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The Courts Government News

DoJ Rejects Microsoft Settlement 236

Posted by Hemos from the rejecting-the-claims dept.
Quite a number of people have written over the last few days regarding the BBC news report that the Department of Justice has apparently rejected Microsoft's proposed settlement. Unless something is reached today, this means it will be up to Judge Jackson to decide what to do on the 28th.
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DoJ Rejects Microsoft Settlement More

DoJ Rejects Microsoft Settlement

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  • Re:No breakup either (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, no, its not very hard at all to argue that AT&T's breakup hurt the company. They now compete with Sprint, MCI, Worldcom, and soon all the babybells they spun off. They were the only game in town before. Definitely good for us consumers though, and that's what really matters as far as the Sherman Antitrust Act is concerned;)

  • Go get some perspective.

    Yet another hypocritical statement from one of the /. rabid-zealot crew. Microsoft is a company, not a government. They cannot set laws, tax you or have their own military. In the absence of these things it would be quite difficult for them to "control your government ... and your country." Get over your paranoid hysteria and calm down. Go smoke a joint or something.

  • I'm Glad (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really don't think anything has changed at MS. Despite their unbelievable disaster of a trial, I really think they assume the rest of the world is dummer than they are. I really thought Justice would pussy out somewhere along the case. But they have held firm. Good for them. In the past they would have made some has assed announcement that they had reached an 'agreement' with MS - that MS was really 'sorry' and that they had learned their lesson. Barf.

    We have the rope, the noose is tied, let hang the mfs.

    Also, I really hope no breakup happens, let the entire rotting turd of a company slowly fade into computer history. Ain't going to happen tomorrow, but it will. It's mind boggeling to think of the damage they have caused to the entire computer industry. Hopefully the industry can get its act together and figure out a way to have standards without monopolies. Wishfull thinking...

  • Re:What will happen to Microsoft? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    >I think breaking up Microsoft would be bad for computing as a whole.

    `computing`? I dont think the ability for computation to take place would be adversely affected by any legal judgment, unless it inhibits electron flow in some way. Do you mean the computer industry? Why, though?

    >the second most valuble company in America.

    You mean profitable? `Valuable` means it`s valuable TO something or someone, and its hard to see just who that would be, apart perhaps from their shareholders.

    Fluffy nonsense.
  • I think the implications of the "OpenSource Windows" solution would be much more severe than those of a breakup.

    I think most of the folk here mainly want available source, not open source. In an interview, Judge Jackson said making Windows open source would violate the takings clause, and thus could not be required.
  • >This community is so hypocritical - The ONLY time Slashdotters would
    >ever enjoy a court case involving a software or web company is if
    >Microsoft was at the butting end. Linux needs to win in the
    >marketplace, it doesn't need help from the courts.

    Let's see...people rather enjoyed the prospect of DoubleClick being hauled in front of a court...most of us don't have a problem with script kiddies being locked up/and or being put to death...Linux One certainly doesn't seen to have very fans... All in all I'ld say your comments are nothing but the rantings of a disgrunteled Microsoft Astrotufer.....
  • >I vote ESR as Leon. He's got the gun thing going for him, too. Hmm.
    >Now I have to go write that fanfiction idea. (Grin)
    >Now, what OSes would Nene use? I'm thinking dual boot BeOS/Slackware,
    >with a nice bright, cheerful bashprompt theme under Linux.

    BUMAS running some form of Windows 2000 would be a perfectly logical explaination of why they tend to go berserk...As for Nene it would more likely be some kind of BeOS/Linux/BSD hybid rather than a dual boot type deal. The idea's yours if you want it.....

  • >>Despite what /.ers seem to think, Microsoft has done a lot of good for
    >>the computing industry as a whole, making it so that computers have
    >>moved from being the domain of long-haired hippies at geek enclaves
    >>like MIT to being available for everyone.
    >Was it MS? I think IBM played a bigger part. Let's face it, without
    >IBM, MS would not be as big as it is.

    Actually it was Apple,Atari,Commodore and IBM that brought computing to the masses. Micosoft has always played the role of the parasite.
  • >UNFORTUNATELY Perhaps if Microsoft were to be allowed a military wing
    >(as befits its status as the #1 corporation of the #1 country in the
    >world) we would see less of this liberal/Socialist BS and regulation,
    >and a bit more gung-ho good ole fashined US CAPITALISM.

    Hmmm...Microsoft changes it name to GENOM? And then Linus's daughter will have to create suits of powered armour and form the Tux Sabers in order to avenge the death of her father...
  • No, it wasn't possible UNTIL the DOJ got involved.

    Don't try to revise history on us now.
  • Oops. I did ask for that one. But one mistake isn't as bad as all of his. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but consistent incorrect usage of spelling and _grammar_ belies a problem of greater magnitude.

    Yes, I misspelled grammar. I didn't do it, however, because I didn't know better, but because I made a mistake.

    I'm not perfect, by any long stretch. However, I at least know the correct way even if I do mess up sometimes.

  • Hear! Hear! Excellent. I don't think a clearer explanation has ever been given as to why a Microsoft split would work from a practical (and business) standpoint.
  • ... that they won't reach an out of court settlement, that would be the equivalant of Microsoft winning the case. And that is a Bad Thing(tm). ---
  • > Remember, this is the second most valuble company in America.

    I think what you really meant was the second most voluble company in America.
  • I can refute that one. I mean, there have been interfaces quite similar to Bob all over the place. General Magic had one for their PDA many moons ago, and some early work done by (IIRC) IBM in the 70's also had that sort of interface.

    Generally they were limited to offices, and not kitchens, or the other useless rooms that Bob has, but I'd think that it's a ripoff.
  • Of course it can't be some county jail. We do have a class-stratified society, after all, and Gates is upper class by virtue of money and power. He will never, never, _ever_ see some 'San Berdino' jail. However, it might be more plausible to see him in posh federal prison- as expected, with cable and good food yada yada- and BARS, quietly there somewhere. It may be posh but there you'll still stay, and that's kind of the point, isn't it?

    My only concern is this: is this a civil case? It might not be an option without a criminal suit. But I really want to see Gates, Ballmer, anyone else responsible for setting the tone of this company, behind bars for however short a time. It is a point that must be made in some way. Hitting them with a pie in the face is just silliness. Hitting them with an Uzi in the face is being LIKE THEM in spirit. That's just wrong. They need to be held accountable for the type of behavior they've forced MS into believing is normal and sanctioned.

    • Put all the responsible decision-making execs in jail for an absolute minimum of six months, or at least six weeks. This includes Gates. Hell, being put in jail for six _days_ would be enough to provide a reality check. Anything.
    • After the jail time the execs would be barred from working in the computer industry. If it's good enough for Kevin Mitnick... Note, no fines. Who would notice? These are robber barons.
    • Microsoft gets found formally guilty of abuse of monopoly power.
    • And fined one dollar.
    • No more would be necessary.
    Seriously. No breakup, no huge fines- all that is needed is to cut off its head (the execs that continue to resist market-owner complacency and bureaucratic internal rot), make it vulnerable to a million class action suits, and allow it to follow the usual course of gradually encroaching irrelevance and out-of-touchness, like the last days of the dinosaurs.

    The head guys at MS are _crazy_. They are a particular type of crazy that makes it possible to whip a vast organization into action and motivate it with their values. Unfortunately, their values are quite criminal: "win, cheat, don't get caught and if you are, lie". Run this way, the whole company becomes one titanic mugger- but its natural behavior without this continuing drive from above is far lazier and less dangerous. There have been many reports on how Microsoft suffers from the usual bigness syndrome- middle managers building status by _not_ answering their phones to look busier, that sort of corporate idiocy. Dilbertization. You have to have a grudging respect for a upper management that can restrain this tendency at all, through fear and insatiableness and fits of temper when needed- the natural tendency is for MS to get fat and happy and lazy, but the upper mgmt. are CRAZY and will NEVER be satisfied, hence the current situation.

    Make MS vulnerable to class action suits by a guilty verdict, and remove the crazy upper management. Jail Gates and co. and block them from working in the industry again. And then leave Microsoft to go its own way, following its own lead, and it will dwindle and be reduced by the market forces it's been trying so hard to avoid all this time.

  • This was a new story that I heard yesterday; it was not the old Bloomberg story. The story was that the settlement offer that Microsoft submitted included opening (or somehow otherwise disclosing) Windows' source code as a concession/remedy.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

    /bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.

  • But I can't find it now, as there is a newer story that doesn't mention that.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

    /bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.

  • Do you trust Microsoft, whose legal accumen has been a critical weapon since its first DOS license agreement and before, to submit any settlement terms that wouldn't have several loopholes they can rush through?

    Especially if you're the DOJ. After Microsoft laughed off the consent decree last time, the DOJ will be very unlikely to try to use that tactic again. At least not without imposing a lot of safeguards. I'd hate to think the DOJ is stupid enough to trust Microsoft twice.

  • Shouldn't the objective behind punishing them for being a monopoly

    First of all, they are not going to be punished for "being a monopoly." That is not illegal. They will (hopefully) be punished for illegal maintenance of a monopoly.

    be not to hurt them just to be hurting them but to "make good" to those who were damaged whatever damages they suffered?

    Unfortunately, to making good to those who were harmed would be impossible. Some have estimated that Microsoft has over-charged consumers more than 10 billion dollars. Additionally, they have done irreparable harm to competition in the software industry. We can't know what could have been if Microsoft had not used their dirty tactics to kill off and prevent competition. It would likely mean that consumers would have more choice in what OS to use and the OSes would all play together a lot more nicely than they do now.

    Finally, the point of the "remedies" portion of the trial is to do whatever is deemed necessary to restore competition the x86 OS market and prevent further harm to consumers through high pricing and lack of choice due to lack of competition created by Microsoft's business practices. The point is NOT to punish Microsoft for what they've done. That will likely be done through private lawsuits on the behalf of those who were harmed in the most financially quantifiable ways.

  • Hmm.. I reinstalled Win98 about 6 weeks ago when I upgraded my system. After the first try, it kept detecting my modem at startup even though it was already installed and working. When I finally let it try to install it again, it COMPLETELY screwed up about 70% of the devices on my system. There were resource conflicts everywhere and I couldn't begin to sort them all out. So, I reinstalled again. Now it still detects my modem on startup and I have to cancel it every time.

