DOJ Nixes Lax Policy, Hardens Antitrust Enforcement 249
eldavojohn writes "A policy from the Bush era seen as a hurdle to the government prosecuting companies under antitrust laws has been withdrawn by Obama's Department of Justice. From the article: 'The DOJ's Antitrust Division has withdrawn a September report that "raised too many hurdles to government antitrust enforcement and favored extreme caution" toward antitrust enforcement action, the DOJ said. The change in policy could mean that the department looks harder at the actions of technology vendors such as Google, Oracle and IBM, as detractors have raised antitrust concerns about all three in recent months.' You may recall that Google has come under some antitrust scrutiny recently and the pressure may have just gotten a little more intense."
HELLO! Microsoft anyone? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What about the root of all evil, Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft would had never had the money to launch the XBox as a successful invasion of the video game market if it were not for the combined cash cow monopolies of Windows and Office. (And ironically, if they hadn't been able to move in on the video game market at that time, then the Halo series would have stayed on the Mac platform.)
Breaking up Microsoft might not be worth the effort today, but then again, having a natural monopoly has never been the (legal) issue. It's abusing that monopoly to take over other markets that is illegal, and it certainly is necessary to make sure that Microsoft can't continue that pattern.
Re:Neat (Score:3, Informative)
He implied he'd be willing to pay a reasonable price for the individual components. Presumably, if the components were individualized, other people would also be willing to pay whatever they see as reasonable, and if MS-I, MS-II, and/or MS-III couldn't figure that out, they'd go out of business.
Re:What about the root of all evil, Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
Google isn't abusive either, sure they have expanded rapidly, but they haven't been destroying the competition. Now if they redirected all searches of Yahoo to "Did you mean Google?" sure, but not presently.
True. Search for "search engines" on Google. The first link in the results is a news article about the Wolfram Alpha. In results further down, live.com is listed ahead of google.com. When I click on the "list of search engines" link at the top, I get a page that lists yahoo.com, but *does not* list google.com.
Seems reasonable.
Re:Neat (Score:4, Informative)
They have repeatedly and willfully violated the laws of multiple countries, have been fined multiple billions of dollars, and that has not deterred them as they continue to violate those laws. That means breaking them up into multiple competing companies, with the products decoupled from each other, is the only real remaining remedy with teeth.
Re:Neat (Score:3, Informative)
I'll take D - "none of the above" :)
you really WOULD like to see MS actually make constructive contributions to computer science, as opposed to just enriching it's current stockholders, you should agree with me.
Enriching it's shareholders requires continuously improving products (which is done through research and developement based on that research). The ribbon is a recent and visible example of that, from the product group you were referencing. (recycling electrons [msdn.com]). You might contend that MS is up to all kinds of nefarious activities to enrich it's shareholders. There's many things to be said about that. First, it's debatable. Second, if they break the law in anyway, there are harsher penalties for that - breaking up the company is pretty mild. Third, nefarious activities aren't the sole domain of very large companies, so breaking up MS isn't the solution to that either. And finally, you still haven't pointed out this synergy between Office and Windows that you're referring to..
Interoperability will improve unbelievably, because IE, for instance, won't have the wealth of the other divisions to draw on.
But any modern OS is incomplete without a browser. If you were to break up the company, you would have to include the browser in the OS unit.
It is only that wealth, and the stubborness of MS, that has prevented IE from being standards compliant in the past.
I would contend that it's a lack of competition that caused IE's stagnation and lack of standards compliance. After a few years of good, solid competition from FF, IE's vitality is finally getting restored. The rest of the industry let us down by not competing with IE. Mozilla righted things with FF.
MS reps waltzed into the conference, paid off a few people, and bullied the rest into signing off on a new standard. Phhht. As a seperate corporation, they could never have pulled that off.
Nothing related to OOXML and ODF is not politicized. Your version of events isn't neutral either. If there was indeed bribing involved, how do we know that Office (as an independant company) would not have large enough coffers to do the bribing on it's own? Their revenues & profits are on the same scale as Windows revenues and profits. They don't need any funding from the OS division.
but it should stand on it's own merits, and not rely on all the rest of the MS monopoly.
And it does. I honestly have no idea about the 'assistance' the office team gets from the rest of MS, that you're referring to.
What we have today really sucks. And, because so few people can even imagine how much better things COULD BE, they think that they are happy with it.
What we imagine (in terms of a better world, software-wise) is hardly justification for breaking up MS. For instance, if Apple open sourced all it's software, and it's hardware designs, and released all it's patents into the public domain, of course things could be better. But that's not a good enough reason to force them to do that -- they are completely justified in following the business model they have today.
Re:Neat (Score:2, Informative)
"I saw someone else post this as well -- am I missing something? What's the tight integration between Windows and Office?"
MS Office can and does bypass the printer driver.
It binds closer to the filesystem calls and uses API calls others cannot, making it faster.
An extreme example is WPfW: the API used was deprecated and Windows Office didn't use it and worked well. WPfW weren't told and was crap.
Re:Neat (Score:3, Informative)
And now back to reality! Most of software being developed in the world is developed for custom orders. So even if MS, Oracle and IBM disapear, "software engineers" will still be valued.(It's like saying that a cook is worthless without a restaurant.)
Yes it IS extremely low, but players like MS make sure that the adoption is close to 0%, in certain areas. That is the main problem.
That is a load of bullshit! I work in a quite large company, that is one of the leaders in it's market, however the competition is extremely fierce. And I do understand clients are actually benefiting. I am pushed a lot to bring value and I like it.
Oh, and BTW, any "Good job" in your post is the 1980's programmer's job or when programmers were considered gods of the tech world and asking them to do something was like praying and hoping of returns. I would never call that lazy-ass job as good.
If you want that kind of job, please become an CS researcher.
And BTW, the company where I work, is basically a competitor of Microsoft in certain niches, so I know how they push the clients to agree to their terms.