The Case for Another Antitrust Action Against Microsoft (theatlantic.com) 209
"Since its own brush with antitrust regulation decades ago, Microsoft has slipped past significant scrutiny," argues a new article from The Atlantic.
But it also asks if there's now a case for another antitrust action — or if we're convinced instead that "The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don't you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here!" Right now, it's not illegal to be big. It's not illegal to be really big. In fact, it's not even illegal to be a monopoly. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you're just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it's just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who's to know what's a fair price if there isn't any competition? Nevertheless, here we are...) Yet if bigness alone is enough to draw scrutiny, Microsoft must draw it. Courts have disagreed on what size market share a product or company must own to be considered a monopoly, but the historical benchmark is about 75 percent. Estimates vary as to what percentage of computers run Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Gartner research puts it as high as 83 percent...
Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share. If we're wondering whether crappy airline experiences are a competition problem, should the same question apply to crappy computer security? In fact, in areas where Microsoft faces strong competition, it's reverting to some of the behaviors that got it sued in the '90s — namely, bundling. Microsoft and Amazon are essentially a duopoly when it comes to cloud services... Microsoft offers its big business customers an "integrated ecosystem" of Windows, Office, and its back-end cloud services; some analysts even point to this as a reason to keep buying Microsoft stock. That's just smart business, right? Yes, unless you're at a disadvantage by not taking the bundle. Some customers have complained that Microsoft charges extra for some Windows licenses if you're not using its cloud-computing business, Azure...
Microsoft does much more that we're happy to call "evil" when other companies are involved. It defied its own workers in favor of contracts with the Department of Defense; it's been quietly doing lots of business with China for decades, including letting Beijing censor results on its Bing search engine and developing AI that critics say can be used for surveillance and repression; it reportedly tried to sell facial-recognition technology to the DEA.
So why does none of it stick? Well, partly because it's possible that Microsoft isn't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal perspective. Yet it's so big and so dominant and owns so much expensive physical infrastructure that hardly any company can compete with it. Is that illegal? Should it be?
It's now the world's second largest tech company by market valuation — over $2 trillion and even ahead of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla (and behind only Apple). For the three months ended in June, Microsoft's net income rose 47% over the same period a year ago, according to TechCrunch, with a revenue for just those three months of $46.2 billion.
The Atlantic argues Microsoft has successfully rebranded itself as nice and a little boring, while playing up the fact that it lost a decade in consumer markets like smartphones because it was distracted by its last antitrust lawsuit. Yet meanwhile it's acquired major tech brands like LinkedIn, Minecraft, Skype, and even attempted to buy TikTok, Pinterest, and Discord (as well as "almost two dozen game-development studios to beef up its Xbox offerings"). And of course, GitHub.
But it also asks if there's now a case for another antitrust action — or if we're convinced instead that "The company is reluctantly guilty of the sin of bigness, yes, but it is benevolent, don't you see? Reformed, even! No need to cast your pen over here!" Right now, it's not illegal to be big. It's not illegal to be really big. In fact, it's not even illegal to be a monopoly. Current antitrust law allows for the possibility that you might be the sole player in your industry because you're just that well managed and your product is just that good, or it's just cost-prohibitive for any other company to compete with you. Think power utilities, such as Duke Energy, or the TV and internet giant Comcast. Antitrust law comes into play only if you use your monopoly to suppress competition or to charge unfairly high prices. (If this feels like a legal tautology, it sort of is: Who's to know what's a fair price if there isn't any competition? Nevertheless, here we are...) Yet if bigness alone is enough to draw scrutiny, Microsoft must draw it. Courts have disagreed on what size market share a product or company must own to be considered a monopoly, but the historical benchmark is about 75 percent. Estimates vary as to what percentage of computers run Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Gartner research puts it as high as 83 percent...
Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share. If we're wondering whether crappy airline experiences are a competition problem, should the same question apply to crappy computer security? In fact, in areas where Microsoft faces strong competition, it's reverting to some of the behaviors that got it sued in the '90s — namely, bundling. Microsoft and Amazon are essentially a duopoly when it comes to cloud services... Microsoft offers its big business customers an "integrated ecosystem" of Windows, Office, and its back-end cloud services; some analysts even point to this as a reason to keep buying Microsoft stock. That's just smart business, right? Yes, unless you're at a disadvantage by not taking the bundle. Some customers have complained that Microsoft charges extra for some Windows licenses if you're not using its cloud-computing business, Azure...
Microsoft does much more that we're happy to call "evil" when other companies are involved. It defied its own workers in favor of contracts with the Department of Defense; it's been quietly doing lots of business with China for decades, including letting Beijing censor results on its Bing search engine and developing AI that critics say can be used for surveillance and repression; it reportedly tried to sell facial-recognition technology to the DEA.
