What is the deal with the anti-trust case, anyway? A person can work like crazy, innovate, make peoples lives easier, only to be stomped into the ground for it? Most of the general public (myself included) would be nowhere NEAR a computer if it weren’t for Windows. Is it because Bill Gates and Co. is successful?
Ayn Rand would’ve had a few things to say about all of it, I’m sure.
Entirely.
I paid close attention to that whole ordeal. Maybe I dont understand the economics of it, but I do not think they did anything wrong. Netscape is mad because Microsoft offered its browser for free, almost putting Netscape out of business. Plus Microsoft made deals with other companies that made them a stronger. In my opinion, those are just aggressive business practices. That is what makes a business successful!! Businesses lower their prices to be more sucessful right? Well Microsoft offered something for free, so what? That is just lowering it as far as it will go. Microsoft could have sold IE but they did not need to.
And there are complaints about putting IE into Windows. So what??? It is their OS, why not? If Netscape doesnt like it, then they can go out and make their own damn OS. It is a free interprise. Microsoft should not be punished for being so popular!
Exactly! And if this is the general consensus, why is the media so hell-bent on muckraking? Here in WA, when Paul Allen bought the Seahawks and built the Experience Music Project, everyone moaned and whined about the “greedy millionare” throwing his bucks around. No one said “Wow! He’s helping pay for a new stadium!” or “Hey, he’s sharing his music memorabilia with us!” Where is the gratitude for the accomplishments of the hard work these guys put in?
It’s the green-eyed monster at work again…
Bill Gates has money. Microsoft has money. And power. And influence. This influence is bound to anger some people, since the influence will affect some people negatively. Rather than try to out-innovate Microsoft (which, according to MS’s detractors, shouldn’t be too difficult, right?), they whine and complain and demand that Big Daddy Gummint come in to give MS’s well-deserved slice of pie to them.
OK, IANAL, but I think you’re missing the point of the anti-trust case. They aren’t being sued for being successful, or even for being a monopoly. They’re being sued for abusing their monopoly power, by trying to extend that monopoly into other markets (specifically, the internet browser market) using anticompetitive buisness practices.
It works like this. I have a monopoly on oil refineries, you make natural gas powered car. Its not legal for me to start giving gasoline powered cars away for free to drive you out of buisness.
Thats essentially what MS was trying to do, not by giving away IE for free (NS was also free), but by controlling access to it. PC manufacturers weren’t allowed to modify the desktop icons - which included IE - or the startup screen - which said something like “Windows 98 with Internet Explorer”.
Now, you could argue that, what with MacOS, BeOS, and Linux, MS never had a monopoly in the first place. Jacksons unusual definition of the market that MS had a monopoly in is probably going to be argued in the appeal.
Important to note is that the quality of the browsers didn’t matter. I personally think that since version 4, IE has been much better than NS, and I, as a programmer, have benefitted from having IE integrated with the operating system. Nor does the MSs track record on innovation, which is very arguable, or their bringing computers to the masses.
Oh, and theres also the Sun and Intel things, but those have sort of passed by the wayside.
Check out this link for more detail on the case. Its got some of the best coverage I’ve seen.
The deal with the anti-trust case is that Microsoft broke the law by abusing its monopoly position in operating systems. They did this by attempting to acquire a monopoly in web browsers through anticompetitive means, and by maintaining their operating systems monopoly through anticompetitive means. These actions have unquestionably harmed consumers. You can see this thread for an existing debate on this issue as well as a number of examples of harm. If you intend to claim that Microsoft has done nothing wrong, please respond to the points I’ve already made in that thread.
Also, reading the conclusions of law wouldn’t hurt either, if you actually want to debate the issue rather than just spouting your opinion. It’s only 43 pages and is quite readable.
Hunsecker: What do you find unusual about the definition of the market in which Microsoft was found to have a monopoly?
Hunsecker…
It’s not quite the same thing. To take your example… I have a monopoly on oil refineries, you make a natural gas powered car. Is it illegal for me to introduce a revolutionary new fuel cell that allows cars to get 200 MPG, which just happens to nullify the need for a natural-gas car? Your going out of business is a side-effect of a product improvement.
There’s a difference between “abusing monopolistic powers” and “improving a product… which just happens to have negative effects on other companies”. I think MS just happened to know how important the Internet will be, and decided to better their product (Windows) for the average user… unfortunately for Netscape, their product was suddenly rendered obsolete (well, sort of).