  • The previous poster was complaining about Microsoft getting sued by a bunch of people if they are found guilty. I think that's pretty much the way it should be. The current case is supposed to determine whether or not they actually broke the law, and if so, in what ways. Then, with that determined, remedies are supposed to be carried out to make sure they don't do it anymore. That's as far as the DOJ case goes. Then it will be the people who've been screwed by Microsoft's dirty tactics turn to get their pound of flesh (times 3) from the company.

    This should win back some of Microsoft's ill-gotten gains which will hopefully help to restore a bit more balance to the market. If Microsoft can't easily afford to give away products and rely on monopoly profits to starve out the competition or use other dirty tactics (such as buying out an OEM's contract with a competitor so that only MS products get distributed and the competitor withers and dies along with consumer choice), they might actually have to compete.

  • "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
  • (Of course, I can't think of a single product that they [Microsoft] invented - everything's ripped off or bought from someone else)

    I forget whose site it was, but one of the "Boycott Microsoft"-type sites out there had a long-standing challenge to the Microsoft supporters who visited the site: name any Microsoft product that was truly innovated by Microsoft and not either bought from someone else or blatantly based on a ripped-off idea. Many products were advanced for consideration and rejected. Finally, someone advanced one suggestion that nobody could refute. Yes indeed, folks, it seems that Microsoft does innovate. The name of this wonderful sparkling gem of good-for-consumers innovation?

    Microsoft Bob. The precursor to the Office paperclip "assistant".

    I don't think any more arguments need to be stated. Microsoft should clearly be banned from innovating any more, lest millions of computer users worldwide suffer permanent sanity loss.
    -----
    The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

  • But I do not believe Microsoft is without fault, I just don't think it's the government's place to spank 'em.

    Well why the hell not? MS wouldn't have all of the perks of being a corporation if not for the government. And it's not as though antitrust legislation is new - it's been around for a hundred years. MS could afford lawyers early on. Bill's always been rich, and his dad's a big name lawyer. They knew the rules, and they still chose to break em. I have no sympathy for people that expect to get away with breakin' the law.

  • Neither I nor the people who wrote the relevant US laws believe(d) that monopolies are in and of themselves wrong. If one company provides the best service and the rest die off, that's ok with us.

    Microsoft is not in trouble because they are successful and earned a monopoly position. Microsoft is in trouble because while they held that position, they abused it in ways that I and the US government believe violate the law.

    Perhaps whatever happens to Microsoft will be bad for consumers and perhaps it will be good for consumers. Which is it? I don't know and I don't think it should matter. Illegal acts should not go unpunished.
    --

  • MS wouldn't have all of the perks of being a corporation if not for the government

    Exactly why the less government involvement the better.

    I have no sympathy for people that expect to get away with breakin' the law.

    Agreed, hence the "It's up to the courts to decide". IMHO the US Government should never have been involved in the first place. A private suit could achive the same end. But big brother has a bigger stick eh? *sigh*

    Not that i won't be laughing when MS gets spanked don't get me wrong :)
  • Okay, I'll accept this. I would likely have fewer problems with MS if they were never a Corporation to begin with, as it most likely never
    could have gotten so big anyway. But given as how this is the real world, that isn't the case.

    That it is the case doesn't make it right. I am not talking about MSFT /becoming/ a corporation, my objection has to do with them geting perks /because/ they are a corporation. Companys /should/ ONLY have the same rights awarded to individuals.

    My objection to MS's behavior stands.

    Really now :) No where did I condone their behavior.

    And while a private suit could have technically achieved the same end, it's well known by now that the party with the most money is increasingly favored - not the one who deserves justice. This isn't as much of a consideration for the govt. And they're having quite a lot of
    success as compared to the private cases, which are proceeding much more slowly. Justice delayed is justice denied....

    agreed 100% doesn't mean i have to like it though :) and while i /do/ like i guess it's just that I wish it didn't HAVE to be this way
  • It'll be a big win for the DoJ if it can get a guilty finding against Microsoft. This will allow other people to sue MS much more easily. Caldera was bought off by the rich boys from Redmond in a case which could have done *serious* PR damage to MS. The DoJ prevented a settlement by making it appear that it wanted to break MS up. Now it's saying it doesn't want a breakup, leaving MS no time at all in which to come up with a proposed deal which doesn't involve this.

    Well done, guys. You've beaten them at their own game.

    Let's hope that the Europeans actually get round to investigating MS's other racket: MS Office.
  • this lawsuit has moved beyond what is immediately good for the consumer. a lot of people have argued that microsoft is being made an example of, despite having made good products. i am not going to argue about whether they make good products. but this is about much more than whether microsoft's continued existence is beneficial to the economy.

    microsoft has flaunted the law. repeatedly. they settled lawsuits in the 80s, and broke their promises. they have perjured themselves in court, made highly inconsistent statements, have extended delays as much as possible, and generally have not made a Good Faith effort to treat the legal system with the respect it so often demands.

    one of bill gates' strongest assets is also his weakness. his father was a lawyer. a very good one. bill gates thinks like a lawyer. you see this in interviews with him today, you even see this in his argumentative Byte interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz from the early 80s. he understands the court system well enough to know that people can play games with the law. and that they do, and that many people can do it quite successfully. but he is not a lawyer, and it shows.

    one of the things you learn in law school, through repeated readings of case studies, is that Law Takes Itself Seriously. you can only fuck with judges up to a certain point- then they get medieval on your ass. bill gates has fucked with the system before, and got away with it. he thought he could do it again.

    he was Wrong. im sure people have heard of "the wheels of justice". its a good metaphor. those wheels are really slow, but they are also huge, infinitely heavy, and very hard to stop once theyre set in motion.

    microsoft cannot be allowed to escape unscathed. their behavior has shown a flagrant lack of respect for law, the justice system, and indirectly, all that it stands for. the judicial system doesnt like people who dont follow its decrees. it has the power to punish those who do, and will... because ultimately, if microsoft can get away with it, then others might try as well.

    law is based on the threat of force, not the actual administration of force. in order to preserve order, the system must make sure it is respected. that people exhibit both FEAR AND RESPECT.

    we all know microsoft has not respected the justice system. its been patently obvious even with bill gates' own testimony. in short, they have not provided a good example of how businesses should behave in relation to the law. so the justice system is forced to act, and microsoft has only succeeded in making an example of themselves.

    unc_
  • that people are happy w/ Msft, once you learn your way around it's basically consistant and other than the little oddities (the freeze's etc that you mentioned) it IS easier for your average non-pro folks to use. If I were giving free help to a Linux newbie and they really didn't seem to be interested I'd heartly recommend, "I think you'd be better off with Win98/2k".

    However what *I* want is: leave the rest of us alone! To each his own. A lot of people really ARE better off with the Windows they've learned. I've known many folks that had a painful time transitioning from Win3 to Win95 GUI, and know some that still use the Win3 file manager in '95! GREAT! I'm ALL FOR IT!! Just don't try to force *ME*, who is quite comfortable and in fact enjoys the nitty gritty bit level control over my network, to use nothing but Msft - Have some respect for *MY* point of view, keep Msft OFF MY BACK! That's the whole point of this suit - we DONT want to stop Msft users from enjoying their products (remember, 27% of them aren't even paid for, per Msft) we want to stop Msft from crushing out every product WE enjoy using. The LAST thing we want is to take someone's choice away. What we DO want is a choice ourselves! Not everyone wants proactive handholding help or training wheels welded on, or an annoying Word processor trying to guess what your trying to do and making it twice as hard as just getting out of my way and letting me do it what I know how to do in the first damn place.
  • Did you ever consider your parents' reluctance to consider Linux as an alternative might be a reflection of your own pro-Microsoft bias?

    While there are a (very) few applications for which Linux simply isn't an ideal solution (video capture for the nonce being one, running some games being another), I challenge any reader here to consider the following:

    What is the most common question you are asked by friends and acquaintances, when the find out that you study/work in the computing field?

    Four out of Five computer professionals surveyed say: "Can you fix my [Windows] computer?" (While the comment is a little toung in cheeck, among the rather large number of computer professionals I know, the statistic would be 37 out of 37 surveyed).

    The only reason users consider Windows to be "easier" to use than, for example, Linux, is that it comes preinstalled on their computer. Using just about anything which is already installed is, by definition, easier than installing something new.

    However, once users are confronted with installing Windows again themselves (and this happens to anyone who uses their system with any regularity sooner or later, c.f. bitrot and MS IE or Office's behavior with respect to DLLs shared by non-microsoft products like Netscape and Word Perfect), they are amazed to discover how much more difficult it is to install the latest release of windows 98 than, say, Linux Mandrake. How does one demonstrate this to them? By sitting back and letting them do the work, and being present to provide moral and technical support, and consume their beer in the process.

    Once installed, Linux is just as easy to use as Windows, as far as the end user is concerned. When it comes to maintenance, it is even easier, especially if you run Mandrake and use their "update" feature. What's more, it doesn't break on them again in six months! In fact, herein lies one very huge advantage to turning ones non-techie friends onto Linux, where possible: the amount of time you'll spend helping them fix their system yet again will go down dramatically.

    I have turned more non-technical people on to Linux than I can count. Not one has returned to using Windows. Not one. These aren't geeks. These are artists, pilots, teachers, authors, and musicians. I haven't done this by "preaching about Linux's robustness" as you put it, but by simpy handing them a Mandrake or Red Hat CD and offering to help them install it. As I said, my "help" for the most part has been to sit back, drink one of their beers, and watch them do the work, answering an occiasional question here or there.

    Oh, by the way, the average "clueless" user is much smarter than you arrogantly give them credit for. They do give far more than "two shits" about the robustness and reliablity of their system. They don't care nearly as much whether they are using Microsoft Word, StarOffice, Word Perfect, Abiword, or whatever, as long as they can get to know the interface quickly, and can read and write files in the same filke format their friends and collegues use (usually either Word or Word Perfect). They may lack the technical jargon to express their desire for reliability and robustness, but it is readilly aparent in every sigh of disgust when they lose an hours work due to a system hang, and every frustrated plea upon meeting me: "Can you please fix my broken [Windows] computer?" and in every instance when I diffidently suggest they might want to try Linux and am met with an enthusiastic "Yes!"

  • That's bs. The plain fact is that to average users to much power is _frightening_. To much flexibility is _confusing_. A command line is _scary_. People don't _wan't_ to have so much power that they are loaded with the responsibility of not accidentally wiping things out or unrecoverably breaking their system. It doesn't help Linux at all to ignore this painful facts. It doesn't matter what /we/ think. It matters what the user thinks.

