States Want to Punish MS for Abusing Settlement Terms 23
fdiaz5583 writes: "In a legal brief filed with U.S. District, the states cited the comments of a Microsoft executive to bolster their argument that the settlement is weak and has not diminished the software giant's ability to abuse its monopoly in personal computer operating systems. The nine states seeking tougher sanctions against Microsoft said they should be allowed to speak at a hearing on the proposed settlement due to start March 6. Currently they are due to present their alternative proposals at separate remedy hearings starting the following week."
Explanation please? (Score:1, Offtopic)
See Sony's Tunney Objection (Score:2)
Anyway, they are using it to try to force Sony to agree to a new licence in which Sony would waive some rights (I don't know exactly which rights) to sue MS over patent infringement. As far as I can tell, besides being generally good for MS (the more people you can get to agree not to sue you, the better), it looks like a scam to try to rip off some PlayStation related IP.
Here's an article [infoworld.com] which summarizes Sony's complaint.
BTW, why is this offtopic?
Isn't it sad... (Score:1)
Does anyone care? The staes are finally doing something about the obvious abuses (not the hidden, legalistic ones) and no-one cares.
I don't remember who said it, but "Hate isn't the opposite of love, Apathy is."
Re:Isn't it sad... (Score:1)
I know something to that effect is in The Foundtainhead by Ayn Rand, but knowing her, she probably stole it from someone else.
Does anyone care?
Sure we care, it just doesn't deserve to be commented on. We KNOW that the settlement doesn't have any teeth. We KNOW that M$ has been laughing its head off about it.
The reason it was posted was that it is news. It may not be wanting of comments, but it is news.
How many times? (Score:3, Insightful)
The first couple dozen articles on the Microsoft settlement got lots of statements of support/disagreement.
Just re-read those, they're still valid.
Personally, I think Microsoft should not have been prosecuted for negotiating contracts in their favor. Who cares? As long as no one is forced to buy their product.
And no one was forced. Ever. Just because the lowest price machines came with Win pre-installed did not mean you had to buy it. White-box machines have always been available. And Linux was around for years prior to Win95.
Bob-
Enough leverage to steal IP (Score:2)
The only way that a company would make a concession like that is if they felt forced to sign an agreement in order to stay in business.
Therefore, in my view, the fact that companies were willing to sign such oppressive agreements is evidence that they were forced to buy Windows in order to stay afloat. (BTW, we are talking about the OEM customers, not the end-user customers.)
And I'm "forced" to pay taxes. (Score:2)
Those businesses made the choice to "stay afloat" by OEMing Windows on Microsofts terms, just as I make the choice to pay taxes to stay out of jail and for no other reason.
Microsoft has no jail, no guns, no ability to use actual force, other than market leverage. If market leverage is so awful to you that you equate it with force, I would suggest some lessons in economics. [mises.org]
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
Bob-
Are you "forced" to live? (Score:2)
The "fact" is that by being so greedy, Microsoft signed their own death warrant. Microsoft has lost the "good will" factor, people use it only because of inertia. Now that better products are being produced, Microsoft is being abandoned. The turning point was the Microsoft Win95 rebate drive. Now that the sole source contracts are expiring, they're not being renewed. The market at work. Check out WalMart.
By the time the lawsuits came along, it was already too late. So go ahead and beat the dead horse, have your jolly anti-trust suit. Crow how you're fighting the good fight while such efforts do nothing but reenforce Microsofts own failing position and give it lots of free publicity, and the lawyers and politicians cash in.
Or better yet, just don't use their products. No one is forcing you.
Your arguments may sound nice from an acedemic standpoint but the don't hold up in the real world. It's like saying that just because somoneone was holding a gun to your head, you weren't "forced" to do X, becuase you could have just chosen to die. While technically true, it is not a practical argument.
Simply saying that I don't "have" to use MS products just becuase my boss tells me to is like saying I don't "have" to eat or feed my family. I mean, we could all just become street people and live out of garbage cans, right?
