Microsoft hurt consumers?

[SPOOFE]

I'll be the first to admit that I like Microsoft (although I'm also usually the first to make fun of MS and/or Bill Gates). However, I really am curious as to what ways that Microsoft has hurt consumers. I know the MS's success has hurt competitors (and it can be argued that any damages Netscape or Corel took were due mainly because they themselves created crappy products).

Microsoft has been found to have hurt consumers by Judge Jackson. However, in Time and Newsweek articles, it's pointed out that these "damages" to consumers are unnamed. So I turn to the teeming millions... how has Microsoft hurt consumers on a large scale?

I don't want this to turn into another "PC vs. Mac" debate or "Linux vs. Windows" debate-- there are other threads for that-- I'm perfectly aware that Windows' popularity would reduce market share for Mac and Linux users. However, those are indirect damages, and I don't know of any accusations of MS going after Linux or Apple (indeed, Bill Gates PREFERS Apple computers). So if you're going to bring up an example, please show the Microsoft deliberately caused such damage, or their gross negligence causes such damage.

[Mr. Feely]

See this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=26172), where I have extensively identified and explained several ways in which Microsoft has hurt customers. In a nutshell, Microsoft has prevented many innovations from occurring because they threatened Microsoft's operating system monopoly, or competed against other Microsoft products.

Just for kicks, I'll give you another example demonstrating how Microsoft has harmed me as a consumer, as well as users on other non-Microsoft platforms. They did this by introducing gratuitous incompatibilities with the standard Western language character set (ISO 8859-1 Latin-1) in the "Save as HTML" feature of their software. As a result, when I or other users using non-Microsoft platforms view web pages created in this manner, we get question marks instead of the characters `'" and symbols -- ---, which basically makes the web page hard to read and makes the author look like they have poor grammar. See this page (http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/) for a more in depth explanation and a script which "demoronizes" your broken webpage for you.

Mr. Feely

[SPOOFE]

Let me re-iterate what I wanted to know...

What I want to know is what Judge Jackson thinks hurt the consumers. From what I've read (in the two aforementioned articles), he hasn't mentioned ANY actions on MS's part that hurt the consumer, yet he's ruled that MS has hurt the consumer... but there's now no way for MS to argue the point since Jackson hasn't said... etc.

You get the idea.

What the heck was Jackson referring to when his findings of fact said that MS hurt consumers?

[Mr. Feely]

IANAL, but it seems to me that the premise of antitrust law is that using anticompetitive methods to achieve or maintain a monopoly is inherently harmful to consumers. Jackson found that Microsoft used anticompetitive means both to maintain its monopoly in operating systems and to attempt to achieve a monopoly into the browser market. He specifically referenced Microsoft's behavior towards Intel, IBM, Netscape, and Java (among others) as examples of these anticompetitive methods.

Given that, it seems pretty obvious to me that for Microsoft to argue that it didn't harm consumers it will need to demonstrate that its actions in those cases were not anticompetitive.