    *sigh*

    No, it is not BS, although your comment and underlying assumption certainly are.

    It is far too late to be replying to this thread, but I simply cannot let this silliness continue.

    As I have personally demonstrated, users such as my sister, my mother, a friend of mine (who is a pilot and completely computer illiterate), another friend's grandmother, and other far too numerous examples to mention, do not need or require the commandline to do what they need to do using Linux. They click on an icon to run Word Perfect or Star Office, they click on another icon to run netscape, yet another to run tkrat, still another to run xcdroast, and so on.

    They don't even see a command line when installing the operating system! Why? Because, in the two cases where I just handed them a CD and said "Have Fun!" I gave them Mandrake 7.0. Most modern Linux distributions have a GUI install from beginning to end: the user never see's a command line.

    It is only when they have to do serious maintenance that they might be confronted with a command line, which is a very unusual situation for most users. "Power" users are the exception, but then, they are also far more open than most in learning how to type "./config" and "make" than the average user I've turned on to Linux. Even then, with Mandrake or Red Hat many of the issues can be dealt with using a GUI. In only one case have I had to tell the user to go to the command line to do something.

    Yes, if the user has to do high level system maintenance they will probably be confronted with a command line. One guy I know had to deal with this when he bought a sound card which required ALSA. And guess what. He had little trouble reading the README and installing the driver himself, even though he had never so much as compiled a kernel before (which ALSA more or less requires).

    Most users in my experience, once shown how to do things from the commandline (and again, I reiterate, this in my experience is almost never necessary), are far more comfortable cutting and pasting a "mknod" command from a README or HOWTO file than they are editing a misbegotten Register. Furthermore, I have had several people comment that they had a much easier time figuring out what they had to do, even knowing almost nothing about Linux and even less about UNIX in general from the online HOWTOs, than they did trying to navigate the disorganized GUI windows users are afflicted with.

    These aren't computer geeks I'm talking about, these are users with below-average cluefulness (my friend's grandmother, for crying out loud!)

    It has gotten to the point now where people are asking me, sometimes completely out of the blue, "can you show me how to setup Linux, I want to try it." I do not see any of the hesitency or unwillingness to use Linux on the part of users that you and others keep alluding to.
  • It doesn't matter how crappy Windows is from our perspective, if a user has to reboot twice a day, but still can get his work done, they will certainly use Windows over a Linux machine on which they either have to go through a steep learning curve or where the applications they use (regardless of equivalents) simply aren't present or don't work. That's the facts.

    Except that you have some of your "facts" wrong:

    • they [ ... ] have to go through a steep learning curve Users do not need to go through a steep learning curve to use Linux at all, or even to install if they are using a modern distribution. The only learning curve applies when trying to do something fancy maintenance-wise, which is no more difficult (and usually quite a bit easier) than learning to do the same thing under Windows.
    • where the applications they use (regardless of equivalents) simply aren't present or don't work. It is very rare for applications to not be present on Linux, and even rarer for them to not work properly. Users are far more married to file formats than they are applications. I have found that, without exception, when a user says "I need to have application x" what they really mean is "I need to have an application as easy to use as x, with the same capabilities and able to read and write the same file format as x," which applications are present under Linux for nearly every task these days.


    Even in the case where there are one or two applications the user cannot live without, for which there is no Linux alternative (videocapture and certain games come to mind), most users I have dealt with have preferred running dual boot machines and running Linux where possible to running windows. At least this way they have more control over when and where, and for what reason, their machine is being rebooted, and the frequency of system crashes and hangs is dramatically reduced. Contrary to popular myth here, users do care about stability and reliability very, very much.
  • This is just the Microsoft way of making you think you are getting something when you are really not. Opening windows source isn't going to benefit too many people. The source is a big mess and too large to sort through without spending a great deal of time on it. Think about it. In linux... recompile the kernal source the way you want it. In windows... change it and beg microsoft to put it in?!?

    If Microsoft releases source code, it has to **build** and it has to create the **same** binaries as the released ones. That's a no-brainer, but, we still might have to do some explaining to convince the DOJ that that's the only way it will work. Furthermore, it has to be source code for **all** versions of Windows, current and future, or it just plain won't work. And finally, it has to be the source for **all* of Windows, not just the kernel.

    To put it simply: "the source code, the whole windows source code, and nothing but buildable source code"
  • > you have a bunch of little MSes that still have all the existing insider communication channels

    The thing is, as a publicly traded company, each baby-Bill would have to file financial statements and be accountable to its stock holders. Let's assume they were split between the OS (Windows, NT, etc) and the Application (IE) companies.

    Look at the findings of facts and you see that, among other things, MS gave away IE and actually paid off AOL's contract with Netscape. These are profitable to the big MS because they maintain their applications barrier to entry. Developers will continue to develop for Windows rather than cross-platform solutions which guarantees future Windows revenue.

    If MS were split, the application company would have to give away IE and pay AOL to take it all to protect the profitability of the OS company.

    If I were a shareholder of both companies, I'd sell all my MS-Apps stock and buy MS-OS. The OS company wouldn't be able to compensate the Apps company for its losses, and the Apps company would go under.

    This is what MS was doing when they were "leveraging" their monopoly. They were willing to take losses in one part of the company to insure monopoly profits in the other. By splitting the company up, you take away the ability to cross-subsidize.
  • The Gates story is simply not true.

    Look at today's (Mary 27) HNN: http://www.hackernews.com/arch.html?0327 00 [hackernews.com]

  • "You have always had a right to choice. I'm just curios why you think it is YOUR right to make my choice now?"

    Microsoft: "Yes, you've had your choice all along. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

    Bad Mojo
  • Why doesn't MS wait for the ruling? Aren't the secure in the fact that they are not a monopoly?


    Bad Mojo
  • If the Judge says they are not a monopoly and are without any guilt, then those lawsuits are not going to appear. If MS was sure that it was not guilty, they would just sit back and wait for the not-guilty verdict to be rendered.

    But that's not the case. They know they are guilty and have lost. They are trying very hard to buy their way out of trouble.


    Bad Mojo
  • I really don't think anything has changed at MS. Despite their unbelievable disaster of a trial, I really think they assume the rest of the world is dummer than they are.

    I get a laugh every time some M$ spokesdroid says that breaking up M$ would be "unacceptable" (and some bonehead journalist reports it as if it means something).

    Picture instead an about-to-be convicted murderer making statements about what sentence would be "acceptable". Hello? You can try for a plea bargin, but if that doesn't work, your butt may be strapped into a specially wired chair whether that's "acceptable" to you or not.

  • The legal and political strategies are interesting. MS would be wise to settle, because that way they could find some terms that are mutually acceptable. If they argue their side and then let the judge decide, they are likely to fare worse. But if they can stretch it out to appeal, then they may find a new administration at the Justice Dept. On the Justice Dept side, they know if they get a break-up it will be appealed, and they could be out in a year.

    Anybody know which candidate(s) they have bribed, um, I mean contributed to for the 2000 elections?

    (Anyone who thinks they aren't trying this as part of their game plan is extrordinarily naive. They already "lobbied" to have the DOJ's budget cut. Instead of playing by the rules, M$ is trying a more "cost-effective" solution -- gutting the umpires and/or buying their own.)

  • Actually, this seems like a pretty good idea to me. If they had to give all OEM's the same pricing, perhaps with a scale to take volume into account, they wouldn't have a lot less leverage to punish OEM's who dare to sell computers with other OS's. It was largely the per-processor licenses and the ability to crush OEM's with excessive prices that they used to keep other OS's out of the market.

    As to what is keeping their prices in check, that's a good question. Here's a little quote I found about M$'s earnings:

    For the 6 months ended 12/31/99, revenue rose 22% to $11.5B. Net income applic. to Common rose 26% to $4.61B.

    A little rudimentary math indicates that M$'s is clearing a whopping 40% (and rising!) profit margin. Now, I'm not an MBA or anything, but most companies would probably be happy making a quarter of that. Hell, most companies would probably be happy with a tenth of that. In a quick search of other large, famous companies, I can't find a one making more that 15%, and most are making less than 5%.
  • But if they can stretch it out to appeal, then they may find a new administration at the Justice Dept.

    I mentioned this once before in one of the numerous discussions about this trial, but here it is again:

    So what if there's a new administration at the Justice Dept.? The case is being prosecuted by the DOJ and the Attorneys General of 19 states. Yes, you read correctly, 19. What are the chances that all 19 states have a 'new administration'? I think the answer is pretty obvious. There is no reason to believe that the other prosecutors would just walk away from this case because a 'new administration' up and ordered the DOJ to drop it; and that's assuming a new administration would even be so rash. I mean maybe the public is still sympathetic to MS (and they are unfortunately), but wouldn't people want to know why a trial was succesfully prosecuted, and then suddenly dropped? I don't see a President sticking his popularity on the line right at the start of his administration for just one campaign contributor, no matter how generous.

    Furthermore, the other attorneys could get on quite well without the feds since the most expensive/difficult part of the trial is over; I'm pretty sure they would be capable of 'cleanup'.

    Chris
  • > By not settling, Microsoft can tie this whole thing up in appeals for decades.

    Alas, that may be the best we can hope for. None of the remedies that I've heard discussed seem to really cure the problem, or at least fail to fix it where we won't be back in the same boat in a couple of years.

    But ten years of appeals means ten years of police car in the rear view mirror. And ten years of news stories that make passing mention to the Findings of Fact. Together, those two things might do more to keep MS honest and the rest of the industry wary than any of the proposed remedies would.

    Although MS's recent acquisition frenzy, their new embraced/extended Kerebos, and the number of companies who have bit the W2K bait even after the FoF, all make my hopeful vision pretty doubtful.

    On the other hand, a ruling that made the FoF part of the official record would undoubtedly unleash a flood of lawsuits, and perhaps the next DR-DOS type case won't wimp out (sell out?) before the really bad behavior is burned into the public's awareness.

    At this point we can only hope for the best. Perhaps enough has been done already; if MS has missed its grab to control the internet's protocols, we can expect them to start withering from natural causes now, since they manifestly can't compete with the quality/price ratio of logicels libre. Companies aren't switching to Apache, *BSD, Linux, etc. due to market clout, that's for sure.