So why does none of it stick? Well, partly because it's possible that Microsoft isn't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal perspective. Yet it's so big and so dominant and owns so much expensive physical infrastructure that hardly any company can compete with it. Is that illegal? Should it be?
It's now the world's second largest tech company by market valuation — over $2 trillion and even ahead of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla (and behind only Apple). For the three months ended in June, Microsoft's net income rose 47% over the same period a year ago, according to TechCrunch, with a revenue for just those three months of $46.2 billion.
The Atlantic argues Microsoft has successfully rebranded itself as nice and a little boring, while playing up the fact that it lost a decade in consumer markets like smartphones because it was distracted by its last antitrust lawsuit. Yet meanwhile it's acquired major tech brands like LinkedIn, Minecraft, Skype, and even attempted to buy TikTok, Pinterest, and Discord (as well as "almost two dozen game-development studios to beef up its Xbox offerings"). And of course, GitHub.
It's all about harm (Score:5, Insightful)
Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition.
That's what it all boils down to: the harm being caused. Bigness has nothing to do with it. And I don't know about the rest of the community, but from where I stand, Microsoft isn't the same harmful company it was back in the 90's. If we're looking for fish to fry, I'd put my sights on Google & Facebook any day of the week.
Re:It's all about harm (Score:4, Insightful)
I mentioned this elsewhere but Google and Facebook themselves are small fry compared to the mega conglomerates going around buying up every single house in the country so they can rent it back to us. They're buying all the apartments too, unless you think you can escape on cheap land they're buying the trailer parks. They're also buying up all the hospitals. And they're starting to buy up water supplies.
A handful of wealthy sociopaths are monopolizing food shelter and healthcare. I'd say that's a much more pressing concern then the state of our tech companies. Slashdot is getting older, we're going to need medical care as we age. The people doing this will use our medical system to force us into so much debt we mortgage our homes and then they'll buy our homes out from under us and rent them back. That's what we need our politicians to be working on. Not lost battles and pointless fights.
Re:It's all about harm (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is absolutely the same company it was in the 90s. It's just that they have so thoroughly won their battles that they don't have anyone left to fight. Except very marginally Google. Remember Amiga? How about BEOS? What about wordperfect?
Are you only thinking about desktop computers? That's definitely important; but Microsoft thoroughly lost the largest growth market of the last 20 years (smartphones), and Microsoft certainly hasn't won on the server side either.
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So? AT&T never did break into the horse shoe market.
Re: It's all about harm (Score:3)
Dude, if you think Microsoft was in any way involved in the demise of the Amiga, you simply donâ(TM)t know your C= history.
The Amiga was killed by Commodore management and marketing screw-ups, plus plain running out of money. Microsoft had nothing to do with this; the Amiga was never a serious contender for the desktop.
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the Amiga was never a serious contender for the desktop.
Completely true.
They were the Apple of today before Apple was.
Only they were then purchased by the Dell of today, trying, but ultimately failing to branch out into other markets with nothing but their name. Only without the money to survive those failures.
Sad story. I still own an Amiga 500, and an Amiga 1000, and the thousand or so 3.5" floppies containing data of questionable legality.
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Management killed Commodore but their time was expiring anyway because we were moving away from special hardware that requires special tricks to use. I know GPUs all have their own peculiarities but the development model on PCs is totally different from on Amigas. And if there had been more different Amiga models in any given period then it would have had to change there anyway because nobody could manage to target them all, learning all the special tricks for each platform, and people would have had to ado
Re:It's all about harm (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is absolutely the same company it was in the 90s. It's just that they have so thoroughly won their battles that they don't have anyone left to fight. Except very marginally Google. Remember Amiga? How about BEOS? What about wordperfect?
I would categorize this statement in the "not even wrong" bucket. Microsoft has thoroughly lost quite a few battles, to the point that they have withdrawn all their troops from those fronts. Windows Phone is probably one of the best examples, but there are much more subtle sea changes - for example, sure, the Windows cow still has some cash in its udders, but the profit future for MS is clearly in cloud services. Windows server technology is another fruit that has a few more drops of juice to be squeezed, but it's in decline.
I agree completely with the earlier poster that said MS is no longer the same company. I couldn't tell you exactly when it turned the corner, but MS now is a company I'd actually rather like to work for - they have an interesting future, a believable roadmap, and an ethically palatable path to reach greater things.
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The most recent monopolist gimmick from Microsoft is coercing their vast existing customer base into cloud services, which delivers the same exact services as now (especially if you use Azure VMs) but at a ridiculously inflated cost.
I don't know anymore if a company needs to control even a plurality of the market anymore to be considered a monopoly, it seems more a qualitative analysis as to whether their buyers are locked in (via capital and switching costs) to a specific product and how much control peopl
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Idunoo, I actually like the fact that flight simulator streams scenery on the fly instead of downloading the whole 10 TB dataset at once.
