Google Calls For More Limits On Microsoft

teh_commodore writes "Scientific American is reporting that Google is now asking a Federal judge to extend the government's anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, specifically with regard to desktop search software. Microsoft had already agreed to modify Vista to allow rival desktop search engines, but Google says that this remedy will come too late — specifically, after (most of) the anti-trust agreement expires in November. What makes this political maneuver interesting is that Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators, who had found Microsoft's compromise acceptable, to appeal directly to the Federal judge overseeing the anti-trust settlement." Update: 06/26 17:20 GMT by KD : The judge is unwilling to play along with Google; she said she will likely defer to an agreement on desktop search forged between Microsoft and the plaintiffs in the case: i.e. Justice and the states.

Re:"Flamebait"?

[jorghis]

Its flamebait because he is ripping on Alberto Gonzales the head of the Justice Department. That whole mess is totally unrelated to this, but it is a divisive issue and people are likely to argue over it in an impolite manner. Sidetracking a thread into an unrelated flamewar == flamebait.

Re:Marketing

[bill_mcgonigle]

But it brings into focus a new corporate strategy... the use of regulation over competition. Asking for regulation is against the traditional American business philosophy, which typically favours deregulation.

Typically, yes, but not in the case of abusive monopolies. Most systems need regulators (human or mechanical) to avoid positive feedback loops.

Re:Google pushes competitors around too

[Anonymous Coward]

Say I create this end all be all of map products. How is anyone going to find it? Google maps will always appear above my superior map program no matter how many people link to it, or how many people use it, I will always be "second" at best.

Do a Google search for online map [google.com]. Google maps is 7th, MapQuest is 4th, all of the big ones feature.

Your argument doesn't stand up to reality.

 

Re:Google pushes competitors around too

[pavera]

ok, search for maps, I would say grandma or my mom would be about 5000 times more likely to type maps than "online maps". Google maps shows up 1st there...

And its not necessarily about "today" that worries me, or most people about google. It is in the future,3-5 years from now or even 5-10 years from now, when they've cemented themselves atop the internet heap. When they can willy nilly decide, "Hmmm, we're releasing product xyz next month, disable search for all of our competitors!". Sure that would be evil, but do you really think Sergey and Larry will still be around in 10? 15? 20 years? no. They will be off flying their 50 million dollar party 757 they bought after the IPO.

Eventually google WILL go the way of all other large companies. They will be controlled by a regular board of directors, a regular wall street CEO, and shareholders and huge money market fund managers who will demand increased revenue and profit growth every quarter. There comes a time when the demands of the street create the problem of "well, to keep all these investor people happy, we have to be evil". And google will be evil. If we cede control to them without a fight, we are idiots, just like we were in the early 90's with MS.

I remember in the early to mid 90's no one could get enough of MS's stuff, the latest office release, the latest version of windows, the latest version of visual studio, I never heard anyone complain about it because it was so much better than dealing with the fragmented unix vendors and it was so much easier to set up and run than netware, and it was so much cheaper and way faster than anything coming out of cupertino. Businesses loved it, technologists loved it. MS had permissive EULAs that let you install the product multiple times (at work and on a home computer). Their products were inexpensive (extremely inexpensive) compared to all the competition. They seemed to play nice. Then it all changed (sometime around windows 98). Google will hit that point as well. We would be idiots to just blindly trust them. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... you know the rest.

Re:Google huh...

[cyphercell]

There's a difference between power and abuse. Google is scary, but Microsoft has already got a toe hold in equally as much info as Google, for fucks sake it's written out in your EULA, M$ claimed that shit long ago.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/02/02/11/ 020211opfoster.html [infoworld.com]

Re:You go Google

[WilliamSChips]

Microsoft never "stood up" to IBM. They went into a completely consensual business deal and then Microsoft made shady deals with OEMs to prevent OS/2 from taking off.

Re:Marketing

[WilliamSChips]

How do you get your GMail out?

Any mail client that allows POP.

How do your Google Talk friends reach you?

Any Jabber account will do.

How do you stop being tracked by Google's tracking cookies (DoubleClick, Adsense, Analytics)?

NoScript does that on Firefox, I'm sure there's something equivalent on most other browsers worth their own salt and also on IE.

How do your Docs and Spreadsheets get migrated?

The Google apps allow you to export as .doc or .xls files. No ODF yet, unfortunately, but they have a track record of not making this sort of thing impossible for long.

Where do your Picasa photos go?

I haven't used Picasa but I'm sure there's some way given that I've seen Picasa-edited photos on Facebook.

More importantly, how do you advertise online? How do you make money from online advertising?

This [projectwonderful.com], perhaps?

Re:Double standards & patent issues

[Trelane]

How are you locked into using Microsoft software?

Most people are locked in by the fact that most other people use only Microsoft software. This leads to hardware only working with Windows

And how many websites now rely on Google Maps, Google Search or other features for the site to work correctly?

Not that many, really. At least, not in my experience.

These Google features are good enough that competitors offerings are not used by anyone

But they are. Mapquest is still in use in many places, and The Weather Channel just went with Microsoft's mapping software for their new interactive weather map, much to my chagrin. Personally, I run into a great many online apps that don't use Google (particularly after they started going after mashups). Compare this to Windows. How many apps are Windows-only? How much hardware only supports Windows? How many people are trained only in Windows? Heck, check out MS Office. How many researchers have locked themselves into MS Office through EndNote or RefMan? How many people use some little MS Office add-on that (of course) won't work with anything but MS Office? I think we're talking about orders of magnitude difference here.

patents ARE a huge threat to competition and ARE a monopolistic anti-competitive method to kill competition.

Agreed, but what does this have to do with Google, particularly since you're pooh-pooh'ing Microsoft, who is actively threatening with their patent portfolio?