    --
  • The astroturfers are out in force today, ain't they! Just wait until tomorrow, after the verdict comes down.

    Meanwhile, those of you who are infatuated with the "brisk sales" of Win2K might want to re-read what I posted on the topic last week [slashdot.org].
    --
  • No surprise. You can expect a steady stream of offers today, tonight, and tomorrow right up until the verdict comes down.

    These offers are necessary for PR ("We tried to settle, but the DOJ wasn't interested."), and would also be useful if the prosecution finally made a mistake and accepted one.

    The obfuscation in the weekend offer was useful on both counts: for public consumption, it merely needs to sound like a good offer; for the DOJ's consumption, obfuscation makes a mistake more likely.

    But dis-integrating the browser? Get real. The browser wars are over, so the offer is way lame. Not to mention the fact that people have figured out how to dis-integrate it without MS's permission. This part of the offer is just for form; the substance lies in their insistence on their "right" to add whatever features they want to their OS. In other words, they're looking forward to the next * wars, where * != browser.

    --
  • Unlike the majority of AC's here I do have a job and I do have systems to run. I don't have the time nor patience to sit back and make sure my grammar and spelling is 100% correct.

    Besides, i feel its better when people express there opinions, and not the lack thereof. So go have fun shoving grits down your pants and let people with half a brain speak.

    OTH, i'm not here to preach. Your freedom if ignorance is as much my freedom to speech. So have fun saying whatever you want to say. I'm not gonna stop you.

  • Hehe, you do have some good Points. But i don't believe this warrants anticompetitve lawsuits from the goverment.

    Wine is a great project, but only came about as a means for linux to emulate the windows environment to run the windows applications. Wine by no means was a commercial effort to compete against windows or microsoft.

    As far as closed API's has anyone ever tried writing a competing product to Oracle RDBMS that is compatible? Nope, can't be done, but do we Sue Oracle for that? I mean have you seen there new licensing schemes and how they rape the consumer?

    How about Novell, do we get to sue them because nobody could make a compatible product? Weren't they the cause of the downfall of that good ol' company that made Banyan Vines and lantastic? Is it my right to sue Novell for that?

    Just some thoughts.

  • You forgot. "Microsoft uses uncompetitive busines practices to force new OS on unsuspecting businesses. Consumers still have little choice."

    BTW, for those of you wanting to save time. 3 of those were written while looking at the same Microsoft press release, one ends "Finally, I'd like to announce that Windows 2000 Magazine has purchased my WinInfo newsletter and Web site, along with my SuperSite for Windows, a Web site dedicated to the future of Windows computing. ", and the China one has a couple interesting points, it should have been shared (Esp with the Linux/China rumors that get posted.)


    --
  • Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued?

    This is the wrong question. The question is, how would I as a consumer have benefited had Microsoft obeyed the law? Once the law is broken, then the question becomes how do I as a citizen benefit from laws that are uniformly and fairly applied?

    I don't understand how people can pick at microsoft for writing the OS and the Applications.

    This is just muddled thinking. Microsoft is not being sued for producing both applications and operating systems. It is being sued for specific acts by which it illegally leverged its monopoly power in operating systems to limit consumer choice in application software, and to limit downstream partners' ability form business relationships with competing third parties.

    As a consumer, would you benefit from a more vigorous competition for office suite software? How can this happen, when MS keeps API information secret? Would you benefit from lower prices? How can that happen, if Microsoft compoletely controls the downstream distribution channel and punishes OEMS who run their businesses for their own benefit and not Microsofts?

    After Microsoft will sun be next? Will they have to split the processor division from there OS division? Doesn't that give them unfair advantage in the market?

    The answer is, self evidently, no. Sun's having both hardware and software divisions is neither illegal, nor does it harm consumers. Just as Microsoft's having OS and application divisions is not illegal, nor does it in itself harm consumers. Let's be very clear here -- Microsoft is being pursued for specific illegal behaviors, not for their structure. Structural punishments may well be applied, but only because Microsoft has shown cannot be trusted to behave legally and responsibly. In the end a structural punishment may be better for MS shareholders than severe punitive government oversight of day to day operations.

    Or is it because the consumers who don't
    know about Sun and other Systems out there don't think to sue them too?

    Or is it because Sun is not a monopoly and therefore cannot be accused of abuse of monopoly power?
  • MS is not offering to release the source to Windows. AFAIK, although this was reported on a number of sites, a spokesman for Bill Gates denied that Gates had said anything to this matter, and insisted that the media had misunderstood his original remark.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • This is a reallycool idea.

    But only if is there any way to make it state or county prison ... perhaps in a capitalist robber-barron shot of irony - a privatized state prison?

    The other reply to your message reminded me that I know someone who was in federal prison with Michael Milikin. When asked how Mr. Milikin was dealing with jail, he said "Oh, federal prison is pretty mellow, it' state prison that you really want to avoid."

    Not like they wouldn't pay off some of their fellow inmates for protection anyway, ala Papillion ...

  • You raise some good points, but miss something very important. This is not (or, at least, should not be) about being Anti-Micro$oft; it's about offering other operating systems. I also am a very firm believer in using the appropriate tool for the job; as well as being very much pro-*nix, I am a M$-Certified Professional, and spent a lot of time with NT, Win9x, NetWare, MacOS, and DOS. There are times when Windows 95 is the most approriate choice -- I would probably never recommend Linux to a non-technical person if they didn't have an interest in learning about it -- but there are many, many times when it is not. Too often people choose the default, rather than the best option. Kind of like when you build Perl -- many questions say, "If you don't understand this question, just hit ENTER." This is not always the best option (although it is correct much more often in the case of Perl than it is with OSes).

    From our perspective (the users out there who care about what OS/tools/software we use), there are much better options that M$ windows/office/visual *++ -- but for many casual users, this may not be the case. But this is not the point. This whole thing is about decisions being made for you. Nothing more, nothing less.

    This, by the way, is why I will never again use an Apple operating system without an 'X' in it.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • Disintegrate IE? Now thats a solution that would make me happy! ;)
  • Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve.

    [later...]

    So yeah, as an educated consumer i know what fits MY bill.

    Who were you educated by? Microsoft PR?

    The history of the PC is replete with the smoking carcases of innovative companies that tried to compete with Microsoft:

    • DR-DOS
    • Stac Electronics
    • Netscape
    • Blue Mountain Arts
    • TV Host
    • Internet Electronics (Did you know that "IE" is not a trademark of Microsoft?)
    • etc.
    Perhaps you can tell me what, exactly, Win3.11 had that Win3.1 didn't except an incompatible API that broke a number of competing products.

    --
  • "Users do not need to go through a steep learning curve to use Linux at all, or even to install if they are using a modern distribution. The only learning curve applies when trying to do something fancy maintenance-wise, which is no more difficult (and usually quite a bit easier) than learning to do the same thing under Windows."

    That's bs. The plain fact is that to average users to much power is _frightening_. To much flexibility is _confusing_. A command line is _scary_. People don't _wan't_ to have so much power that they are loaded with the responsibility of not accidentally wiping things out or unrecoverably breaking their system. It doesn't help Linux at all to ignore this painful facts. It doesn't matter what /we/ think. It matters what the user thinks.

    "The only learning curve applies when trying to do something fancy maintenance-wise, which is no more difficult (and usually quite a bit easier) than learning to do the same thing under Windows."

    Hmmm...ok, you attempt to teach users how to configure X, keyboard bindings, and how to use a (perhaps several) new and foreign windowing systems.

    "It is very rare for applications to not be present on Linux, and even rarer for them to not work properly. Users are far more married to file formats than they are applications. I have found that, without exception, when a user says "I need to have application x" what they really mean is "I need to have an application as easy to use as x, with the same capabilities and able to read and write the same file format as x," which applications are present under Linux for nearly every task these days."

    Well, we'd like to think that, but I simply think that's not true. Users are /trained/, either explicitly in classes, or by long use, to use an /application/. Yes, they are tied to file formats because they are tied to the application they use. It takes a while to figure out what all the goddamn buttons and menus in MS Office do, or at least which ones you need. Remember, users don't give a damn about "Linux" or "Open Source", and our philosophical high ground doesn't mean a thing to a large part of them. Users want something to /use/. Something quick and easy and intuitive that lets them get their work done. If they can't do exactly what they are currently doing it is going to be seen as a pain for them. Why /should/ they move when they already have something that lets them get their work done? Converting users is more of a slow gradual and painful process, than just saying "Here is a whizbang OS with everything you need. GO!".

    "...most users I have dealt with have preferred running dual boot machines and running Linux where possible to running windows."

    I'd love to meet users like the ones you know. The ones I know don't know what dual boot is, let alone want to know, or even let anyone possible mess up their systems which they've already grown accustomed to, customized, etc. I don't mean this derogatorily either. People are comfortable with what they have and are experienced with. There has to be a /strong/ reason to make them move.

    "At least this way they have more control over when and where, and for what reason, their machine is being rebooted, and the frequency of system crashes and hangs is dramatically reduced. Contrary to popular myth here, users do care about stability and reliability very, very much."

    I think the _real_ myth is that with our hubris we assume that users have the same priorities and values that we do. We assume that people really care about the fundamental stability and reliability of their computers. They appreciate a well designed or elegantly implemented OS. That they actual respect this stuff, like we techies in our ivory tower do. That they actually /want/ more control. I think that's the myth. And we should wake up to the fact that normal users are not going to be swayed merely by technical merits they don't care about. If their system crashes once or twice a day (or week is more like it), but they can still get their work done fast and efficiently, that is a pretty good trade off. Remember, they don't care about computers for it's own sake. I think that's where we get mislead. We care about good design and implementation, about reliability and stability, because as engineers we design these systems. This dialog simply can't be one way, of us telling users how good a new system is for them. It has to be two-way...we have to /know/ what they want in the first place. If Windows or MacOS really wasn't suiting people for their purposes you'd better believe they'd be using something else. The fact is that those operation systems and applications on them do for the most part suit users perfectly fine. We should concentrate on developing and refining the missing features that users actually want and use, than lauding over technical superiority. In short, if we want users to care about Linux, we have to listen to what they actually want and then provide it for them. Linux systems can "make do"...but I think Linux has the potential for doing a lot better than just "making do".
  • It doesn't matter how crappy Windows is from our perspective, if a user has to reboot twice a day, but still can get his work done, they will certainly use Windows over a Linux machine on which they either have to go through a steep learning curve or where the applications they use (regardless of equivalents) simply aren't present or don't work. That's the facts.
  • This is very true. I was a beta tester for Windows 95. I remember being frustrated by the fact that the beta copies would not install on my DR DOS machine. I was forced to reinstall MS-DOS 6.2 on the machine before I could installWin95 beta. I submitted this bug to MS and of course no further action was taken on it.