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Idunoo, I actually like the fact that flight simulator streams scenery on the fly instead of downloading the whole 10 TB dataset at once.
The problem is not with that kind of tech, the problem is them being able to deny you access to the game software and remotely brick or forcibly obsolete old software. We shouldn't want more electronic junk piling up in landfills polluting the planet.
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The energy savings on new hardware makes it worth throwing old hardware in the landfill for the reduced carbon emissions alone.
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That's where you are wrong, they got their wish. Any group of two or more computers connected in a network becomes and behaves as a single computer, so the person who programs the network owns the network. That means Microsoft can now remotely kill and set policy over all of your devices and deny you access to honest executables.
I'm perfectly aware of this. MacOS has the same limitation, only much worse because Apple has actually _used_ that power very damagingly (e.g. preventing people from updating OS-provided components with security-fixed versions). Apple also sends checksums of every executable you try to run, back to the mothership for approval. Microsoft does not. Apple has clearly set a trajectory where at some point, only Apple-reviewed software will run on Apple computers. Microsoft has lost that battle too - the Windows
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As far as all the uber-paranoid "they can do this" stuff is concerned: Capability does not imply intent.
Dude they've already done it, what do you thin "MMO's" were? they were regular PC rpg's with their networking code ripped out and trapped behind a logon screen and user account to get clueless people to pay more money for the same game and kill piracy.
We've been trying to save games by restoring their stolen networking back ends, you can check out our handywork here with Earth and beyond and Need for speed world.
Earth and beyond MMO - Restored networking code
https://www.net-7.org/ [net-7.org]
Need for speed world MMO
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Dude they've already done it, what do you thin "MMO's" were? they were regular PC rpg's with their networking code ripped out and trapped behind a logon screen and user account to get clueless people to pay more money for the same game and kill piracy.
Why are you trying to generalize an event that occurred in a corner of the gaming universe (which, believe it or not, is not the entire world of computing) to general-purpose productivity computing? Taking an example that actually makes sense: If you write your next novel in Office 365, even in the cloud, you can instantly and seamlessly export it to a file that's readable in any number of non-Microsoft packages. For example I use the free version of O365 to edit docs in my OneDrive from various web platfor
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Why are you trying to generalize an event that occurred in a corner of the gaming universe (which, believe it or not, is not the entire world of computing) to general-purpose productivity computing?
Because you don't grasp they are trying to raise the price of software through extortion, you've fallen for their productivity and cloud talking points. The goal was to kill piracy via trusted computing and lock down users PC's so they can increase the price of software.
You don't grasp the whole thing was about monopoly profits. When you no longer get honestly coded binaries you get UWP/Packaged and protected bits they can forcibly disable old software or make it obsolete even though you paid money for it
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What about wordperfect?
WordPerfect killed itself. 5.1 for DOS was its pinnacle. When the world moved to GUI and WYSIWYG, they faltered. All their attempts at modernizing beyond DOS were buggy piles of crap. They're a case example of the market leader getting lazy, milking their cash cow and not innovating to keep ahead of competition. By the time they started to get things right, it was too late.
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WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was great. But they had versions for multiple other platforms, too. And using WP 6 and WP 8 on windows was fine for me.
In spite of my good experiences, MS Word used secret Windows APIs that they deliberately withheld fro
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It is not at all much better, if you are enforced to rent software.
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Microsoft is absolutely the same company it was in the 90s. It's just that they have so thoroughly won their battles that they don't have anyone left to fight.
Of course, Windows Mobile is the dominant smartphone OS, Top500 supercomputers run Windows, the defacto choice for a server OS is Windows Server, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition evolved into the dominant operating system in the tablet market, SQLite? MongoDB? Redis? nah they don't exist because the only thing anybody uses is MS SQL Server! All battles won, none lost, nobody left to fight.
Even Windows' lowend laptop market (particularly in education) is being eaten away by ChromeOS and the only way they have ma
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It's just that they have so thoroughly won their battles that they don't have anyone left to fight.
Horseshit. MS has fought countless battles in the past 2 decades and lost repeatedly over and over again. There are many segments that they tried to make headway in an failed spectacularly, none more so than mobile, but also education, and social. In many other segments they are actively competing including PC hardware, gaming consoles, and their current biggest money maker: cloud services.
The idea that they are now all encompassing and have no competition left is just stupid on the face of it.
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Microsoft had nothing to do with the failure of the Amiga. That was entirely Commodore's fault.
Today Microsoft has strong competition. On the consumer side a lot of people are using Chromebooks and tablets running Android or iOS now to do what they would previously have done with Windows.