Anyway, small companies engage in much worse anti-competitive tactics all the time. They just don’t gain the attention of the anti-trust lawyers until they get very big. Netscape isn’t exactly squeaky-clean on this. Sun gives away Java, not because it’s a benevolent benefactor of Mankind, but because Sun believes that giving away Java will kill a bunch of other commercial languages and give them a large profit center if they can maintain control of the language.
IBM spent most of the 1980’s trying various tactics to destroy the clone industry, from releasing the MicroChannel proprietary architecture, trying to cut deals with Intel that guaranteed them early batches of CPU’s, etc. Apple refused to license their OS so they could maintain hardware sales, and some claim Apple refused to release key specs to outside software vendors (the same claim was made against Microsoft).
Microsoft has some very compelling arguments for bundling the browser with the operating system. Microsoft does not have a monopoly. If it did, the PC software industry has no technical barriers to competition, meaning that their monopoly is not assured in the future. All of these things should be reasons for the Justice department to stay the hell away.
Bill Gates (and his PR crew) have done an excellent job of persuading the public that he is just being persecuted by the government for his company’s success. I’ll give him that. But I don’t buy it at all.
What I found especially interesting during the trial were the testimonies of former employees of PC manufacturers who all claimed that MS threatened to stop supplying them with Windows for their systems if they didn’t not install NN on those same systems. Other manufacturers reported similar threats and talked about the NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) that MS made them sign. Has anyone heard of these, and if these claims were convincingly disputed? Damn, I had a lot of printouts regarding this trial. I should go dig them out.
The one thing that bugged me the whole trial was Microsoft’s claim to the end that anything punitive against them would stifle innovation and “harm the consumer”. Come on! Of all the industry giants, I’d say MS is the least innovative. What have they ever done that was innovative?
Why would a small company engage in anti-competitive tactics? This would be suicide. Small companies can only afford to be anti-competitive when they’ve got something great that no one else has-- if this is the case, then they’re not really “small” anymore, are they?
Huh? So it’s not assured in the future. We’re not talking dynasties here, we’re talking present-day monopolies.
Microsoft broke the law because they used their monopoly position in the OS market to displace the market leader in the browser market - plain and simple.
To fix the gasoline analogy that you guys have been trying to build. Imagine that Microsoft monopolized the gasoline industry. All cars need gasoline, so the automobile manufacturers automatically install Microsoft Gas98 in all their cars as they leave the factory. Now Netscape comes along and they don’t sell gas, they have a gas additive that improves engine performance. The car manufacturers start shipping new cars with Netscape Addivator and customers are happy. Then Microsoft gets to thinking, “Car owners like gas additives. We should make our own gas additive and just put it in all of the gas we sell”. This is bad enough, but Microsoft goes a step further, they design the additive such that if you try to use Netscape’s additive, your car won’t run and they coerce car manufacturers to stop installing Addivator. Suddenly Netscape suffers serious marketshare loss. Eventually, Microsoft “fixes” their gas additive so that Addivator will run in your car, but by that time it’s too late, Netscape’s marketshare has been compromised. Did Microsoft win the additive market because they had a better product? No, they won because they had the power to take away the consumer’s choice in products and drive a competitor out of business.
dhanson wrote:
That’s not exactly true. Sun gives away java because they plan on making money from java based APIs. This is why their lawsuit with Microsoft is so important to them. If Microsoft is allowed to violate the java liscensing agreement and build a non compliant version of java, this threatens Sun’s future application sales because Microsoft could prevent Sun applications from running on a large percentage of the world’s computers.
How is protecting your intellectual property an “anti-competitive tactic”? The quantity and quality of the documentation released by Apple to developers is unparalleled in the history of human kind. Pick up a copy of “Inside Macintosh” sometime, plus all of the technical papers and a wealth of other documentation. While you’re at it, get a copy of the MPW programming environment. It’s all free from the Apple Developer’s website. Having Apple’s detailed documentation is infinitely more valuable to a software developer than having the source code to their OS… of course the robber barons would prefer the source code…
A monopoly doesn’t mean that there’s NO competition, only that the competition is insignificant. Sure, there are other, non Microsoft, OSs out there for the PC, but Microsoft owns more than 95% of the market - that’s clearly a monopoly.