    -JD
  • "If the Judge says they are not a monopoly and are without any guilt, then those lawsuits are not going to appear. If MS was sure that it was not guilty, they would just sit back and wait for the not-guilty verdict to be rendered."

    Its not quite that simple. If you were being told you have a 50% chance of being convicted of murder and sent away for life, but are offered a chance to work out something less, wouldn't you at least look at it? You can be as sure as you want you are not guilty, but only what the judge thinks will count in the end.
  • Really? Netscape crushed? Last time I checked they were still viable, although its now rolled into AOL(yeah, like they're really any better than MS) If Microsoft chooses to give software away they are crushing other companies, but if others give software away thats OK.

    OK, I know you pro-MS guys would say anything to amke MS look better, but this BULLSHIT is a bit too much: to state MS did not crush Netscape. Well, MS only choke the mostimportant source of revenue for Netscape, effectively causing it to fall under an almos-as-slimy corporation as AOL.

    And how did MS choke Netscape's main source of revenue? (yes I have to write this, too, because I guesspro-MS guys will ask it)? By (not only) developing and giving a good quality browser away for free (because MS has a LOT of cash that they can throw away for such purposes); and even PUTTING such browser in every Windows shipped with every PC in the world.

    Please, spare us the BS that not even you believe.

  • When did the USA become so jealous ? It gets more like Europe day by day.

    Goodness me! Who moderated this spiteful little post up?

    where he can innovate great software free from the meddlesome interference of big govenrment.

    Now I know it's probably a bit passé to accuse ACs of astroturfing these days. But just from a linguistic point of view, isn't this lovely marketing-speak?


    --
    This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
  • Oh, so now it -IS- possible to separate them?

    Quite so. :-)

    And what has changed between the time MS's lawyers insisted IE was part of the OS and now?

    Before, Microsoft wanted to use their power in the OS arena to gain power in the browser arena (no pun intended).

    Internet Explorer has since become a considerably more popular (and, let's face it, simply better) browser than Netscape. At the same time Linux has begun to erode the popularity of Windows.

    So now, Microsoft want to use their power in the browser arena to gain power in the OS arena. As long as IE doesn't run on Un*x, separating Win and IE does not affect this aim.


    --
    This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
  • ...including releasing source code for Windows...

    This is just the Microsoft way of making you think you are getting something when you are really not. Opening windows source isn't going to benefit too many people. The source is a big mess and too large to sort through without spending a great deal of time on it.

    Think about it. In linux... recompile the kernal source the way you want it. In windows... change it and beg microsoft to put it in?!? I don't think so. If you wanted to change how windows worked you would need to distribute your version of windows with your software. And that's assuming that Microsoft would allow you to do that. Even so, you probably would only get it by buying Microsoft VC++ (kinda like MFC source) or some other MS product. Don't expect microsoft to make a GNU Windows!
  • > Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued?

    Tell me, have you R E A D the findings of fact? Can't you S E E how unbelivable evil they are? Isn't it O B V I O U S that the govenment has to intervene? Do you realize how U N I N F O R M E D your opinions are?

    Please read:
    Halloween I [opensource.org]
    Halloween II [opensource.org]
    Findings of Fact [gpo.gov]

    And theres plenty more material I can point you to. Work on those first. Or try Stephenson's stuff.

    Without the Sherman Act, your entire life would be run by GlobalMegaCom. It's a patch to the flaw of capitalism.

    Please note that the link to the findings of fact is to the original version, released in November 1999. A version, apperantly with slight corrections, was released a month later "by court order", but it's HTML format has quite a few problems... which comes as no surprise: META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97"
  • Becuase these musicians don't matter. MS, by being the behemoth that it is, can control your government, your newsprint, and your country.

    It's not about fairness. It's about the long term future of your country. Go get some perspective.

  • I have written code for GNOME, and I know how painful it was to get started.

    BUT having said that, I must say that once I got it, it was a real breeze. Somehow, the steep learning curve always plateaus out. Maybe that's a cool philosophy to live by, no?

    Well, I can't say I advocate this for everyone. But that's the difference.

  • IANAL, but I believe you are correct that Judge Jackson will rule on the 28th, but that's only to say whether the behavior that was determined in the findings of fact actually broke anti-trust law. I think the vast consensus of legal pundits is that he will find that MS did break antitrust law.

    But that ruling would be followed by arguments by both sides in court over what the remedy should be. It's kind of like the "sentencing hearing" after a guilty verdict in a typical criminal case.

    The legal and political strategies are interesting. MS would be wise to settle, because that way they could find some terms that are mutually acceptable. If they argue their side and then let the judge decide, they are likely to fare worse. But if they can stretch it out to appeal, then they may find a new administration at the Justice Dept. On the Justice Dept side, they know if they get a break-up it will be appealed, and they could be out in a year. So they want to settle, too, but they have such an overwhelming case that they need to get some major concessions from MS in order to accept any settlement and present it to the American public as "justice served."

    Michael Mann, I think I have the subject for your next movie.

  • We're probably going to see a breakup, even though there are conduct remedies that would work. And it's all Microsoft's fault. They could have settled this thing long ago.

    But no, they had to try to tough it out. They tried spin control. They tried faked evidence (remember the infamous video?). They tried political threats. They tried bogus technical arguments. They tried meaningless concessions. But it didn't work, which became clear when Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact.

    The judge was clearly hinting "you better settle this thing, or you're going to lose big". But Microsoft still didn't seriously try to settle. Dumb move.

    So in a few days, the judge will issue his findings of law, and they're probably going to say that Microsoft is doing lots of things that antitrust law says are illegal. Then the penalty phase starts. If DOJ and the state AGs want a breakup, they'll probably get one.

    Microsoft can appeal if (when) they lose, but the appeal gets fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, bypassing the circuit courts, due to a change in antitrust law from a few years back. They can't stall for more than a few months.

    So Microsoft's own actions have put this thing on a track where the alternatives are narrowing down to breakup or nothing. And "nothing" is, at this point, very unlikely.

  • Breakups always hurt companies and this isn't a technological witch hunt. It's a monopoly case. Just because they're a monopoly doesn't mean people don't rely on them. Breaking them up will only hurt MS as a whole and would even hurt the computer world. Can you see Windows Distributions ... as if this wasn't bad enough in windows. Cross compatability would be a joke. Developement would be non-existant. And people would be forced back into the late 80's with all these GUI's that no one understood.

  • I guess you'll see a

    MS OS
    MS NET

    One will work on the operating system the other on network apps ... I don't really get it either. It's like Bill having a company then a judge says "hey ummm no". Then they take bills company and give control of it to someone else. Can you see Linus Torvaldos with MS OS and ummm whoever the CEO of Netscape is today as the head of MS NET.

    Impression of Linux viewing the windows source code...
    Linus: okay show me
    Tech: Are you sure sir?
    Linus: yes
    Tech: here goes
    Linus: hahahahaha okay now wheres the real code
    Tech: that's it sir
    Linus: This is QBasic ...
    Tech: well no one else seemed to care...
    Linus: first line is REM Hehehehehe stupid people

  • The MS Monopoly Game [ms-monopoly.com]
    Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
  • Other reports on ZD Net and CNet are saying that the DOJ is backing away from a breakup as a proposed solution
  • Yet again another attempt at anti-MS FUD from the rabid Linux zealots of /. I hear all of this anecdotal "evidence" of how Windows machines crash every half hour, yet in my experiance this is simply not true.

    This is a true story. &nbsp I walked into my office this morning and discovered a PDC with the BSOD. &nbsp Fortunately a reboot "fixed" (in quotes) it. &nbsp A second machine within the same domain also had the BSOD. &nbsp That didn't fare as well and I had to waste my day reinstalling it and the backup software, blah. &nbsp This isn't some "anecdotal evidence". &nbsp This is a fact.

    Yes, it can crash, but this generally occurs with poorly written software that doesn't conform to MS guidelines or when the OS has been setup incorrectly.

    I can see "poorly written software" possibly causing problems but with all of the "undocumented features", how can a developer really code software using these so-called "Microsoft guidelines"?. &nbsp And what does "or when the OS has been setup incorrectly" mean?&nbsp If you go through the default install of NT 4.0, put on the latest service packs, keep ALL screen saver activity off the console, configure the video at the undocumented recommended resolution of 640x480 16 colors - WTF else is there to configure?

    I think we've all seen enough on these /. pages from burnt-out sysadmins who are SICK of this crap. &nbsp Especially if you have a different OS on older hardware, sitting side by side with it, with all kinds of stuff loaded, and it can achieve uptimes in the hundreds of days!

    We're not making this up to spit on MS. &nbsp The day they produce a product as stable as DOS 5.0 (which I had running on a 486/33 for 8 years WITHOUT having to reinstall it), then I will buy it. &nbsp Otherwise, I hope the judge sticks it to 'em!

    JMHO.

  • But Oracle doesn't come preloaded on your PC, and Oracle has competition from DB2, MySQL, PostGreSQL, SQL Server ad infinitum...... The benefit (see I can spell) of this lawsuit is to open the OS market to fair competition. OS/2 has almost died due to MS policy and the cowardice of the other PC manufacturers, Netscape for almost the same reason, but at the centre of this is the Machiavellian monopoly at Redmond. Remember that you would not have such a huge choice of hardware as you do if IBM had kept the PC architecture closed, what we want now is the same opportunities on the software side without MS putting pressure on the PC makers. We need compatibility until the playing field is level again and we have a number of competing OSs with real innovation coming from competition.

  • Ya gotta wonder... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27, 2000 @04:15AM (#1168717)
    Everyone's been wondering whether or not a breakup would actually do any good in this situation. Instead of one big MS, you have a bunch of little MSes that still have all the existing insider communication channels they always had.

    Perhaps what the DOJ really wanted hard core monitoring and business practice changes and was just pushing for the breakup angle to make anything less seem like a consession... bind the company up in red tape, like with IBM, and you'll punish them severely. Of course, you don't want to hobble them permanently, just long enough to stimulate actual competition and innovation, then set em loose again. Maybe then they'll produce something of reasonable quality at a reasonable price... after all, they'll actually need to compete.

