Microsoft's Mistakes: What Not To Do When The Government Investigates Your Monopoly (sfgate.com) 117
As America's antitrust investigators eye Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon for possible government intervention, Bloomberg offers nine "lessons learned" from the way Microsoft handled its own antitrust investigation:
Don't deny the obvious... In the app-store business, Google and iPhone maker Apple together control more than 95 per cent of all US mobile app spending by consumers, according to Sensor Tower data. It could be more effective for these companies not to start by denying that leadership position -- if you have 80% or 90% percent of a market, arguing that you don't really dominate isn't the hill you want your legal reasoning to die on...
At the height of Microsoft's hubris (or carelessness, or both), the company sent Windows chief Jim Allchin to the stand with a doctored video that purported to show how computing performance would be degraded when the browser was removed from Windows on a single PC. It was actually done on several different computers and was an illustration of what might happen rather than a factual test, as the company initially claimed -- a fact that came to light only after several days of the government picking through every inconsistency in the video. Microsoft remade the simulation several times in an effort to save the testimony. The company seemed to think it could get away with baldy stating a technological claim and mocking up something that backed it up, perhaps reasoning that no one would know the difference, but it miscalculated badly...
In an interview last year at the Code Conference, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamented the distraction the case caused, and cited it as a reason the company missed out on the search market -- the business that fueled the runaway success of Google, now under the microscope itself. Others have pinned Microsoft's abysmal performance in mobile computing partially on constraints and distractions from the case...
Consider settling early.
The article also remembers leaks of Bill Gates deposition ("During their playback in court, the judge laughed at several points") and ultimately concludes that "observers and legal pundits almost uniformly agree the software giant did virtually everything wrong in the course of the investigation." A federal judge ordered Microsoft be split in two, "a fate Microsoft avoided when an appeals court reversed that part of the ruling and the company eventually settled."
"That 2002 settlement led to nine years of court supervision of the company's business practices and required Microsoft to give the top 20 computer makers identical contract terms for licensing Windows, and gave computer makers greater freedom to promote non-Microsoft products like browsers and media-playing software..."
At the height of Microsoft's hubris (or carelessness, or both), the company sent Windows chief Jim Allchin to the stand with a doctored video that purported to show how computing performance would be degraded when the browser was removed from Windows on a single PC. It was actually done on several different computers and was an illustration of what might happen rather than a factual test, as the company initially claimed -- a fact that came to light only after several days of the government picking through every inconsistency in the video. Microsoft remade the simulation several times in an effort to save the testimony. The company seemed to think it could get away with baldy stating a technological claim and mocking up something that backed it up, perhaps reasoning that no one would know the difference, but it miscalculated badly...
In an interview last year at the Code Conference, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamented the distraction the case caused, and cited it as a reason the company missed out on the search market -- the business that fueled the runaway success of Google, now under the microscope itself. Others have pinned Microsoft's abysmal performance in mobile computing partially on constraints and distractions from the case...
Consider settling early.
The article also remembers leaks of Bill Gates deposition ("During their playback in court, the judge laughed at several points") and ultimately concludes that "observers and legal pundits almost uniformly agree the software giant did virtually everything wrong in the course of the investigation." A federal judge ordered Microsoft be split in two, "a fate Microsoft avoided when an appeals court reversed that part of the ruling and the company eventually settled."
"That 2002 settlement led to nine years of court supervision of the company's business practices and required Microsoft to give the top 20 computer makers identical contract terms for licensing Windows, and gave computer makers greater freedom to promote non-Microsoft products like browsers and media-playing software..."
The real lesson from Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for Apple to get their smack down... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Great Walled Garden of Apple demands that all apps use the operating system provided web browser component to display web pages, or else your app is non-compliant and disbarred from being included in the Apple app store. This sounds very familiar to the Microsoft case where Microsoft was forcing everybody to bundle the Microsoft web browser with their OS rather than allowing people to have third party web browsers.
My hopes is for the entire Walled Garden concept to be outlawed. Third parties shouldn't be forced to bow down to their monopolist masters.
Re:Time for Apple to get their smack down... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry no.
WINCE was garbage. Android and iOS are not.
