Final Arguments in MS vs. the States 381
Bistronaut writes "Reports are in today on the final arguments between the 9 State Attorneys General and Microsoft (articles from eWeek). CNN also has a summary. Spoiler: States say, "Here are our priorities for reforming MS." - MS says, "We don't need no stinkin' remedy.""
Re:finally (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about what you're saying, and quit trolling for Microsoft.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, when I got into computers back in 1991 I started with DOS and only began the love affair when I discovered OS/2.
Where would we be without MS? Imagine a best of breed OS that evolved from the best aspects of OS/2, BeOS and Linux, all three of which would have had mainstream support and decent marketshares years ago if the OEMs weren't scared shiteless of retaliation from MS.
Immovable object and ? force... (Score:2, Insightful)
---snip---
For their part, the non-settling states said additional disclosure of the source code that would allow rival software to work with the Windows operating system was their most important demand. "If you forced us to articulate the single highest priority -- that's it," states' attorney Steve Kuney told the judge.
---snip---
As far as Microsoft's priorities with respect to the proposed remedies are concerned, Sullivan said its top priority is to make sure the company is not forced to reveal more of its source code, insisting that doing so would substantially harm the company and give and unfair advantage to competitors, arguments that Gates and other Microsoft executives have made repeatedly in the past.
---snip---
Hello? Essentially, Microsoft says it's top priority is NOT doing what the states feel is the topmost remedy to the entire situation.
Again, DOJ and MS lock horns head on and it will come down to the Judge.
Dear god let us have a resolution already.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:5, Insightful)
Running Netscape on OS/2 Warp? Running Mosaic on MacOS? Despite what they'd like you to believe, Microsoft has not contributed anything particularly vital to the ease of use of computers. The basic concepts can all be found elsewhere(and earlier). Windows at Xerox PARC and on MacOS. The mouse was invented well before Microsoft was founded. DOS was certainly nothing special, and Win95 didn't offer anything OS/2 wasn't doing well before. I fail to see any big favors they've done us.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, until I completely swore off developing on Microsoft I was rebooting several times a week ("Mouse movement detected. Reboot now?"), having to reinstall several times a year, spending days scouring bbs, usenet, msdn to see if anyone else had seen my particular microsoft problem before. Always wondering when Microsoft would break existing implementations in their attempts to force upgrade. I still have to help out relatives who think they've broken their system when Microsoft changes an Office format, I still spend much time deleting Outlook worm mail, I've had to spend time telling clueless managers what all that nimda traffic was in the (Netscape) webserver logs.
So all in all, without Microsoft I'd probably have a couple months of my life back, lower stress levels, and a healthier liver.
Microsofts attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
I am really getting tired of Microsofts attitude towards this whole trial. Take your lumps and move on.
Re:It's never over (Score:2, Insightful)
In America we love our freedom but give it all away to Bill
Guess file compatibility's worth more to us than our free will
"Kick" - Irrational Exuberance
no no no, it's more like this... (Score:2, Insightful)
BillG + lawyers: Well, I'm rubber and you're glue, your thousands of reasons bounce off of me and stick to you!
States: Uh, uh, uh, wait, that doesn't mean anything! I read in some law book that you actually have to refute our reasons and stuff!
BillG + lawyers: Too late! We already said it! And look, here's our press release declaring that you smell your own farts! Nyah-nyah!
States: Rats! We'd better focus our remaining arguments on declaring that we're not fart-smellers!
Ballmer: Hey! I don't smell my own farts! (dances like a sweaty monkey)
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Seriously, does anyone expect anything genuinely more informative than that from their arguments? the DOJ let MS dictate many of the terms of the debate, and wasted too much effort fighting MS on their own semantic turf, focusing insanely on the conceptually murky(-able) browser issues rather than looking at the "smoking gun" issues (such as OEM licensing and dual-booting, DR-DOS "incompatibility", even Apple and MS-Office). The states haven't done much of anything to expand on the DOJs well-supported, but poorly-executed arguments.
Not that MS has come up with any non-philosphical arguments themselves - most of their objections are based on the idea that the law shouldn't apply in their "special case", which is based on "software is different/MS is too economically vital to mess with/Gates is a lovey-sweetums and everyone should just love him back".
For crying out loud, the debates about post-modernism I attended in art school never achieved the bull-headed, pseudo-articulate, self-important levels of idiocy that this trial has.
