States and DoJ Divided On Microsoft Antitrust Success

Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that the US Department of Justice and five States have declared themselves satisfied with the antitrust enforcement efforts taken against Microsoft despite a further seven States maintaining they have had 'little or no discernible impact in the marketplace.' While the US DoJ and five States — New York, Louisiana, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin (The New York Group) — reported that the final judgments have succeeded in increasing competition to the benefit of consumers, seven States making up the California Group are not convinced."

You were expecting...?

[clang_jangle]

The nature of our current government makes a mockery of the FTC and anti-trust regulations. How can we reasonably expect anti-trust regulation from a federal government which is almost entirely composed of corporate henchmen?

Well.

[Renraku]

Who do you turn to when the courts and states themselves are playing corporate favoritism? Can you sue the state, or is it time to bring out the soap box/ballot box/ammo box?

Re:The question is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this also make Apple the same as Microsoft? Can you use iTunes with another portable media player? You can with Media Player though.

I am neither Pro M$ or Pro Linux. I live in a world where these are both needed and used. Does anyone complain about Adobe? Apple? No, because they are small compaired to M$. Intel has been doing this crap for years, sure they only have 90% of the Processors world wide, not just your CPU mind you, but Flash Memory, chips in your Phones, etc. Of Course this is the number the lawsuite in Japan used.

If Linux was more user friendly, to people like my grandmother, and more streamlined between distro's, then yes, M$ would start to suffer. Sure anyone half techie can use Linux, but lets face facts, that is not the majority of your PC users or people buying them anymore. Apple has made a great start in that. Lets see what 2 or 3 years gets us.

Re:Oddly enough...

[rtb61]

OK. Lets add blatant lying about xbox fault rates, and defective design in order to extend their monopoly. Then just a few weeks ago paying off one of the studios to drop blu-ray. Then there are all the WGA lies about it working in the face of continual failures. Then the advertising about performance and stability of vista just a few weeks before they supply a performance and stability service pack. Add to that cheating on their taxes by off shoring patent royalties. Lets see, there are the crazy claims that M$ can use GPLv3 code with out being bound by GPLv3. Also there was the mother of all adware patents that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time. There was also that whole blatant blue jay patent theft thing.

Yeah, I know that's not a full year, in fact I got sick of searching /. just back to july, if you want to find the rest of the disgusting B$ behaviour coming out of redmond for the nine months prior to that look for yourself ;).