On the business side Microsoft does offer Office for Mac and you can use the online versions from Chromebooks as well, so it's hard to argue that Microsoft is locking people in via their own software. Even for development a
Word Imperfect. (Score:2)
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Remember Amiga? How about BEOS? What about wordperfect?
Jack Tramiel killed Amiga. Apple and JLG killed BeOS. Wordperfect killed itself by being crap. It was great, then it was surpassed, then it flailed around for a while, then it died. Microsoft has a long list of victims but none of those are on it.
Google and Facebook themselves are small fry compared to the mega conglomerates going around buying up every single house in the country so they can rent it back to us.
Yep. That is what's going to actually lead to revolution. I just hope we point the torches and pitchforks in the right direction, though I have no faith in that.
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WTF are you talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
But dear anti-trust scree writers: if you're going to make an argument, at least try to have it make the slightest amount of sense. Phones and tablets are just different sizes of personal computers, you miserable fucking cretins, and there's no use pretending otherwise.
Re:WTF are you [asking] about? (Score:2)
Or even better if you have a solution approach to offer. Mine appears in a long comment elsewhere in the discussion, but it would be great if you have a better one.
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That would explain why when you walk into an engineering firm you see all those people working on CAD drawings on their phones...OH WAIT, that never happens!
Well, clearly it explains why you can take any phone or tablet and install whatever desktop OS you want on it. You CAN'T?!?
Next thing you know, someone's going to tell me there's no point in installing a full development suite and compiling Doom on my phone!
It's almost like a phone, tablet, and desktop PC are distinct things with distinct primary purposes.
I edit and view AutoCAD drawings on my phone. I also have many engineering toolbox applications on it when I go in the field.
My tablet runs Windows 10 Pro, as do the other 13000 tablets my company bought for engineers to take into the field.
While the OP is a bit off base with his post, your post very well may be even more ignorant.
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Phones and sometimes tablets do make good in the field devices, PCs not so much. Laptops are decent for being a guest in an office but not out in the field if you can help it.
So, in fact, you agree that you do not use your PHONE for CAD. It doesn't sound like you use your tablet when in the office.
Like I said, it's almost like they're distinct devices with different purposes.
If you manage to compile and run Doom on your phone. I want to see it.
Not the right solution (Score:3)
Congress and the executive branch need to force logical interoperability requirements, and dogfood the stuff themselves. There is no reason that any government system should be a Windows monoculture; no vendor (or common code base) should have more than a 35% share of purchase contracts, period for security reasons.
I’m still amazed at how entrenched the “office suites” are as well it is quite odd that there hasn’t been more progress towards specialized tools.
Re:Not the right solution (Score:5, Informative)
This was attempted by various governments around the year 2000 Microsoft protested, and eventually published a basically fake open standard called OOXML, for which they ballot box stuffed the RFC approval procedure in 2004 to be able to claim that Microsoft Office products followed a published standard The standard was incomplete and does not provide assurance of compatibility with Microsoft's dools.
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Doing it by standards committee is hopeless but doing it by purchase order specification is (hard but) possible.
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Thing is the alternative ODF wasn't that great either. There are big issues with both, for example:
- Lack of a common macro language. This is particularly bad for spreadsheets.
- Lack of standardized formatting, sometimes your fonts are slightly different to the other person's and their document gets reformatted on your end.
The former is an easy fix, just pick Javascript (so it works in browsers too) and be done with it. The latter is a problem because fonts are often copyrighted, so even embedded stuff like
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ODF had a working public standard. It could be refined, and it could be duplicated. Copyrighted fonts are indeed an issue.But arbitrary, undocumented, and arbitrarily altered standards are much worse for keeping documents accessible. It's a profound danger for critical documents: if Microsoft discarded support for old, deliberately obscure formats, they could become extraordinarily difficult to access.
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They'd have an issue, it would risk business by reducing the lock-in to Microsoft tools. Being new and improved does not eliminate the profit motive.
National security needs to be considered (Score:2)
This seems to have no legs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Confuses Monopoly with Market Power (Score:2)
This article confuses "monopoly" with "market power.". Monopolies are granted by the government and enforce with guns. Market power is earned by a company.
I don't see how this article makes sense when most everything Microsoft does is also done by either Linux or Macs or both. Oh and what about the HP and also Google cloud services.
Microsoft is making all of our lives better each and every day. That's why we keep buying their stuff. Anything the government does will ultimately hurt us consumers by corrup
Re:Confuses Monopoly with Market Power (Score:4, Informative)
> Monopolies are granted by the government and enforce with guns.
That is not the definition in the English language, nor in law. It is a common reason for a monopoly to exist, but it is by no means the only one.
Re: Confuses Monopoly with Market Power (Score:2)
There's no definition here that Microsoft falls into.
Only governments can guarantee exclusive control.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
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> Only governments can guarantee exclusive control.