It had some interesting ideas. But the programming model was junk. It was that way all the way from the bottom of the stack to the top. They would have been better putting NT on phones much like what Apple did with iOS. Instead they created a hybrid which combined with the hot garbage that activesync was sunk them. Why yes I love resetting my phone with my computer. Oh it did not work correctly (blee doop). Apple saw the eco system of sideload and gave the devs a way to reach millions. MS gave us activesync and said 'good luck'.
MS should have owned that market. They had a 7 year head start. They squandered it.
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There were, amazingly, some techies who who thought WinCE was good. I am surprised by that, but if someone is so deep in a bubble that can only see Microsoft solutions, then even the stuff they throw in the trash looks like diamonds.
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My hopes is for the entire Walled Garden concept to be outlawed. Third parties shouldn't be forced to bow down to their monopolist masters.
The difference though is apples walled garden does serve a purpose that apple can show happily it does protect the average user from malicious software and when it does get past the wall apple has the tools to remove it and while apple is far from perfect it has shown at least a good attempt to protect their user base. As a advanced user this also helps through "herd immunity"
Where apple may get unstuck with the walled garden is for specialised software where the market is small hence the sale cost is high
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By forcing a monoculture, Apple objectively harms the security of its users and ecosystems, since everyone will be vulnerable to a zero day. e.g. Thete's no way to avoid a vulnerability in Safari by running Firefox, everyone must run Webkit engine. That nakes its monopolist behaviour even less acceptable than Microsoft (which never stopped a user from running Netscape).
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My hopes is for the entire Walled Garden concept to be outlawed. Third parties shouldn't be forced to bow down to their monopolist masters.
A walled garden is fine. As long as users aren't forced to remain inside for non-technical reasons.
If buyer of a device wants to run 3rd party software on it, that should be their choice. If doing so has the chance of damaging the hardware, that's a hardware problem (read: either bad hw design, or a simple warranty issue). Not a valid reason to restrict what software a user can run. Vendor could still deny (software) support to users that run 3rd party software. Or deny access to services provided within
Re:The real lesson from Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
When your Washington, D.C., lobbying budget is $0, increase it to $100M per year to keep the politicians happy.
Sadly true enough. Perhaps the better lesson though is not what not to do when the government investigates you for being a monopoly, but rather, what not to do to cause that in the first place. In the US businesses, particularly large powerful ones, can nearly do no wrong. To get the massive negative publicity required to start this investigation was the result of horrendous behavior in the first place. They deserve everything they got and more that they'll probably never get.
Re:The real lesson from Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly true enough. Perhaps the better lesson though is not what not to do when the government investigates you for being a monopoly, but rather, what not to do to cause that in the first place.
It doesn't even have to be an investigation. There is a rather infamous recording of a voice mail floating around of an Illinois legislative rep. cold-calling the owner of a road construction company, wondering why he hasn't ever got in touch with her. Because she is on the committee that oversees federal highway spending and it would be good for him to get in touch with her. I mean there's a formal process for submitting bids on federal highway projects. But, you know, she's on the committee and everything, and, you know, funding...
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It is a nice-sounding story that matches the most base presumptions and biases that people have, but it is also pure narrative with no supporting facts at all.
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The anti-trust case was argued in Feb 2001. By that time Microsoft was the #1 donor to every representative, senator, and presidential candidate in the United States.
Political parties are not the same as lobbyists.
How anyone could have found your false claim "Insightful" is beyond me.
I'm not the one confusing an apple with a banana.
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When your Washington, D.C., lobbying budget is $0, increase it to $100M per year to keep the politicians happy.
In 2000, when Microsoft was in the crosshairs of Janet Reno, there were a whole bunch of companies ranged against them, so there would have been lobbying budgets on all sides - Microsoft, Netscape, IBM, et al. So that one was a war b/w companies where the lobbying budgets played a role.
It's a different story this time around. It's not a Facebook vs Twitter or Google vs Apple: it's a whole lot of very irate people who have complained about being censored, and what's at stake here is it becoming practical
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The problem is, this was their attitude - do anything and get away with it, ethics are irrelevant - until they ran into the US government and a brick wall they could not knock down in the same way. So they finally figured out lobbying was the secret to getting over that hurdle.