What do you Microsoft defenders think about benevolent dictatorships? Do you like them too? It should be intuitive that competition is a requirement of free enterprise. Without competition, the economy will spiral down into crony capitalism.
I don’t get it though - I mean there is competition. Microsoft maintains a huge market share, but it is not 100%. And all signs point to a further eroding of their market share, especially with the evolution of computers into handheld devices and such. This should not be possible if they had a true monopoly.
I don’t mind penalizing companies for unfair business practices, but to break them up for it? It seems very harsh - especially since they don’t know that what they are doing is illegal until someone takes them to court for it. I mean there is no rule book that states explicitly that the practices they maintained were illegal - it all hangs on the decision of a judge.
PeeQueue
mipsman,
Agreed. Competition is essencial. Remember that Microsoft had to compete with Market Leaders in every market they entered. There was no ‘gimmy’ when they got into the OS business, or the office productivity suite, or the browser.
Another interesting thing - they have consistantly brought the consumer less expensive software, (good for consumer, yes?) and they have allowed less expensive hardware to be more useful (PC was garbage with DOS, but Windows helps, Mac was always better, but much more expensive than clones…)
As for their innovation, they may not have created a single new thing (I think they did, but anyway) but if they are able to put together a package people want, more power to 'em.
This whole things reeps, the consumer was benefitting and the Government steps in to help the whining competitors. Better the Government should look at the damn gas price, and think about what’s happening there.
First of all, I’d like to thank Mr. Feely for encouraging me to read the “Conclusions of Law” that he provided me a link to. Having read that, and I must admit I’m not a lawyer, so my understanding of the document may not be entirely correct, I have to come down on Microsoft’s side.
The biggest thing that disturbs me about the judge’s ruling is that the findings are self-contradictory. In one part of the ruling, he says that Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices to stop a Netscape/Java platform from acting as a competing operating system. Hence, it would seem to me that the Netscape browser, enabled with Java, provides essential operating system services. However, in the latter part of his ruling, he makes the point that the operating system and internet browser are two seperate things, and therefore including one with the other constitutes illegal bundling. Excuse me?
A minor point that disturbs me is the Judge’s description of the “applications barrier” to the introduction of a new operating system. I remember when Microsoft produced its earliest versions of Windows. It didn’t go over well, in large part because no one was willing to write applications for an operating system no one was using…and no one was willing to use an operating system that no one had written applications for. So what did Microsoft do? They wrote their own Windows applications! (granted, whining to the government wouldn’t have done much good, since they were up against their own product, MS-DOS) Anyone who wants to compete with Microsoft by writing their own operating system can do that, and good-bye “applications barrier.”
Actually, I hadn’t read the conclusions of law till you posted the link. I heard on another newsgroup that the market was something like Intel-based server operating systems.
But still, it strikes me that “Intel-based PC OS” is a pretty narrow definition.
Oh yeah, and in my gas analogy, I wanted to show that MS was using anticompetitive practices is the car (IE) market, because they felt their core market (Windows) was being threatened. I have no problem with MS competing on the merits of their software, they often do have the better product and it deserves to win out. Its when they try to drive the competitors out buisness by using their OS dominance that I have a problem.
But boil it all down, and it’s still the same. If IE wasn’t a better product, it would have gone down in flames. I used Netscape before I tried IE, and it was a royal pain. It’s a free economy, right? The government should get the hell out of the way and let inovation drive the competition.
Even if MS owned every oil well on earth, and bundled the additive into the gas, a brilliant, hardworking person could develop an alternative energy vehicle and fight their way to the top if it was more efficient.
JoeyBlades said
Didn’t I read almost this exact same reaction from MS? Someone, please help me out: Wasn’t one of the proposed penalties to be that MS would have to release its code to the general public?
I may be confused…
In a competitive marketplace, yes. But what happened was, MS used their advantages in the OS market to attempt to force NS out of the browser market, rather than having their browser compete solely on its merits.
(OK, this metaphor is getting too streched but…)
Thats the theory, but if MS tries to stop people from being able to get the A.E.Vs by jacking up the price of gas for truckers who want to haul A.E.Vs around the country, then thats anti-competitive.
This is essentially what they did to OEMs. If the OEMs changed the Windows desktop to put netscape on there (or even a shortcut to http://www.netscape.com) then they’d be charged a lot more for Windows. (Sec. I.A.2.a.i in the findings of law)