Only in the sense that governments provide the legal framework for property law, especially intellectual property law for software, and enforce the market power by providing a legal framework for contract law with consumers and with software developers. The definition you point to does not say only governments can grant monopolies. There is a much more thorough analysis at:
https://opentextbc.ca/microeco... [opentextbc.ca]
Companies can also p
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The legal entity known as snowshovelboy does not grant charter to microsoft, under color of law, to have monopoly in the trade of computer software within its jurisdiction.
Am I doing it right?
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Do you really have issue to uninstall something off-topic on Linux, Apple? I can't get rid of Xbox entry in Windows business system. While weather widget appears and takes precious taskbar estate after Windows update, mandatory. In the wrong system of temperature degrees, if you wonder. Experience of modern computing is becoming progressively miserable.
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1. Weather widget may be optionally available, but never ever has to appear on every desktop after mere update, without purposeful choice of the user. Calibrated wrong on top.
Yes, I know importance of updates, THEREFORE user interface additions like this should not happen for the folks who dig them. No. This is wrong design.
2. Every business client of mine, including large corporation I happened to serve, is using and does suffice Pro version of the Windows product for decades. This is not about my seek min
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Sick, stuff - quite some typos, obviously need to wake for breakfast.
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Sorry, but I had to disable Windows updates indefinitely on my old Windows 10 laptop for work. One update consistently locked up my computer before finishing. If I was lucky, it let me hard reboot. If not, I had to go into safe mode and restore from a previously saved known good point. (The indefinite part was waiting for my new laptop, which the office bought a month later, but
"switching from Windows to Apple's Mac 'OS" (Score:3)
That's not really what you do. You want to switch from Windows to the Apple OS, buy an Apple computer.
Let's also then, consider the absolute monopoly Apple has on hardware. You want the Apple OS, you buy the Apply computer. You buy iOS of you want an iPhone. Microsoft doesn't, can't enforce a hardware monopoly. And you can buy a Dell, for instance, computer and not buy Windows, for it. You're not buying a MacBook with any OS other than OS X, so far as I know.
Re:"switching from Windows to Apple's Mac 'OS" (Score:5, Interesting)
Since apple has 10% market share globally in the desktop/laptop space they aren't held to the same standards. You can ignore apple, buy from another vendor and suffer no detriment. You won't receive files in apple-only proprietary formats, or have to connect to apple-only proprietary servers.
The same in any competitive market, you can't buy a samsung tv without samsung's software on it, but you can easily buy an lg tv, or a sony, or any one of a hundred other brands and suffer no detriment.
MS is different in the desktop space. If you have a non-windows machine you are likely to come up against windows-only stuff on a regular basis - wether its proprietary file formats that require microsoft applications to open, or proprietary server software that require microsoft clients to access. Using anything other than windows often places you at a disadvantage.
Re: "switching from Windows to Apple's Mac 'OS" (Score:2)
0. You can't but anything else if you want Apple OS. Well, not without going all hackintosh.
1. At work we see Windows and OS X machines accepted for a variety of roles - the tools are all web-based, and every other app is available on both platforms.
Yeah, if your company can't do that, they are lagging a little, or don't have multi-million dollar tech budgets. It's just cost, not capability or tech.
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0, you can't buy a samsung tv and run lg's webos on it... you can't buy a ford with a rolls royce interior, the os is the key differentiator for apple products.. back in the days you could only run amigaos on an amiga, sunos on a sun, irix on an sgi etc, the only difference with apple is that they are the only survivor from this era in the consumer market.
1, are those "every other app" available for linux? for netbsd? for freebsd? for solaris? for android?
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And you can buy a Dell, for instance, computer and not buy Windows, for it.
If you are ordering from the company online. If you are browsing your local shopping place, majority of PCs on offer will have MS software prepopulated and mandatory to pay for.
Re: "switching from Windows to Apple's Mac 'OS" (Score:2)
You won't get a MacBook, for instance, with even Linux installed, from Apple... In store or online, so far as I know.
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If you care to replace one Unix flavor with another, it's your delicacies to go trough. :-)
Had Windows on iMac as a second OS once ago, thanks to Apple, was it looking crap.
I know some local hotel with iMac shiny spines turned to the guests,
Windows installed if you examine front of PC. Because their outsourced IT is Apple dealer
Nope! (Score:2)
Microsoft is very successful, but not doing any harm that justifies government swooping in and punishing that success.
When you start talking about such things as failure for Mac OS to gain more traction? I'd say that's entirely Apple's own fault, as the company decided years ago that computers weren't the primary focus anymore. Apple is far more interested in selling phones, iPads and streaming subscription services. The computer is practically a "legacy" product it can't quite let go of yet, because from
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The computer is practically a "legacy" product it can't quite let go of yet, because from their POV, they haven't convinced enough people that an "iPad Pro is all you need!"