Microsoft was able to force companies to do thier bidding because most of the pople you deal with, and you'll learn this as you grow older Bob, aren't willing to sacrifice thier careers, thier families and the betterment of the human race simply to make a tiny moral point. Just like most people who are getting mugged at gunpoint won't push the gun into thier forehead and say "I chose my own death over the $20 in my pocket, because I believe thats stealing is wrong, and holding true to that principle is more important than the burden my death will place on my wife and children and on society as a whole."
By this I mean, if a company had decided to just "go under", the executives of that company would be facing punishment from thier investors (and a tainted reputation from those who may otherwise have been willing to invest in the future) for allowing it to happen. Thier employees would be out of work and subsequently be forced to look for more work or face starvation. And, IF that company believed that they were actually doing something worthwhile and contributing to society (yes, there are a couple of companies tht actually believe this), they would basically have to be willing to, from thier point of view, hurt society for all future humanity.
Yes, you can argue that Microsoft did not "force" anyone to do anything, just like you can argue that the bullet itself didn't kill anyone (It was the internal bleeding that ended up killing him sir, so it wasn't technically murder, it was the victim's body comitting suicide), but to do so would relegate you into the realm of monkeys and lawyers, where common sense takes a back seat to meaningless hairsplitting and feces flinging.
Yes I am. Suicide is illegal. (Score:2)
I also agree that Microsofts negotiating placed them in a very profitable position, for a short time.
But something you'll learn, as you grow older Gnovos, is that the market is a cold and heartless bitch. Nothing Microsoft could do prevented their main product from being made obsolete. Nothing they could do was able to force anyone to buy their product, if the individual chose not to do so.
I use Win2K at work, and happily used Win95 for 6 years before moving entirely to Linux. Does that surprise you? How does my employers (bad, but so what?) decision to use Microsofts products make my decision not to use Microsoft products any less a successful moral one?
Yes, some companies and people, in fact a vast majority, chose or accepted Microsoft as their default. It doesn't change the fact that none of them were forced to use it.
Bob-
Re:How many times? (Score:2)
Er, yes. But exactly there lies the problem. When I founded my company a couple years ago I was on the lookout for a server. Guess what: I was forced to buy their product with any fscking available option, safe for assembling it myself. Sure, I forked out the xx$ for Windoze '98 and grinded my teeth.
A year later I get a laptop. Do you really imply there was any way to avoid being forced to pay Microsoft licensing fees. Sure, a major manufacturer [dell.com] had a "Linux option", which consisted of a two years old clunker with no configurability, whatsover.
Of course you may argue, it's the manufacturers fault for not supplying more options. But this also doesn't quite cut it. There are quite credible rumours (since those OEM contracts are aparently declared trade secrets), that the good boys from Redmond just cut off your air supply in form of much higher licensing fees, which essentially kill your business, if you indeed offer a credible alternative.
Oh, and the fact that only Recovery CD's (yeah, right! recovery) are shipeed with those machines, which disables a double boot unless you cough up umpteen hundred bucks for a retail version didn't really do much to calm my anger.
The problem is not that Microsoft is a monopolly, the problem (as acknowledged by the courts, btw) is the abuse of this monopoly power in order to kill competition.
You prove the point. (Score:2)
You demonstrate the point exactly. You could have assembled the machine yourself, but the cost of Win98, to you, was not worth the effort. You made a deliberate decision, based on your personal relative value, to do something you feel you were "forced" to do.
And the consequences if you had chosen to assemble the machine yourself? Some time, some effort, no blood. No prison. Some would do so just to have a machine built to their perfect specifications. Another choice, another value judgement.
This is the free market in action.
And as far as the courts go, fsck-em. Entrenched bureaucrats who only watch out for their own asses. When Microsoft started buying politicians, they settled really fast, didn't they?
Bob-
The settlement isn't harsh enough (Score:2)
Furthermore, the adaptations proposed by the states are very reasonable, if only minimal requirments, to prevent further abuse. MS should be forced to sell OEM's a stripped-down version of Windows, and OEM's should have the right to remove any features they so desire. Furthermore, competitors -- including competing operating systems -- should be given the code to MS Windows so that they can ensure compliance and compatability with Windows. In other words, people making competing products to MS' IE, file-browser, e-mail prog, messenger prog, should have the ability to integrate and mesh those with Windows just as well and easily as MS can/does.