And now I've added to it..
Blech.
Anti-Trust Case was always bogus (Score:1, Insightful)
I've proposed several remedies for the problems, none of which have a chance of getting adopted :-)
Microsoft's complaint (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, imagine that. Being convicted of a crime and then actually being punished. What a crazy world we live in, huh?
Cheap humor aside, can anyone explain (and IANAL, so I'm asking honestly here) why a company that lost an antitrust suit gets to make arguments about what the punishment should be? If a private citizen is successfully sued, does s/he get to go through another round of hearings arguing that s/he shouldn't be penalized?
Frood
To quote Neal Stephenson... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The availability of all this cheap but effective hardware was an unintended consequence of decisions that had been made more than a decade earlier by IBM and Microsoft. When Windows came out, and brought the GUI to a much larger market, the hardware regime changed: the cost of color video cards and high-resolution monitors began to drop, and is dropping still. This free-for-all approach to hardware meant that Windows was unavoidably clunky compared to MacOS. But the GUI brought computing to such a vast audience that volume went way up and prices collapsed. Meanwhile Apple, which so badly wanted a clean, integrated OS with video neatly integrated into processing hardware, had fallen far behind in market share, at least partly because their beautiful hardware cost so much.
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux."
Not trying to troll just pondering (Score:3, Insightful)
What does Windows do for me?
Compatability- let's face it, even all of our beloved OSes like *nix and OS2 dont' support everything that we want. Microsoft is generally up to date a good bit of stuff. If I want a Paralell scanner that I have to work, its easy. Linux, I look online, sorry that's not supported, it needs to be SCSI or USB. OS2, I don't know, but IBM isn't really pushing its updating now are they... Other things also fall into this pit. Alot of hardware is Windows only, while this isn't Microsoft's fault, its certainly nice to have an OS that's 'standard' on most desktops, no it's not the only OS I use, I have 3 linux boxes and 5 windows boxes around the house, all different flavors on all.
Simplcity- While Mac OS offers this as well, which I am grateful for. I know Windows well. I know linux well too. However, there are too few 'standards' around for linux setups and configs. Its hard to troubleshoot. Perhaps thats just me, but it still needs maturing for standard setups, etc...
There are a few other ways that Windows helps me, but I am outta time....
Anyway, sorry if you guys thought I was trolling, but I just didn't see the 'antitrust' suits as being really a big deal, Microsoft didn't ever stop me from using a 3rd party utility or 'confuse' me about their options to install software. I can put Opera, or Mozilla, or Netscape, or AOL, or Realplayer on my system as easy as anything else. It's not stopping me from doing what I need to do. Anyway, there goes my Karma...
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:5, Insightful)
An honorable sentiment, BUT...
...seeing as Microsoft stole their user interface from the Apple Macintosh (which stole it from Xerox PARC's "Altos" system),
...and seeing that Mac had long filenames and REAL plug-and-play (with its pure SCSI architecture) years before MS had a clue that these might be good things,
...and seeing that the loss of Mac's market share to PCs was really due to price and NOT capability or ease of use (in 3 words: cheap PC clones),
...what exactly do you think we owe to Microsoft? Not one innovation in computing or user interfaces has come from Redmond. NOT ONE. And software? Their best products were purchased, not developed by them (Visio, PowerPoint, FrontPage, MSIE nee Spyglass Mosaic, etc., etc...). Even C# is just a Java ripoff.
Let's leave Linux out of the picture for a minute. Sit down with a Mac (if you haven't already). Every good thing MS has given you, they got from Apple or other software vendors. Except the Internet, which was old when I was a pup... and the Web, which came from Tim Berners-Lee and a little NeXT box called info.cern.ch. :-)
we can only hope... (Score:4, Insightful)
The commercial software establishment is largely like these now non-existant railroad franchises. People have discovered that it's just software, and they are happier to enjoy a level of compatibility accross a variety of systems.
Of course, once the railroad industries agreed on standards it became possible for mass production of standards-based railway hardware. This eliminated much of the guesswork, tracks were wide enough to support trains of various sizes and shapes. Without these standards, the golden age of travel would have been unachievable.
Software needs to adopt standards, and the open source community has been vital to that process.
Given Microsoft's track record in this area, I think the best outcome now is for the judge to force MS to abide by standards for all present and future networking protocols. If a networked feature of MS software does not employ a documented RFC, W3C recommendation, etc. it must be fixed.