    And for all you MS apologists out there who say that MS innovated and all that blather, perhaps they did... but at a far reduced level than the innovation that would be produced in a stimulating, competitive environment. That's exactly the problem with monopolies: When you are your only real competition, you tend to get fat and lazy, and the consumer suffers.

  • Punishing Microsoft (Score:3)

    by unitron ( 5733 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @05:13AM (#1168718) Homepage Journal
    Shouldn't the objective behind punishing them for being a monopoly be not to hurt them just to be hurting them but to "make good" to those who were damaged whatever damages they suffered?

  • Talk about biased statistics (Score:3)

    by tilly ( 7530 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @05:08AM (#1168719)
    Let me see.

    Playstation 2, in one country, in one day, sold as well as Windows 2000 did across the entire world in about 3 weeks (actually 22 days). And Playstation 2 did not have any OEM preload channels to claim as "sales".

    Yes, Windows 2000 is selling well compared to the original NT 4.0 (which was hardly a hit before Service Pack 1), and compared to some unspecified "expectations". However suppose that your average machine turns over in 2 years. Then Microsoft's sales are consistent with replacement alone on about 33 million machines. Of course the installed base of NT is a lot larger than that, and NT tends to get replaced more often than once every 2 years.

    Hmmm...doesn't seem like much "pent up demand" there!

    No, if the Windows 2000 news doesn't improve at some point, Microsoft is in trouble.

    Regards,
    Ben

  • How about a regulated monopoly? (Score:3)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @06:29AM (#1168720) Homepage
    Like other 'natural' monopolies ('natural' in that they have successfully established Wintel as the defacto privatized standard of interworking components, and people will continue to want to buy into that standard for compatability, just like settling on a language or system of weights and measurements of conducting business) - I mean, how ELSE are prices going to be settled, just 'trust 'em'? Personally, I can't even SAY 'capitalism' w/o saying 'competition', so if the competition is over, what's the price regulating mechanism? Charge what the market will bear? Hardware just keeps getting better and cheaper, but Msft software seems to be getting better and more expensive. Shouldn't they have to get prices approved like the local power company monopoly does?
  • It seems to me that capitalism is predicated on a free market where prices are dictated by supply and demand, and that this mechanism of price control breaks down in the presence of a monoploy. Thus anti-trust legislation must a pivotal aspect of a capitalist economy. Anti-trust legislation would be redundant in a centralized socialist economy because prices would be determined centrally. Therefore the US use of anti-trust legislation suggest to me that the US is a capitalist, rather than a socialist economy.

    I don't see how being offshore would help either. If the US, EU or Japan can't prosecute the company, they can impose punitive duties on its products. Since all three have at least examined anti-trust charges, I don't see any of them kicking up a major stink with the WTO.

  • Re:Hmmm...what's going on? (Score:3)

    by LinuxParanoid ( 64467 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @07:22AM (#1168722) Homepage Journal
    As I read several articles this morning, the MS concessions appeared to be allowing some access to some OS code to some OEMs and other software developers. This is not the same as a generic offer to open the source to any interested party. The criteria for who can view the source and under what licensing conditions is obviously a rather material issue.

    Say for example that "serious" companies (serious defined as having a certain revenue level) were allowed to access the source. That'd still lockout startups and open source efforts. Not to mention the various ways in which the license that is written "to protect Microsoft's intellectual property" could in turn restrict the ability for people to write GPL-resulting code.

    In short, the fine print is rather important. Do you trust Microsoft, whose legal accumen has been a critical weapon since its first DOS license agreement and before, to submit any settlement terms that wouldn't have several loopholes they can rush through?

    I pored through the Java contract Sun wrote when it became public, and believe me, that one was pretty tight and there were still a few subtle but critical holes that MS was able to drive a Mac truck through.

    The very art of compromise and give and take the DOJ would need to eliminate the big holes would still leave need small holes MS could exploit steadily and with substantial strategic success due to their market power.

    I remain highly skeptical that any conduct remedies could succeed (in fulfilling the purposes of the Sherman Anti-trust Act) in the face of a relentless, aggressive, and highly intelligent competitor with immense market (monopoly) power.

    --LP

  • MS offers to free OEMs, dis-integrate IE to escape (Score:3)

    by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @04:14AM (#1168723)
    The Register [theregister.co.uk] had this story [theregister.co.uk] posted a bit over an hour ago, which talks about yet another offer made by MS since the rejection of the last one. I'm not reposting the whole thing here, though. Aside from not being broken up, MS are still insisting on not being made to admit they're guilty. Seems like MS is getting really desperate!

  • Re:It's a pity (Score:3)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @04:42AM (#1168724)
    MS document their stuff well? Look at what the Samba developer Jeremy Allison [slashdot.org] had to do to get interoperability.

    Look at what Andrew Schulman had to do to demystify the Window95 hype.

    Look at all the undocumented functionality that MS Word used, but nobody else knew about, until it was reverse engineered.

  • But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court. Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve. But simply existing without anything better or no one stepping up to the bat does not make microsoft an evil empire.

    One little problem with this is using extremely questionable practices and buying out companies left and right even if they have a better product may be business. But, it is they who are keeping you from the best possible solution. This doesn't rely on the court but in there decisions not to play fair. It is your savior who has dug there own hole.

    Now no matter how much you like there products they will be getting a slap on the hand thusly deserved.

    Anyone who lets themselves be fooled into thinking that a large corporation is doing it for the consumer is eventually going to find out they care nothing about you or your issues.
  • OK...the first thing you think when you hear this story is, well, naturally, the DOJ is rejecting Microsoft's offer, since:
    1. The DOJ seems poised to win, and you don't settle easily when you're winning
    2. Microsoft is likely offering minor concessions
    However, I heard that Microsoft was actually offering a number of substantial concessions, including releasing source code for Windows. It seems odd the the DOJ would pass on this, as it could seriously change the marketplace.

    I guess the real question would be: is Microsoft offering to release the Win 9x source code, only to turn around and concentrate on the NT codebase? And would they immediately make API changes to make the old codebase incompatible? Perhaps that's what DOJ is thinking.

    Anyhow, I certainly don't have the answer. I don't really like government getting into all of this anyhow, but I don't particularly care for Microsoft, and what they've done to the industry, either.

    If anything good is to come of this, they should get Microsoft to release any rights to OS/2 source code, so IBM could open source OS/2, if they want to. That SOM stuff could be very useful to the KDE and GNOME projects.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

    /bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.

  • Re:What truely is the benifet of this lawsuit? (Score:4)

    by SgtPepper ( 5548 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @05:22AM (#1168727)
    Hehe, you do have some good Points. But i don't believe this warrants anticompetitve lawsuits from the goverment.


    Well that was, and is, up to the courts to decide. In my opinion I would agree, the less government involvment the better.

    Wine is a great project, but only came about as a means for linux to emulate the windows environment to run the windows applications. Wine by no means was a commercial effort to compete against windows or microsoft.

    Exactly :) ( think about it....That was my point to a 'T' )

    As far as closed API's has anyone ever tried writing a competing product to Oracle RDBMS that is compatible? Nope, can't be done, but dowe Sue Oracle for that? I mean have you seen there new licensing schemes and how they rape the consumer?

    Nope, but in all fairness, there is many more Databasing programs out there then Oracle with much more open standards ( sorry, examples escape me, not up on that I admit )

    How about Novell, do we get to sue them because nobody could make a compatible product? Weren't they the cause of the downfall of that good ol' company that made Banyan Vines and lantastic? Is it my right to sue Novell for that?

    You're not, and we're not suing Microsoft, the US Government is. Let me just finish by saying I agree the government is sticking it's nose where it don't belong. We are comrads in arms in that respect. But I do not believe Microsoft is without fault, I just don't think it's the government's place to spank 'em.

    Sgt Pepper
  • Its not a lawsuit in the normal way of things, its a goverment/legal ruling on whether a company is anti-competitive.

    As for why this is a problem, have you ever seen old style eastern block TV, monopoly gives no drive to improve quality. The aim of a company is to make as much money as possible for its shareholders, this is enshrined in law, that they treat consumers fairly is not.

    If the world had no monopoly rules then you'd see a massive merger of Big Companies into monopolies, this would enable them to make more money and not care for competition.

    Basic rule of business

    "Fuck 95% of the industry but leave the other 5% to prove you used KY"

  • Don't be stupid. Noone in their right mind wants to see Microsoft broken up. It's no good for anyone. It'd be nice if they opened up all their APIs, and curbed some of their business practices, but a splintered Microsoft is an awful remedy.

    As a small long-term (5+ years) stockholder of Microsoft, I wouldn't mind the company being broken up rather than to have some restrictive remedies. In five more years, I'm confident that I'd still be doing better than the market index.

    The remedies you suggest are pointless:

    Opening APIs without opening source is irrelevant; knowing the syntax of calls without opening the precisely-defined semantics (bugs and all), something really only available with reference source code, is useless for the purpose of interoperability, which is what customers most want between their various software programs; this is one (of several) important reasons why Linux has succeeded as a centralized UNIX platform when all past UNIX standards efforts have failed.

    The hard-charging culture and high intelligence at Microsoft (along with a dose of legal savvy that has been with the firm since the DOS license agreement) will basically make "curbing business practices" largely ineffective at solving the issue of Microsoft's wielding of monopoly power. In two years, the issue will just reassert itself, and we'll be back to square one. While Microsoft management seems to think that stalling tactics would be profitable (I'd agree this is factually true; every day cements their dominance further), such tactics are shortsighted evasions of a willingness to recognize the validity and purpose of anti-trust law, and the refusal to tackle the real problem of distrust and fear that their previous behavior and relationship with partners has earned them from friend and foe alike. (Try naming one serious Microsoft partnership that has succeeded. They're like the bully of the playground who wins and keeps trying to but in when people leave to play another game. A breakup would help break this cycle of counter-productive dominance.)

    As a stockholder who has watched his small MS holdings go up 10x in the last five years (wish I'd bought 10x more!) I wouldn't mind a short-term dip in return for a more workable, less threatening long-term corporate structure.