Additionally, restrictions should be placed on MS' use and development of the boot-loader.
Furthermore, provisions should be put into place to ensure that alternate OS' are represented at OEM stores -- such as *Linux, *BSD, BeOS, AmigaSDK, GNUstep, Hurd, etc -- so that the makers of other OS' have the ability to compete. The real reason MS dominates the market is because THEIR OS is installed in MOST OEM PC's, and OEM's WON'T install other OS'. If users had the option to have the OS of their choice installed, MS' dominance would be reduced. So MS should be forced to pay a fee to OEM's to allow them to display alternate OS' on systems in their stores.
Of course, the main thing is that they should force MS to open up the source code for all versions of Windows. That is, if they aren't going to break MS up, which would ALSO solve the problem.
PS -- I posted this message before, but mistakenly under the wrong topic. Some idiot who obviously doesn't pay any attention to the headliners in
Problems that I see (Score:1)
1) the settlement doesn't do anything, what's to stop M$ from breaking it's agreements has it has so many times before?
2) What's the deal with presenting an alternate settlement *after* the hearing on what is currently proposed has started? that just seems a little weird to me.
3) M$ obviously believes that becuase it controls the money it controls what goes on in the courts.
--
Linux: because I want to get there today!
Settlement strong for MS (Score:4, Interesting)
It hasn't even been agreed upon and they have already figured out crafty ways to use it to leverage more power over their customers, and possibly assist them in monopolizing new markets.
Like California's and the federal government's energy deregulation plans, this settlement most likely has plenty of loopholes explicitly written into it which give MS all sorts of advantages.
Digression:
The federal deregulation plan is what made Enron possible (Enron is basically a private energy stock market, which produces nothing, provides no service, and adds no value to any product, but the law was written expressly to provide for the existence of such leech entities for the purpose of skimming a profit off of the energy economy).
PG&E helped craft CA's plan, and restructured itself to take advantage of loopholes which it introduced into the plan. (WARNING: the following is simplistic and based on my half-assed understanding of the situation, but I think I have the general idea.) They basically split themselves into two corporations, a parent and a child. The parent company produced nothing, provided no service, and added no value to any product. Its sole purpose was to own the child company. The child company made enormous profits off of bilking the state of California.
Suddenly, despite record profits, the child company found itself out of cash. Where did the huge profits go? They were transferred to the parent corporation, which paid much of them out to their stockholders. The child company had some funds left over after this, so right before declaring bankruptcy, they gave a bunch of their executives and managers cash bonuses.
Back to the point:
Sorry, too much detail. The point is that when the government gets into bed with a corporation in order to pass laws or reach some legal agreement, you can bet that they have paid someone off in order to get some carefully crafted loopholes thrown into the legalese. It is easy to write and hide loopholes in legalese, and later on you can act like the lawmakers failed to close the loopholes because they are only human.
In the CA energy scandal, several companies used the excuse that what they were doing, although obviously unethical, was perfectly legal. They neglected to mention that it was only legal because they had written the law.
Mercantilism. (Score:2)
The "corporations" pay off the government with some special taxes, and the politicians with campaign fund contributions. "Reform" has no effect.
Since the "corporations" are the experts in their fields, officially, new regulations are written by and for those same "corporations". Any abuses are covered by "Hey, we're following the law", and "Lets pass a new law!"
Oversight committees, when the abuses are just too massive to sweep under the rug any more (citizens noticed!), are made up of more experts, often the same ones who drafted the abused laws in the first place. See: Interstate Railroad Commission for a case in point.
Recall your lessons in Mercantilism. Want real reform? Abolish limited liability corporations, repeal government regulations, and let ideas stand or fall on their own merit. A "monopoly" cannot move fast enough to keep up with real competition and remain abusive. Abuse destroys good will. See: Microsoft.
That's why the Big American automakers are not building electric cars people want, the laws they wrote to mandate them have not come into effect yet. When they do, the upstart electric vehical companies will be regulated out of business, and the Big auto companies will buy up the remaining good ideas.
Bob-