And there should be a federal committee responsible for reviewing and enforcing this. It is not acceptable that standards can be implemented along with a proprietary MS protocol (eg: MS Exchange).
Ultimately, all commercial software should be made to follow these rules, only the open source community will be allowed to innovate networking protocols. Most of the significant protocols came from open source / public domain anyway, let's mandate that tradition and stop companies like Microsoft from meddling with a good thing.
Re:Something really wrong here (Score:3, Insightful)
Never underestimate the twistiness of a lawyer- and judges are uber-lawyers.
I'd have done the same thing. It's way more effective than asking them, "Are you going to obey the outcome of this proceeding, or laugh at it and scorn it?" You don't ask them directly, 'are you going to obey the law'. You ask, 'how much of this is reasonable and just'. If they take it as an opportunity to grandstand, you know they're gonna ignore the ruling, because they don't believe in it, or in the law.
FWIW, I burst into incredulous, delighted laughter just seeing the news.com subhead about what Microsoft had done for a reply to the question. Forget foot-shooting: they've blown off their f**king leg here. Spectacularly bad judgement. And Judge Kollar-Kotelly is a smart lady :D
Re:Not trying to troll just pondering (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, sorry if you guys thought I was trolling, but I just didn't see the 'antitrust' suits as being really a big deal, Microsoft didn't ever stop me from using a 3rd party utility or 'confuse' me about their options to install software. I can put Opera, or Mozilla, or Netscape, or AOL, or Realplayer on my system as easy as anything else. It's not stopping me from doing what I need to do.
Indirectly, they did. By not allowing OEM's to preload BeOS on their computers (That's an anti-trust violation!) they have not only prevented me from getting a quality OS from a quality OEM, but now I can't get BeOS at all! The same thing with Netscape. I can't get Netscape preloaded from an OEM because Microsoft is able to punish OEM's who want to sell me what I want. (Another anti-trust violation) For goodness sakes, they are supposed to be system integrator's. If I want Netscape 7 and Realplayer 8 on 40 PC's I purchase, I shouldn't have to pay someone else to install them. I should be able to get them preloaded from Dell. I can't though, and the reason is that Microsoft went around to OEM's and told them to not preload Netscape, or else. And we all know what, "Or else" means.
Consider your feeling for Clear Channel. They have an increasing more powerful ability to control record companies. Suppose they told a record company to not sign up a certain group, or they'd not play any of the record companies music? Now all of a suddenly that band finds itself forced to sign with a small record company. Sure, you could probably buy the CD mail-order or something, but the music isn't heard on mainstream radio, sold at Best Buy and other retail outlets, and for the most part unknown. But it hasn't stopped you from listening to the copy you were able to purchase.
See, it's the same thing with Microsoft. Sure, you can still use Opera. But because Microsoft is willing to break anti-trust law, you can't get Opera on your new Dell PC.
Compatability- let's face it, even all of our beloved OSes like *nix and OS2 dont' support everything that we want. Microsoft is generally up to date a good bit of stuff. If I want a Paralell scanner that I have to work, its easy. Linux, I look online, sorry that's not supported, it needs to be SCSI or USB.
This is one of the strangest pieces of logic I've ever seen. And I really wish that people would get some common sense and I'd never hear it again. Okay, maybe companies write drivers for Windows because it's the most popular. But that doesn't mean that drivers couldn't be written for other OS's. It just means that the companies don't want to write the drivers for other OS's. If Windows didn't exist today, companies would be writing drivers for at least one other OS. And that's a fact.
-BrentRebut (Score:4, Insightful)
As for 3rd party apps, you can expect an unchecked monopoly to stop you from using them in subtle ways. I'm not saying that everything they have done is bad for us, I'm saying that a person who says "there is nothing wrong here" is ignoring the facts. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is smarter than you or I, and he studied this issue for a very long time and heard the best arguements money could buy, and he came to the conclusion that there is something very wrong here, and that it is bad for you and I, and that drastic measures are warranted.
Re:Microsoft's complaint (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Microsoft was not sued.
2) In a criminal case, yes.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not because i am some kind of rabid mac fanatic. It is just because there has never been a point that any Microsoft OS looks compelling.
When i need server work done, or webpages or CGI or whatever hosted, i use a variety of Unices (linux for my main server box, my college's Solaris box). I have been quite satisfied with the performance of all of them.