    Sure, as a stockholder I have some concern that a dip would cause employees to flee their golden handcuffs, but at the end of the day, this is like a gust of wind carrying a huge load of acorns off a heavily laden tree. Like a tree struggling to reach the sun (justifying itself by describing the increase in square footage of shade for consumers such an effort would generate,) Ballmer et all can't succeed in their struggle against the law of large numbers forever without getting smaller and more focused. Microsoft would be able to play more effectively in a lot more strategic markets (e.g. WinCE) if they presented less of a threat to everyone else. A breakup would help them reduce their threat profile more effectively than any API opening or business practice remedies that would leave them on their enjoyable but pointless treadmill.

    --LP

  • Re:What truely is the benefit of this lawsuit? (Score:4)

    by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @04:59AM (#1168730)

    But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court. Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve. But simply existing without anything better or no one stepping up to the bat does not make microsoft an evil empire.

    In my opinion, choice has been the first thing to go out the window (sic) since MS reached such a high level of market share. Until about 1 year ago (well after the case started) there was effectively little or no choice to be had when buying a computer for home use. You either bought a pre-loaded Window machine, often with MS Office bundled, or an Apple machine. In many ways, the bundling of MS Windows + Office has done more to throttle the development of competing apps than anything else - it is an insidious method of halting the competition before it has begun. How many people will buy a second Office suite to replace their pre-bundled one? Only those who know precisely what they can or can't do with the MS Office suite, and that does NOT represent a majority of the computer-buying market.

    Sure some of you don't like the "Windows Tax" when you buy a new PC

    So you think I should pay for something I may never use, may format off my hard drive as soon as the computer is powered up for the first time? Again the situation is better now - more vendors provide computers with alternatives (i.e. Linux), but the MS dominance of the bundled solution market is still extremely widespread.

    Why would someone want to choose something that is Niche when they can choose something that is a standard?

    When I work, I want to work with an environment of my choosing. When I need to exchange files with other users I want those OPEN standards to be available so that my file can be interpretted by their system, regardless of their operating system. For interoperability, all we need is exchangable file formats and open networking standards to allow us to communicate and pass information between systems.

    I would feel sorry for the thousands of employees, the foundations that Gates supports, the 5,000+ college students that could loose scholarships, the grants and donations to the city and areas of which microsoft works (redmond receives lots of support from microsoft).

    So you are arguing that because MS contributes so much in charitable ways, its sharp business practices and leveraging of its market positioning to its own ends is acceptable? That argument is extremely fatuous.

    SGI, Sun, Sparc, Alpha, Mac, Amiga, RISC OS, RS2000, Aix, FreeBSD, NeXT, DOS, Novell DOS, CPM, TRS 80. They were all your choices. You chose a PC witch Built its foundation in Windows. You didn't Choose a 10,000 dollar Sparc to not run Solaris on it, so why should it be any different here.

    Why would I necessarily run Solaris on Sparc hardware? There are other choices. But this is a diversion - take a look back at the previous contender in the PC marketplace - OS/2. What happened there? MS leveraged its market position and made it difficult for OS/2 to get a foothold in the market. Result: another choice goes west (although you can still get OS/2, although it hasn't really changed a lot in the last few years).

    What you seem to miss entirely is that MS has managed to make the OS market into a MS-only field for 95% of computer users. And in my opinion, they have acheived this by leveraging their marketing might to remove any competition in the field. So yes, most applications are written for MS Windows, because that is where the market has ended up. My concern is that had there been a wider playing field, we would now be in a better position to choose which OS we wanted to run, and that interoperability between systems and OS's would be vastly improved over the situation we have today.

    Cheers,

    Toby Haynes

  • Thanks MS. (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27, 2000 @05:46AM (#1168731)
    It's a frequently made statement that MS did the world a favour by bringing the windows desktop to the consumer. I think it is uttered repeatedly without the consideration of what the world could have been like if computers had remained something of a black art.

    Enabling millions of people to use a computer without having to learn a thing about them is not a service to IT. I get the feeling that a lot of users, having strained to figure out the perils of the taskbar, thought to themselves, "Great! Now I can ask some <i>real</i> dumb questions."

    So thanks MS, for making sure most of the computer hardware produced in the world will be wasted on some some lazy bozo, to perform such useful tasks as finding and storing pr0n. Not to mention passing on that e-mail from Bill Gates about the disneyland tickets to every person he's ever met.

    Thanks for wasting countless man-hours as trained professionals answered questions like "What's a cursor?"

    Thanks for making it possible for Intel's shoddy 8086 architecture to mutate into the leviathon, overheated, overpowered, underdesigned, hacked together monstrosity we call pentium.

    Thanks for MS Bob. That was a laugh.

    Thanks for a horde of standards shattered and torn in the wake of your monopolistic greed.

    Thanks for the death of Netscape. They weren't great, but at least they tried to read the RFCs.

    Thanks for the Melissa virus, and all it's friends. You made that all possible.

    Thanks for keeping IT dishonest. Now that everyone saw how well it worked, we can follow your business model. Lie, lie, lie.

    Thanks for Visual Basic, and a horde of programs designed to make managers think they can produce code without hiring programmers.

    Thanks for helping IBM put the final bullet into DEC's dying corpse.

    Thanks for winmodems.

    Thanks for the Blue Screen of Death. And memory leaks. And all the other bugs you couldn't be bothered to fix.

    Thanks for DDoS attacks.

    Above, thanks for all the morons who think you brought something to the IT industry. Pop quiz: If I come to your house and give you ten bucks, then steal your car, are you going to sit around saying, "Well, he did bring me ten bucks."?

    Wake up. MS didn't do anything but lie and steal and hinder real development. If they hadn't brought computing to the common man, some other loser would have. Say, Apple. Or Xerox. Or even Amiga.
  • More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?

    The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.

    Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...

    - Robin

  • Re:What truely is the benifet of this lawsuit? (Score:5)

    by SgtPepper ( 5548 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @04:40AM (#1168733)
    First of all, let me just say that that was a very well thought out post, and very well spoken. There's just one point I'd like to discuss..it's when you say here:

    Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve

    This right here....this is exactly what they HAVE done. This is the whole crux of most of our feelings behind Microsoft. Why has WINE been in development so long and still can't run 80% of the software out there ( Disclaimer: Percentage exactly unknown, last time I checked though it was still a large amount of software that either didn't run or was buggy ). In fact you back this up later on in your post with:


    Sure it may not be an OPEN standard, but gee golly sir when i go to the story and there is 400 games and 1000s of applications i can run on my computer. THAT IS A STANDARD!

    A closed specification ( or "Standard" ) is meant for one thing....to prevent compatibility, so you can be the only kid on the block with those nifty APIs. Which change...from release to releast from Service Pack to Service Pack. Now I'm not making any kind of suggestion on how evil Microsoft is, or what should be done to punish them. But I /do/ think they try to prevent others from being able to interface to Windows in a fully compatible, open way. Full Disclouser of all Windows APIs and Protocols would be, in my opinon a very satisfactory resolution to this whole mess.

    Ah well, thanks for listening, and again, nice post :)

    Sgt Pepper

  • How Quickly we forget (Score:5)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @06:26AM (#1168734)
    Wow, the Microsoft paid moderators appear to be out in force. Lest we forget, and be drawn in by the many reasonable-sounding platitudes of forgiveness, lets debunk a few myths:

    • Microsoft can never take Linux away from us, even if they crush it commercially. Not True. Remember Win-modems? Win-printers. Microsoft had embarked on a strategy to get hardware manufacturers to produce hardware "optimized" for Microsoft operating systems (where "optimized" was defined as "usable only by thier (approved) OSes"). MS was hard at work creating a world where developers of emerging operating systems, such as Linux and FreeBSD, would not have been able to get programming specs for device drivers at any price. Fortunately for the proponents of Open Source, being put under a microscope and subjected to public view forced Microsoft to suspend this strategy, at least temporarilly.
    • Microsoft didn't do anything wrong, it is a company's fudiciary responsibility to make as much money as they can, any way they can. Not True. It is not a company's fudiciary responsiblity to violate federal anti-trust legislation in order to maximize profits, or, indeed, to violate any law whatsoever. In fact, a company has a fudiciary responsibility to abide by the law, lest shareholders lose money as a result of legal consiquences, such as, say, an anti-trust trial brought against them by the Department of Justice.
    • Forcing Microsoft to release Windows Souce would remedy their behavior. Not True. Others have commented on the quality of the code, and the (lack of) value in having it avialable. More to the point, Microsoft could simply relelase the source to Windows 9x, then simpy turn around and push win2k or some other product, in much the same way they de-emphasized DOS once the Consent Decree was reached in the mid-nineties.
    • Breaking up Microsoft would be bad for computing. Not True. Whether MS were broken up vertically, such that multiple companies were competing with one another in offering Win 9x/NT/2k, Office, etc., or horizontally, such that one entity markets the OS, another Office products, another internet products, and so on, the end result would be a more competative, and hence more robust, marketplace. This is good for the consumer, good for the competition, and ultimately good for the technology. Ironically, if the breakup of AT&T and subsequent boom in the telephony industry is any indication, it would also be very good for MSFT stockholders.
    • Microsoft can be trusted to abide by whatever agreement (if any) they come to with the DOJ or the court. Not True. The Consent Decree clearly demonstrates the lack of good faith Microsoft has brought to the table in all of these negotiations. How many people remember the original reason the current anti-trust trial came into being in the first place? It was because the DOJ was accusing Microsoft of (gross) violations of the Consent Decree, in which they agreed (among other things) to stop requiring vendors to pay for a copy of the OS on each computer shipped, whether or not the OS was actually installed. Microsoft's response was that "this is Windows 95, not DOS, and therefor not covered in the consent decree." Caldera later proved that Windows 95 was nothing more than a fancy program running on top of DOS 7.0. Interstingly enough, shortly thereafter, hardware manufacturers started offering other operating systems in addition to Windows.
    • Microsoft is popular because it is easier for non-techies to use. Not True. I personally have several examples (a pilot friend, a sister, a mother, and a friend's grandmother) of people who were very uncomfortable with computers running windows because, whenever it would crash, they felt they were making mistakes. The result - they were afraid to use the machine much for fear of "breaking" it. In all cases they found Linux running X and gnome or KDE to be far easier to use, because it works reliably and consistently. They work in confidence that, unless they are doing something as root (and teaching them to understand what that means took all of about 30 seconds), they cannot break the machine. Net result - they are using their machines more, with greater confidence, and, though still illiterate by our standards, they are picking a few things up while being able to get the work done they need to. Most of all, they are no longer afraid of their machines.
    • Microsoft is committed to Open Specifications. Not True. Examples far too numerous to mention (Java, W3C, etc.) left to the reader. ("Embrace and Extend", etc.)