I am long time user of iMac. I find it perfect format for my type of work and leisure. And so are many other forms - I have incorporated another Mac mini, sampling into M1. While no plans for iPad Pro here - they do not even run on macOS, the computing platform.
Antitrust isn't for punishing 'evil' choices (Score:2)
Whether or not a company has antitrust laws enforced against it shouldn't be about whether or not it's doing things you think are bad. Rather, it should be that it causes harm *because* of anti-competitive effects in the marketplace.
If you just want to prevent companies from contracting with the DoD or from being too cozy with China then pass a general regulation against it. If the badness of the behavior doesn't depend on anticompetitive effects there is no reason that antitrust law should be the vehicl
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To be clear maybe there are some valid arguments for enforcement actions against certain behaviors by MS like bundling (but seriously if you aren't going after apple for bundling their phones with their app store it's laughable to go after MS) but I very much fear this isn't targeted at anticompetitive behavior in particular but is being used as a general club to attack company choices the politicians disagree with.
I agree with many of those criticisms but we need to pass actual laws or at least regulations
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With the store bundled, you have freedom to choose if you want anything from the minibar of the store. With the home gaming platform bundled into the business-use OS, escaping uninstall option, it's creepy abuse of vendor's position.
I don't remember voting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Biden, Khan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and others are asking whether consumers suffer any nonfinancial harm from this lack of competition. Is switching from Windows to Apple's Mac OS unnecessarily hard? Is Windows as good a product as it would be if it faced more robust competition? When Windows has major security flaws, for example, billions of customers and companies are impacted, because of its market share.
I don't remember voting for Biden, Klobouchar and others to second-guess the product decisions of software companies. Where is it in their job description to sit around snd ponder if the Windows interface is cumbersome? That it's a bad thing it's not more like MacOS?
Their hubris knows no bounds - amazing.
Re:I don't remember voting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoa, hold your fire.Try reading the article.
Molly from the Atlantic has done a hit piece on Microsoft with no actual quotes from the US government.
I'm not sure how this third rate "journalism" ever made it to Slashdot.
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For what purpose... (Score:2)
I don't see any real harm here. The dominance of Office and Windows in corporate productivity really is a natural one, there's really no demand for multiple solutions. Frankly, MS earns it per seat costs there and has for a long time. They don't control the vast majority of the hardware they run on, they are the only competition to AWS (speaking of somebody that may be causing real competitive harm), they have to work with Google and Apple on smartphones (a lot of those around, right?)
They have pieces in a
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outside of Office, they really have to compete
Do they, really? Take, PC OS. Mostly bundled with them, isn't.
Enforced mandatory updates - is that a form of competing?
Mandatory MS account for PC OS to happen.
Office as a subscription as a matter of fact. Windows to be next very likely.
They are very unfit to compete, I'd say, since they have to very little.
"...slipped past scrutiny..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft "slipped past scrutiny" but previously they were convicted, they just didn't get broken up thanks to the then president.
But now Microsoft is more crafty and acquires competitors or targets competitors with greater finesse and guile. Yet their still "Engulf and Devour" just have learned not be so brazen like other tech giants.
They've weaponized open-source, as Beigi explains in https://medium.com/@keivan/the... [medium.com].
So the big sweet, nice Microsoft is just still "Engulf and Devour" to stamp out any rivalry.
JoshK.
Evil To Work For Our Government!?!? (Score:3)
Also something is really fucked up about the argument that MS should be subject to anti-trust enforcement because they engaged in the horrible behavior of taking contracts with the US DoD.
I mean if we don't want companies doing things for the DoD there is a super easy solutiondon't have the DoD do it. The public shouldn't ask private entities to do something on their behalf and then turn around and say they need to be punished for it.
—
More broadly, when I was working in big tech I was struck by the fact that the opposition to your employer working for the DoD seemed to be almost entirely a selfish desire to avoid having to confront hard questions or be associated with projects that are controversial amount their friends.
I mean if you were really concerned about making the world a better place (and didn't literally believe the US should completely dismantle the military) you wouldn't reject DoD projects generally but you would first ask what the likely effect of taking that contract would be (no reason to believe that the effect of improving civilian detection or enabling more precise targeting has the same impact as building landmines/cluster bombs). Sure, you can make arguments in each direction on any particular project but if your first concern was the welfare of others not selfishly avoiding hard choices/controversial associations you'd feel the need to carefully look at the details of the project and have a theory about which/when defense projects are harmful. I never saw that from anyone making objections to DoD contracts.