I can quite honestly say Microsoft has never, ever done anything for me.
The only Microsoft product i've ever owned was MSIE/OE; and i honestly believe that if it hadn't been for MS flooding the market with free IE to destroy Netscape's revenue, it would have been possible for a competitor to Netscape to appear, one i doubt would have been any worse than MSIE. So, OK, they gave me a stable, standards-compliant web browser, but they also destroyed the web browser market, preventing anyone else from creating a stable, standards-compliant web browser. So i'm going to say that those two things cancel each other out.
I want to stress this hasn't just been "i won't use it if it's microsoft". Every time microsoft has released a product, i have looked at it, evaluated it, and simply come to the conclusion it is an inferior product compared to the competition.
My sole experience with Microsoft's existence has been a steady train since 1991 or so of finding really cool new products and technologies, using these cool new products, and watching Microsoft destroy the corporations responsible for those products.
So, what has Microsoft done for me? Well, i have a long list of really neat products that i think would have developed into something cool, but because of Microsoft's aggressive business practice, they were put out of business, and their ideas were developed no further. With the exception of Microsoft Office (sometimes), and MSIE (again, doesn't count, because Netscape is crap undeserving of a comparison and MS blocked any third parties out of the market), I have never, ever seen Microsoft put out a product superior to its competitors; the one exception, Office, was superior as such because 1), Microsoft knew that word processors were such a fierce field that they could only get by if it were on merit, and 2), they had ungodly amounts of resources from their more-dubiously-attained markets, and they threw all of them into making Office. Now that Office has successfully wiped all of its competitors, I seriously doubt it will improve any further. I also notice it seems to be about $200 more expensive than it as when Wordperfect was a viable alternative.
I have seen MS steamroll over products that had the potential to be superior to all else, and be useful to me, if MS hadn't steamrolled them. Also, becuase Microsoft created a singular entity that turned the OS market into a single huge block, no one seems to care about making cross platform games, meaning I don't get many games these days. I mostly play old NES stuff.
So, i'm reflecting. Everything that Microsoft has done for me ("to" me?) has come down to corrupting all software markets, making the software industry a horrible mess in which all other companies either squabble over MS's leftovers in specialty markets & die horribly at the drop of a hat or are existing "off the grid" (as it were) in the Open Source Fairy-Land. They have locked up ALL the resources in the industry into one huge industry, and absolutely destroyed choice; i have no serious options for my desktop machine except mac os x. (Linux's desktop abilities are incomplete, and Windows is just overall a joke. Where is Be? Where is Amiga? Where is OpenDoc? Where is the cool NaviOS from LAIN? Where is the evolution of basic computing assumptions?) And the funniest thing is, with all its absolutely rediculous resources and market presence and locked-in, NDA'd programmers and contracts and mindshare, Microsoft still can't and never has fricking created a better product than the underfunded, starving minority producers they stomp out, in any field except the very most recent versions of Office and MSIE, and they're even beginning to lose the advantage in THOSE areas!
Wow. That's quite a lot Microsoft has done. Now tell me why i should think of the ending of this trial in any terms except for "the remedies must be as drastic as possible in order to save the software industry"?
I live without Microsoft. I've also, incidentally, at school and jobs, used Microsoft products enough to know what living with Microsoft would be like.
I can quite simply and honestly say that if you had to live without Microsoft, too, you would be absolutely no worse off.
Re:The judge has been favoring MS... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anti-Trust Case was always bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem wasn't just giving the browser away, it was leveraging their OS monopoly to obtain a browser monopoly. Yes, legally, if you have a monopoly there are some things you can't do that everyone else can do.
It's never been 'a Technically Right Choice' in any sense of the word, that's just horseshit. It's been done for one reason and one reason only - to sabotage the consent decree.
They were? Huh? They still use the same tactics today.
Re:Anti-Trust Case was always bogus (Score:1, Insightful)
Then, please name the other OS vendor(s) who have integrated their browser technology so thoroughly into their OS that flaws in the browser application show up in completely unrelated applications.
No, It was NOT a technically right choice, any more than moving video drivers into ring 0 to speed up video response on a professional-level OS (NT). Marketing choices, one and all.
Re:Where lies the real fault? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really?