So right. Even today, in this article, the main thing seems to be that what Microsoft did wrong was fail to get away with it. It never occurs to the that simply following the law, with a certain level of ethics, might have avoided the whole problem. Probably they would have grown slightly slower, they were still in an inherent monopoly situation with Windows and allowing a bit more freedom for their customers might even have reduced the level of resistance to their software.
Apple and Google (Score:2)
Unless there's collusion, wouldn't it be a duopoly? And wouldn't it mean they're trying to force other competitors out of the market? It almost seems like they don't bother competing with each other.
Re:Apple and Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless there's collusion, wouldn't it be a duopoly? And wouldn't it mean they're trying to force other competitors out of the market? It almost seems like they don't bother competing with each other.
This. Apple and Google are like two divisions of the same company. Apple pushes out WebKit, Google eats it up. Apple pushes out Clang, Google drops GCC like a hot potato to jump head first into Clang, even when Clang is largely inferior. The employees use the same private shuttle buses to get to work... Apple and Google even colluded amongst themselves to keep engineers from jumping around seeking higher salaries [fortune.com] so that they could get projects done quicker and cheaper, at the expense of engineers of course.
Not that I can terribly blame them. Microsoft was SUCH a huge and well entrenched adversary that these two probably really needed to help each other out to have any chance of being able to survive against the Microsoft threat.
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The reason Google dropped GCC wasn't Clang or anything: it was the license. Anybody familiar w/ the license wars b/w Stallman and the Open Source Initiative knows that GPL version 3 had a whole lot of restrictions endangering the intellectual property of companies - and indeed, Stallman, who's opposed to the very concept of IP in the first place, intended it to be that way. Which is why a lot of companies, who did use software that was licensed under GPL 2, ditched the ship when the software packages chan
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And wouldn't it mean they're trying to force other competitors out
A monopoly (or duopoly as you correctly identified it) says nothing about your business practice, only your market power.
Anti-trust breaches would mean they are trying to force other competitors out, and it's just as well that neither of them presides over closed platforms with favourable contracts that stipulate competitor's software can't be pre-installed on devices. ... oh wait.
Oh, a "distraction"? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamented the distraction the case caused"
Oh, so when you deliberately fake evidence and perjure yourself in court, the bad part is that it causes a "distraction"?
This is why Microsoft will forever be untrusted in my view. The rest of their double-dealing, monopolistic abuse and shady behavior only added to it, but this bald-faced bullshit they pulled in court is all I ever needed to regard them as the lying, cheating scumbags we always knew they were.
FFS, they had to trick people into 'upgrading' to Windows 10 by making it so when you clicked the "X" control to close the "Upgrade Now?" dialog box act as as if you'd clicked the "Okay" button. How scummy is that?
Windows 10 is a heaping pile of adware and telemetry-laden horseshit, and they knew it- they designed it that way.
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More likely, never tested it because Microsoft just has lousy quality across the board. But Microsoft made a clear and unambiguous decision to try to force everyone into an upgrade that no one asked for or wanted. So, it seems more likely that this was not a bug.
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"Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamented the distraction the case caused"
Oh, so when you deliberately fake evidence and perjure yourself in court, the bad part is that it causes a "distraction"?
Just another large enterprise with not even a shred of honor. But the surprising thing is the extreme stupidity of admitting so in public.
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It's not stupidity. It's arrogance. They got away with it, they flat out broke the law, and nobody was punished for it. They are literally above the law, and they know it.
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It's not stupidity. It's arrogance. They got away with it, they flat out broke the law, and nobody was punished for it. They are literally above the law, and they know it.
Quite the opposite, in fact. They were richly rewarded for their behavior, to the tune of billions of dollars. Not just above the law, but fantastically stinking wealthy to boot, both collectively and individually.
Is there any wonder that a study reports the US functions as an oligopoly?
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> a reason the company missed out on the search market
Yeah. Thank god they missed out on the search market. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But I don't think it would have been all bad if the Windows phones had made it.
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I actually applaud them for the windows 10 update behaviour. I hope idiots everywhere learn from the fact that when presented with a yes/no option you don't just close the window.