People who are principled pacifists and take the extreme line that no one should be selling any military hardware of any kind to the US military have a wildly implausible view IMO but at least they are acting coherently in a way they think makes the world better. But if you think someone should be selling items of some kind to the US military but just object to it being your company doing it than your just selfishly asking someone else to take the heat you weren't willing to yourself (if you want to object to some contracts then you need to have a reason the ones you object to are bad).
Mac OS should of been open to more hardware (Score:2)
Mac OS should of been open to more hardware or they should or not marked up storage, ram, cpu upgrade pricing.
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It is open to many "obsolete" Apple products, which can be upgraded with most generic processors, memory, SSD.
Along relatively recent, free to obtain macOS.
Are they first in anything? (Score:2)
Ask Sony (Score:2)
Sony doesn't have the equivalent of the "game pass" or whatever it's called for Xbox. And Microsoft keeps buying game studios to make exclusive games and then puts them for free on that monthly fee service. That's the kind of thing that only a big company can do that makes even other big companies nervous.
Is it monopolistic? Well, what happens if Microsoft keeps that? At which point should they not be allowed to buy gaming companies anymore so that their competitors can still have games made for their own c
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Two games per month vs unlimited games? Sounds to me like PS Plus is a completely different thing compared to Xbox Game Pass.
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I haven't seen any numbers, but I keep hearing people saying that XBox is in the lead in Canada and the U.S.A.
<emoji="shrug">
Microsoft distracted from smartphones by antitrust (Score:2)
Retrospective revisionism, Microsoft could have dominated mobile in 2003 with the TRON real-time Operating System. Except seeing this as a threat, joined the T-Engine Forum and then got TRON banned in North America.
Microsoft vs. Historical Fact [super-nova.co.jp]
I care less for anti-trust against one company (Score:2)
I care less for anti-trust against one company. I'd rather see broad consumer protections against bad behavior being carried out by *all* these big tech companies. We've already seen right-to-repair moving forward a bit without any references being made to the fruit company. I think that's the way.
If there's anything that MS is doing that might be an abuse (monopoly or not) it's the whole "telemetry" thing, and their push towards requirements for that system ( I forget the name of it) that's designed to
Consider the Source (Score:3)
But in this instance - and in the interest of complete transparency - it might be worth pointing out that The Atlantic is in fact majority-owned by Laureen Powell Jobs, the widow of the late Steve Jobs. See the last paragraph under ownership, here [wikipedia.org].
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Ownership is irrelevant. Words should stand on their own, and these words are struggling to stand more than me after a weekend bender in Glasgow.
They claim to make a case for anti-trust action, and yet don't actually make any case. Being big is not an anti-trust violation. Having market power is not an anti-trust violation. Having a security flaw is not an anti-trust violation. In fact in the entire summary it fails to mention a single thing which could be a violation of any law, not just in the USA, but th
Objective Definition Required (Score:2)
The federal government is entirely willing to follow such non-legal and non-binding guidelines when it suits
And Linux? (Score:3)
Re:And Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
We've seen it before, Microsoft does have agreements with manufacturers that prevent them from selling most hardware with no OS or with Linux.
No they don't. They haven't since the 90s. The lack of alternate OS is not an indication of some nefarious scheme. What they do have is agreement with manufacturers for massively discounted windows licenses. And manufacturers use those because end users *want* Windows PCs or Macs and the alternatives are either unknown or "scary".
Marketing done well, but it doesn't serve you to rehash something from the distant past.
It's the myth which won't die, even after MS stopped the practice in the 90s. They actually got sued a couple of times in the past 20 years over this myth and every single time the contracts shown had absolutely no exclusivity deals and the cases got thrown out. Honestly if there were any evidence these days of this the EU would in no uncertain terms fuck Microsoft royally. Right now they are looking to any excuse to flex anti-trust laws, and this would be a textbook violation.
Then with the whole UEFI Secure Boot thing people dug this out again as evidence of nefariously blocking Linux, completely failing to point out that Microsoft's "Designed for Windows" program had a hard requirement that Secureboot allow both the installation of custom keys as well as be disabled as a condition of displaying the "Designed for Windows" sticker on the product.
Still the myth persists.
Antitrust is the wrong angle. (Score:2)
Only when the government starts to demand open formats exclusively for official business will I begin to take that antitrust bluster seriously. So far, it is all phony posturing or a cheap attempt at extracting a bribe. Worked last time ...
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Antitrust is not the way to fix IA problems! (Score:2)
The problem with Microsoft Windows is not the lack of competition. It is the lack of -consequences-. If fixing cyber vulnerabilities is a core concern, the fix is to make Microsoft (and Apple and Google and everyone else) legally liable for the consequences from a cyber attack that uses a vulnerability in their software.
First step: Remove the ability of shrink-wrap licenses to disclaim any legal liabilities.