    Whatever the solution the judge comes up with, I think the absurd platitudes from the hoards of paid Microsoft astroturfers hear have every reason to fall upon deaf ears. We've heard it all before, and most of us see as clearly through the lies and propoganda today as we did when this all started a few years ago. If you must insult our intelligence by spewing such nonsense here, don't come crying to daddy when the followup posts are a little hot under the collar.
  • Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve

    DR-DOS was compatible (and superior in every way). MS purposely, actively and consciously used several mechanisms to stop it, up to and including per-processor licenses (which were illegal) and purposely incorrect error messages...
  • Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued? Driving the costs up because of lawsuits? Fragmenting a stable market with many more buggy programs?

    I for one, USE linux. Let me say that again. I USE LINUX. and I also Use Microsoft. I don't consider them the Evil Empire, since in my time with computers i have used other OS's such as OS/2, FreeBSD and Solaris and for the Desktop *I* chose to run Windows.

    I don't understand how people can pick at microsoft for writing the OS and the Applications. After Microsoft will sun be next? Will they have to split the processor division from there OS division? Doesn't that give them unfair advantage in the market? Or is it because the consumers who don't know about Sun and other Systems out there don't think to sue them too?

    Flame me all you want, slashdot is about opinions and not about whats right or wrong.

    But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court. Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve. But simply existing without anything better or no one stepping up to the bat does not make microsoft an evil empire.

    Sure some of you don't like the "Windows Tax" when you buy a new PC. But for the average consumer, why would they want to go out and choose something else that there friends or neighboors don't use? Why would someone want to choose something that is Niche when they can choose something that is a standard? Sure it may not be an OPEN standard, but gee golly sir when i go to the story and there is 400 games and 1000s of applications i can run on my computer. THAT IS A STANDARD!

    I would feel sorry for the thousands of employees, the foundations that Gates supports, the 5,000+ college students that could loose scholarships, the grants and donations to the city and areas of which microsoft works (redmond receives lots of support from microsoft).

    I'd feel sorry for all the ASP's, Developers and people who make a living off software because that is what the chose.

    You have always had a right to choice. I'm just curios why you think it is YOUR right to make my choice now?

    SGI, Sun, Sparc, Alpha, Mac, Amiga, RISC OS, RS2000, Aix, FreeBSD, NeXT, DOS, Novell DOS, CPM, TRS 80. They were all your choices. You chose a PC witch Built its foundation in Windows. You didn't Choose a 10,000 dollar Sparc to not run Solaris on it, so why should it be any different here. Like i said, Sun will be under the radar next, hell RedHat could get sued for anticompetive faults with Microsoft coming up and saying they're dumping there product for free to saturate the market.

    I believe the rights of the consumer belong to the consumer, not to Hypocrites, people who are anal about things (fuck you to people who will pay more attention to my spelling rather then *MY* opinions).

    Like i said, i use linux. I run HP-UX systems, i have a few dozen Sparcs, and yes i have 250 Windows Workstations on the floor and yes, i have a few dozen linux workstations. So yeah, as an educated consumer i know what fits MY bill. And my employees know what fits there own. So let it be.

  • A fair punishment for MS (Score:5)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @05:41AM (#1168737) Homepage Journal
    I will not list all the things MS is guilty of. I will rather let my fantasy flow in the direction on how would I punish that evil corporation.

    So, IMO, opening up the source of windows-es is not enough, because we know MS will try to give us the code that is not totally valid ("oh, you meant the source of THAT version of Windows? We thought you meant Windows 3.0 - OK, OK, ..." repeat previous 10.000 times). Or they will edit the sources so that the comments are missing. Or they will flatly forge it.

    Breaking Microsoft up won't work, either. They have been preparing themselves for this since about 2 years. They have formed the communication paths between an OS and an application company to be. A vertical breakup (two or more smaller microsofts, which would compete among each other) won't work for the same reason, and then once the breakup is complete, these mini-microsofts will focus on either the OS, or one application.

    Federal monitoring of their activities? That will never work, or it will work as well as the UN monitoring of the Iraq nuclear and bio-weapons labs.

    So what, then? Well, here is my proposal (apply ALL themeasures in the list):

    - Fine them to pay US$ 100 bln, to be distributed to MS products licensees. For home users, that would amount to approximately a grand/person.

    -All the upper management jailed to serve sentences of 20 to 40 years, depending on their position. Alchin would get 30, Gates and Ballamr get 40 (each). VPs would get 25, etc.

    -The word "Microsoft" would be fobidden from use on posters, T-shirts and other advertisements, and placed in the same cathegory as the symbols of the Nazy era.

    -Federal agents would break into the Microsoft premises, and remove the material with the source code. It would be published in it's entirety, on the Internet, with possibly many mirrors, with noone holding the license rights. Or maybe something like the BSD would be ok. (MS will be forced, of course, to renounce to any copyrights).

    -the MS campus in Redmond would be transformed into "The Museum of Monopoly" (I like this one) and the upkeep will be payd by the Bill Gates foundation (I like this even more) forever.

    The current MS employees (the ones that didn't make it to the jail) will have the option to work in the Museum of Monopoly. It means, the janitors will be pretty much in place, the only problem are those people who made all those buggy products. (Add Access 2000 to the list of "most buggy")

    OK, I have my flame-protector suit on, go ahead :o)

  • Where do I start?! I should just keep my mouth shut, but I can't resist...

    Tell me. As a consumer, how will i be any better off with Microsoft being sued? Driving the costs up because of lawsuits? Fragmenting a stable market with many more buggy programs?

    Well, tell me, as a consumer, how much worse off are we because MS used their monopoly to crush companies like Netscape and many others that would have brought choice and lowered prices in consumer software?

    I don't understand how people can pick at microsoft for writing the OS and the Applications...But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court.

    Well, you may be a little preturbed that you may not be able to get Win2002 at the same level of quality and low cost that you're used to, but what about the injustice to all those people who couldn't choose their OS or browser because MS effectively blackmailed PC suppliers and bought out or crushed competitors.

    The real beef is not that MS writes an OS or applications, remember, but that they use their monopoly position in the OS market to unfairly compete. If this is in fact true (that's Judge Jackson's job) then they deserve to be punished for robbing the consumer of potential better and cheaper options.

    Sure some of you don't like the "Windows Tax" when you buy a new PC. But for the average consumer, why would they want to go out and choose something else that there friends or neighboors don't use? Why would someone want to choose something that is Niche when they can choose something that is a standard?

    I just don't see how that is relevant. The point is not that MS is standard. Everybody agrees they are (at least for Joe Average). The problem is that they use their position to effectively prevent Joe Average from having options and choice.

    I would feel sorry for the thousands of employees, the foundations that Gates supports, the 5,000+ college students that could loose scholarships, the grants and donations to the city and areas of which microsoft works (redmond receives lots of support from microsoft).

    Sure MS gives money to lots of worthy causes. What they give back, though, is a tiny portion of what consumers never should have spent. Just think of all the scholarships, grants, libraries and public projects that could have been supported if instead of buying thousands of site licenses for MS-everything, universities, schools, and municipalities everywhere could have had access to standards-based interoperable PC OS's, which would have allowed cheaper and better application software. Think of all the developer man-years that have been chewed up in porting applications to stay compatible with each obscure API change in MS software.

    Sure this is all hypothetical. We'll never know what could have been. The point is that many people believe that MS forced the market down the road we're on by unfair business practices.

    You have always had a right to choice. I'm just curios why you think it is YOUR right to make my choice now?

    I'm not making your choice. I just don't want MS to make my choice for me.

    I believe the rights of the consumer belong to the consumer,

    Well, you got that right at least.

    Back to schoolwork - see ya!

  • A little story... (Score:5)

    by Raunchola ( 129755 ) on Monday March 27, 2000 @07:21AM (#1168739)
    "Microsoft is popular because it is easier for non-techies to use. Not True. I personally have several examples (a pilot friend, a sister, a mother, and a friend's grandmother) of people who were very uncomfortable with computers running windows because, whenever it would crash, they felt they were making mistakes. The result - they were afraid to use the machine much for fear of "breaking" it. In all cases they found Linux running X and gnome or KDE to be far easier to use, because it works reliably and consistently. They work in confidence that, unless they are doing something as root (and teaching them to understand what that means took all of about 30 seconds), they cannot break the machine. Net result - they are using their machines more, with greater confidence, and, though still illiterate by our standards, they are picking a few things up while being able to get the work done they need to. Most of all, they are no longer afraid of their machines."

    Here's a little story for you...

    My parents are probably the definition of the clueless newbie. They can run programs and surf the Internet, and that's about it. They use Windows 98 SE on their computer at home, and you know what? They have yet to tell me about getting a Blue Screen O' Death. Windows may stall on them, it may freeze on them, but they haven't gotten any of the problems that Linux zealots claim every Windows user experiences. In spite of these occourences, they still use Windows.

    Why?

    Because they know that they can run their favorite programs and get work done. You can preach all about how Linux is the best and how reliable it is. But if my parents can't send e-mail, use programs like TaxCut and Word, play their games, or use their digital camera, they will not use Linux. My parents have a hard enough time dealing with figuring out how to send attachments or how to format a document in Word. You think they want to deal with the fact that their printer or digital camera isn't recognized under Linux?

    My parents are able to work in confidence, as you put it, because they know that they can't "break" the computer unless they tried. It took myself a few minutes to explain to them what they should and should not do. And it's worked. I haven't come home from school to the sound of "The computer is broken!" My parents aren't afraid of their computer, hell, they've been doing more work on it now than they have before.

    My parents aren't the only people to be used as an example. I have several friends and other family members who are quite happy with Windows. They haven't told me about having a system meltdown either. So much for Linux zealotry.

    My points here? Linux is a good OS, there's no denying that. But if people can't run their favorite programs and use their hardware under Linux, they won't use it. The average clueless newbie could give two shits about stats which prove that Linux is reliable, they want to know if those stupid games someone sent them via e-mail will work. And if they can get their work done, they're happy, regardless of what OS they use, be it Linux, FreeBSD, or God forbid I say this in such a Linux-centric setting...Windows.

    ...expecting this post to be moderated down to (-1, Pro-Microsoft Opinion)...

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