So you're saying that BeOS had the same options and opportunities available? They could have gone to the hardware companies and said "Look, if you give any indication that you're putting Windows on the same system, we're going to charge you double for the BeOS license" and not get laughed out of the office?
You're suggesting that Netscape had the opportunity to use the revenue from their massive monopoly on OEM OS sales to back them giving away their browser until it crushed the competition?
Possibly you're suggesting that Word Perfect or Lotus had the opportunity to leverage their intimate knowledge of propietary Windows APIs to make their software run as fast as any competitor, or that they could modify the underlying OS to cause problems with Microsoft Word or Excel?
Now, can you argue that other companies dropped the ball? Sure, some did. But don't be so quick to assume stupidity on the part of a public that was robbed of any choice from a company leveraging it's monopoly in one area (the OS) to eliminate competition in other areas.
Re:Where lies the real fault? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you real? The only thing resembling logic in your post is the paragraph about Gary Kildall. But hey, even that can be argued. After all, the guy had a passion for life and flying. Had that fateful day been overcast, we would be in a very different world today.
Everything else you say is a contradiction to your assumptions. Yes, Microsoft did bully their way in every one of those examples.
Borland? Go ask Phil what he thinks about this. After getting hammered over and over by not having access to the same information Microsoft had for its own development tools. After being chronically late and behind Microsoft new operating systems because most of the stuff had to be reversed engineered (while Microsoft's own tools came ahead of these releases).
Visicalc? Lotus 123 came up with something for the 8086 faster (Visicalc was CP/M only for quite a while). That turned Lotus into a winner overnight. Overtime, Microsoft turned its dreadful Multiplan into Excel, forced it down the throat of every OEM and robbed the market share (as opposed to "winning" it). Not to mention it did everything it could to make Lotus 123 not to work with Microsoft products.
I can go on and on about this. Heck! I lived though all this and I am very intimate with all these scenarios as I was directly involved with many of them.
I get you point and it could be a valid one had you chosen very different examples. As is, it feels more like a paid Microsoft drone trolling around to create confusion.
Re:Where lies the real fault? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is at least one comment that explains why in every
Microsoft is NOT ON TRIAL for being a monopoly.
There is NOTHING WRONG with being a monopoly under US law.
Microsoft were ABUSING their monopoly, which there ARE laws against.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:1, Insightful)
All that's not against MS is a troll, by definition.
Re:Let's stop and reflect (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, my memory's been wrong before, but i seem to quite clearly remember, when i started using netscape, that
- It was NOT free, it was free for educational use and $30-50 shareware for everyone else
- Netscape's sole competitor was NSCA Mosaic, which was free anyway.
I also quite clearly remember that shortly before Netscape went under for the last time, their CEO was bitterly complaining to Time magazine "A year ago [before MSIE and NS's subsequent switch to 'oh, okay, netscape is free now too'] 60-70% of our revenue came from Navigator. Now none of it does."The problem was mainly one of this: because of Microsoft's business prowess in other markets, Microsoft was free to do things that didn't make sense; they were able to take losses; in short, they were able to put out a free product with a quality level and budget far beyond what a free product could possibly have supported.
At the time the MSIE project started, there was a demand for a web browser of the quality level of IE 4. If it had not been for MSIE being dumped free on the market, someone certainly would have begun a similar project-- perhaps they would have even started with the same Spyglass/Mosaic codebase MS bought to begin the project!-- and charged enough money that an MSIE4-quality-level level product could have been funded with it. If someone had indeed charged this for a web browser of MSIE4-quality while Netscape was churning out the same old crap, people would have bought it. A free product, however, could not have afforded to reach this level of engineering and quality, at least not by going the Open Source route-- and the Open Source route would require overcoming an absolutely painful level of inertia, becuase that's how Open Source works. (Look at how long it took Mozilla to make a "finished" product, and they had AOL funding programmers for this Free product most of that time!)
Microsoft's sole purpose in creating IE was that they saw that this demand existed-- people would pay cash money for a quality web browser-- and they sought to cut the legs out from under this demand, thus preventing a potential future competitor (who might, like, you know, support java and stuff, eww) from having a chance to arise. So they threw away money into creating a good enough web browser and giving it away free.
Any company with intentions other than microsoft's desire to crush potential competitors (only Microsoft would interpret "anyone who can create a new market of some sort" as "potential threat"!) would never in a million years have funded a project as large as MSIE without expecting some kind of payback.