Competition (Score:2)
Pretty much the only area Microsoft has a dominant market position in is Windows on the desktop, along with the backend server infrastructure to support it. Possibly Exchange, for enterprise on-premises email. Every other product they have has serious competition. Linux on internet-facing servers. Google docs for office software. A dozen different products for the development toolchain (though I think Visual Studio is probably their single best product, along with Visio.) Xbox has PlayStation and Switch to
Anti-Trust via "Free" Software (Score:2)
They do abuse their market place power, and it's largely through their existing license agreements.
One example: Microsoft Teams
- Paid Slack starts to gain momentum, so MS makes Teams "free" for many corporate license holders with no change to the license cost.
- Zoom goes nuts doe to the COVID-19 pandemic, so MS starts to quickly incorporate Zoom features into Teams.
So the CIO/CTOs and bean counters ask IT why they would want to use a different platform/service when all that stuff is included in their existi
Can you be guilty of antitrust violations (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point the damage is done. I'd much rather Joe Biden focus on mega conglomerates buying up all the ho
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Microsoft basically killed any serious competitors
Their biggest competitor is Apple, which is bigger than Microsoft and is America's largest corporation.
They also compete with Google's Chromebooks (40 million in use) and Google Docs.
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Their biggest competitor is Apple, which is bigger than Microsoft and is America's largest corporation.
The ways that Apple competes with Microsoft, they are an insignificant (from Microsoft's perspective) speck of the market.
Apple may be the most valued company in the world, but that does not mean they're on top of every thing they do.
MacOS remains under 10% of the market.
Apple is more of a competitor for say, Dell, who ships roughly twice as many units as them.
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Your weak point: Apple is not computing company, it started as once ago. Therefore, only limited segment of what it does is in competition with MS. Both gone quite evil, BTW, slurping users into their subscription plans instead of former sales. At another, higher, rate of the overall expense to the user. Making their software do what maker prefers, as an alternative to the possibility of buyer's choice.
I do not use iTunes of Mojave instance here, as it starts with my need to subscribe, instead of the free c
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So, this being large is already very much at our expense.
Then make an effort to switch! There are plenty of viable alternatives to MS Office (MS Office isn't even particularly compatible with itself between versions so the minor incompatibility here or there between it and things like LibreOffice is a non-issue). Who uses Skype these days? That's been well overtaken by Zoom and Slack.
I am tired of uninstalling bundled Windows software
And everybody else is tired of the people who continue to use MS products and complain about it. Sometimes I want to run Windows software so in those cases I boot into Windows, do I
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Who uses Skype these days? That's been well overtaken by Zoom and Slack.
My parents are. Been very happy with Skype to reach distant relatives of theirs, while it was original consistent product.
I will pass them they should be switching now. Joke. Because they won't know how. The are not even english-speaking, would you believe.
If there's a harm, must there be a foul? (Score:2)
Pleasant and mostly interesting FP branch. And yet it never proposed a solution approach?
So here's the idea: Cut Microsoft into 3 or 4 daughter companies. Each daughter gets a copy of all of the source code and an equal share of the resources. Then let them go at it hammer and tongs. They would all start with Windows (and Office) as the standard, and they would each be free to compete and INNOVATE in whichever way they think best. If they want to keep the standard, that's fine, too, but any changes must be
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Appreciated reading your input, it seems very proper.
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Eh?
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It is difficult to accept appreciation as something real? What a times.
You wrote good piece. Your insights and suggestions seem right. That's it.
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Their needs to be some actual real harm being inflicted. Not past behaviour, especially behaviour prior to last case. There are defintiely far more damaging behaviours from other companies that are ongoing right now especially from Apple and Google.
This is a fair comment from today's point of view. However Microsoft's Monopoly win means we are all using windows. It means more secure competitors like VMS never made it to the desktop [wikipedia.org]. It means that more efficient competitors like BeOS never got through to the consumer in bulk. It means that thin clients are impractical. Risc OS [wikipedia.org] never had a chance.
Instead of having an operating system market where companies competed on security and functionality, we simply had for years IT departments choosing a mono
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Honestly it would be a hard case to prosecute.
The Windows "glue" isn't as strong as it used to be. A lot of workplaces now feature a fairly healthy mix of windows and macs with lots of linux servers, and where they don't its more often than not IT policy (SOEs etc) rather than an ability to actually use a Mac. I think this is a side effect of the rise of mobile computing. Even in homogenously windows only environments, people still want to access their data on their phones and tablets, and as a result a lot
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I've worked in managed services for a couple of decades, and I almost never see Linux deployed in the SMB space I've worked in. Where it has been deployed it has almost always been a major headache for the company involved. Nobody understands it, and even when people with more appropriate skills get involved it almost always involves a metric assload of discovery to figure out how they integrated it together.
It was great when that one awesome admin set it all up, but when they shitcanned him for spying on