS actually has in their system (in Office actually), and is little different from the various IE components that were heavily debated in the case.
Yes there is support problem, and hence if customers required different software mix to be bundled, they should understand the support terms and liability should be different. I know this will create more trouble for the customer support depts, but I believe, at least to inform the customers to understand the risk of choices, and to evaluate the benefit meanwhile. (Did Corel score a deal with HP and Dell to bundle WordPerfect Suite instead of MS Works on Windows lately?) Or, OEMs will really start to bundle both Windows and Linux systems separately as demand increases. Again support will be a problem, but I do see it is a challenge of the new reality of computing, and certainly a serious competitor to Windows did not exist when the trial started in 1998. Subcontracting the service support to outsiders will be a trend coming, especially for Linux system.
They also do the same thing with many venues for sporting events and other public events. The difference is that neither Coke nor Pepsi has an extremely large share of the market, they’re fairly equal though one is usually slightly ahead.
I guess the point is made that neither of them holds a monopoly of the market, and hence exclusive agreement didn’t hurt customers or retailers much. Not to mention there are too many other alternatives(competitors) to coke or pepsi as a ‘bundle’ of meals in restaurant. Once again, coke and pepsi are neither necessity as products, unlike OS on a PC. If everyone has to get an OS to use a computer, it affects every computer users, including major businesses and governments. The computer’s role is even more focal in that it is to increase productivity, not just for consumption.
The EULA of Win2k SP3 and WinXP SP1 limit users from publishing benchmarks conducted on the updated system to the public. So even users who want to demand for improvement on performance of the system had to go thru them and public discussion on the web where evident benchmarks won’t be allowed. Is it controlling or not? And is it just about business contract or the software development and improvement that’s more important to everyone of us? I suppose I am speaking not just on the freedom of contract, but also the freedom of innovation and competition. Which is more important, and how do we decide? Either we drink coke or pepsi, I would presume the tomorrow won’t be changed much ourselves; but if we cannot publish benchmark and maintain an open discussion on software performance because the contract said so, or we cannot ask for software we need from OEMs, what will the loss be? And perhaps, this is why the extreme opposite: open source, and the freedom to bundle everything else that’s open source even they are (technically) competing with each other, is advocated; and it is being well received even by the corporate guys.