It's my pet peeve about some less literate users.
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Yes, when you fuck up your case and lose it, and the bad PR causes you not to be able to compete in various niches, you would cry over the "distraction" caused by the fuckups.
There is no reason they need to learn from their mistakes as pure and innocent beings; if they're greedy fuckers, they should still be able to learn lessons about ethics from the perspective of greedy fuckers. That's the basic premise of Capitalism; of course they're greedy fuckers, they're at work trying to make money! That's why they
Same case where they donated computers? (Score:2, Offtopic)
You know, the ones to all the schools. So students would grow up using Microsoft products?
Get'em while they're young.
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They had me. They lost me. Their stuff is just far too bad compared to the alternatives.
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Apple did the same thing way back when. My dad who was a teacher said there was some Apple IIs donated (like one per school) that no one knew what to do with so they sat in storage.
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Microsoft used to be a total dick. Now it is much less so.
Yah, no. Microsoft is the same pustulent dick it always was (I give you Windows 10 spyware forcibly "upgraded") just not as able to insert itself so easily into the ass end of other people's business.
Also: Don't resume, the *day* your parole officer (Score:1)
I remember how Microsoft announced that IE would be the only browser on Windows Phone from now on, they *day* their parole officer left!
Causing Opera to, of course, sue, and win.
I mean come on! That was stupidly greedy! I've seen ex-con drug addicts with more restraint! Literally!
Still happening today (Score:1)
A lesson for everyone in court (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't try to bullshit judges, or at least don't make it so obvious that even a judge can tell. They don't like that.
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Maybe, don't say "to Heck with Janet Reno". And wash your armpits.
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Maybe, don't say "to Heck with Janet Reno". And wash your armpits.
What is not completely factual about those two points, Microsoft slimeballs?
Billg does the foetal rock (Score:2)
Billg rocking back and forth like the man-foetus he is. As far as I am concerned, this image is Billg's legacy. What an ass. What an embarrassment to humanity.
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Hubris comes before the fall (Score:2)
"The company seemed to think it could get away with baldy stating a technological claim and mocking up something that backed it up, perhaps reasoning that no one would know the difference, but it miscalculated badly..."
Well, they obviously thought they had 'the best people', as so often in these cases, they were wrong.
COM (Score:2)
The claim their browser was hopelessly integrated was especially egregious, given their iBrowser interface was their flagship plug and play example of COM.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, everything you said is dead wrong (Score:1)
After Microsoft made the claim that the browser could not be separated from the OS, I did exactly that. I replaced explorer.exe with soffice.exe (Star Office at the time). I also removed iexplorer.exe and replaced it with Netscape Navigator. No programming knowledge was needed and Windows never ran more reliably. Windows booted into Star Office, which had its own Start menu. From there everything else could be accessed normally.
I was not the only person to prove this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remov
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No programming knowledge was needed and Windows never ran more reliably.
But there are third party apps that depend on MS browser components. Specifically, some (shitty) PLC [wikipedia.org] SDKs and HMIs. Even worse, they expect IE6 specifically. Now that this hardware has been built into systems with six or seven figure values, the users are stuck.
Your definition of useful isn't the same as other people's (a lesson that Poettering hasn't grasped either).
Guilty (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure if M$ was a good analogy here as they got away with it.
Despite the overwhelming evidence and what "everyone knew" and what courts had said M$ made it through with barley a scratch.
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Yes, the courts caught them red handed, then Ashcroft (under bush) decided it would be bad for America to hold them accountable. Then Gates formed his foundation, which immediately took actions which materially benefited Gates (and continues to do so). And it functions as a family tax dodge.
huh? (Score:2)
Microsoft ultimately gave out millions in coupons for their software to school, costing them virtually nothing and functioning as the loss leader which is the basis for the resurgence of windows being used beyond the desktop and their cloud platform being popular today.
That an example of what the justice department should not do and what the public should not ever accept but hardly an example of an outcome a company wouldn't want.
Gates's biggest mistake .. (Score:2)
Bill Gates 1995: "today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway"
Bill Gates 2004: “[E-mail] spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.”