You’re going to have to back that up with some serious footwork, because, as the manager of a computer department in an MS shop, I feel plenty harmed by Microsoft, starting with their licencing fees, and ending with viable alternative technologies that they crushed or corrupted.
So you have fantasies about the way the world ought to be and MS doesn’t live up to them. Is this supposed to impress anyone other than yourself?
Cite specifics and I’ll address them.
MS’s fees are in line with or lower than the rest of the industry. Or are you one of those people who think the only proper price for software is free?
The recent MS trial found no consumer harm, so If you want to allege harm, it’s your job to make the case.
tj
Rubbish. The first complaints came from consumers who could not access QT movies on their favorite websites, including some sites that are all-MS (except for QT).
The details HAVE come out. This one is pure Microsoft monopolism. Microsoft removed support in IE5.5 for all Netscape APIs, and required all plugin authors to rewrite their plugs for ActiveX. This was just another nail in the coffin of Netscape.
This is the same total BS I always hear from Microsoft toadies. You are making a fundamental mistake, equating the fortunes of MS with the fortunes of the world economy as a whole. If MS doesn’t make money off computer OS purchases, some other company will. MS is a monopolist because it wants to earn ALL the money in the computer industry.
You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The verdict specifically said that consumers were harmed. I don’t need to make the case because the court has already ruled that consumers were harmed. That is the whole point of the Sherman Antitrust act, when consumers are barred from making alternative choices due to anticompetitive monopolistic actions of a company, that is by its very definition harming consumers.
Go read the verdict before spouting more Microsoft propaganda.
Which I’m sure won’t have any effect on companies integrating those computers into networks with Windows computers, or who share software between European and American branches. And all the software on the market will convert itself to be compatable with whatever OS Europe switches to. And that said OS will offer all the benefits of Windows, and support all the same hardware.
:rolleyes:
Hell, in that case, I’m a monopolist.
Don’t bother to quote Jackson’s ruling. The court of appeals threw it out, remember? Jackson was censured for bias after all. The only part of his ruling that was upheld was that MS is a monopoly and that it engaged in exclusionary contracts.
Even this biased ruling couldn’t point to any actual consumer harm, although it did toss around a bit of rhetoric about belief in harm. That’s fairly unimpressive given Jackson’s general cluelessnes and they way the Appeals court repudiated him.
“I can’t cite any actual harm to consumers, but I’m pretty sure that there is some in there” doesn’t cut it in a court of law. Not even when it’s the Judge talking.
In Jacksons Findings of Fiction, he admitted that MS prices were too low to be monopoly rents, but he asserted without reference to any evidence that they COULD charge more if they wanted to.
tj
No, the Finding was upheld in its entirety, with the exception of one area, the IE bundling issue. Jackson was not censured for bias, he was censured for speaking to the press, in violation of judiciary standards. The appeals court held that he did not show any bias. Remember, judges are SUPPOSED to make judgements about the defendants, their credibility, their conduct, etc. That’s the whole POINT of the judiciary system.
If you’re going to desperately cling to your completely erroneous ideas about this lawsuit, then there is no point in even attempting to place the facts before you. I give up. You are incorrigibly ignorant, and will remain so.
If you’re referring to the “broken Quicktime” incident that popped up during the antitrust trial itself, it did turn out to be Microsoft finangling with the system.
Quick summary: In November 1998, Apple software VP Avie Tevanian testified that Microsoft had introduced bugs into Windows to prevent QuickTime from working properly. After Avie left the stand, Microsoft issued a press release stating that the bugs were in fact in QuickTime, not in Windows, and the whole problem was due to Apple’s programming errors – the bug was that QuickTime didn’t properly register three of eleven filename extensions with Windows – namely, “.qt,” “.vfw,” and “.aifc.”
However… In Apple’s own specs for QuickTime Digital Video File Formats,none of those three “improperly supported” filename extensions is actually a valid Quicktime filename extension at all. No one is 100% certain, but it seems like the “rogue extensions” were used by Windows when saving Quicktime media off the internet, which then failed to play because they had illegal (according to Apple’s specs) extensions – making it a Windows “bug” after all.
Microsoft has a long history of blaming other companies’ programmers when third-party software suddenly stops working with Windows. I’m cynical enough to suspect that the real source of the bugs is on the other side of the fence…
Also not true. What they said was: “You put a netscape icon on the desktop, but you you may NOT REMOVE the IE icon.”
MS has NEVER prohibited PC manufacturers from bundling Netscape. They only prohibited them from removing IE.
The customer may remove either icon once they have the PC in their hands.
Now in terms of MARKETING, they have some exclusive marketing deals. “If we give you money to help market your PC’s, you may not promote Netscape on the main page of your Web site or the same page as the PC”. Was typical. The court of appeals ruled this to be illegal.
tj
Wrong.
Microsoft told Compaq that they’d double Compaq’s license fee for Windows if they bundled Netscape. Compaq didn’t bundle Netscape. The windows license fee is around 10% of the cost of a PC these days; doubling that fee cripples a product on the market.
In HTML the file names (including extensions) are specified by the web site that supplies the data.
These extensions ARE common ones on the Windows platform and have been for years. What Apple has to say about approved extensions is irrelevant, people use these or the web sites woudn’t be serving up data with those names.
It is Apple’s fault if they didn’t support the extensions that people actually use. (and Web designers for using non-apple-approved extensions, I suppose). MS had nothing to do with it.
And programmers have a long history of blaming MS for their own mistakes. So? Finger pointing is ubiquitous.
You wouldn’t believe the shit that Lotus 1.2.3. did in their code. The actually reverse-engineered DOS and then grabbed memory from some known offset to look at undocumented internal flags. When those flags moved, MS went and ‘faked’ the flags that Lotus was looking for so that it still worked.
I happen to know that Windows95 had 100’s of hacks for no other purpose than to keep 3rd party products compatible.
Did you know that if you call GlobalUnlock() and pass it the letter ‘M’ that it will quietly ignore the call without either crashing or returning an error? Guess why…
We delayed shipping Win95 for nearly 5 months after it was done so that we could put in hacks to make broken 3rd party apps continue to work. Nearly all of these were bugs in the apps that just happened to be benign in Win31 (like the Unlock ‘M’ thing). I personally did a patch for “Monty Python’s complete waste of time”, and it WASN’T because I cared one way or the other about that product. It was assigned to me. (It was a cool product though)
The Adobe Font techology actually PATCHED the core Windows drawing primative DLL in Win31 in order to install. MS had an engineer whose ONLY JOB for 4 months was to hack the GDI so that the Adobe font technology still worked. This involved creating fake assembly language signatures that Adobe was searching for, then then periodially querying them to see if they had been patched. When they were patched, the patches were fixed up so that they went to the correct places.
So don’t tell me that MS intentionally breaks competitors products. I know better.
The worse you can truthfully say is that they don’t always fix their competitors bugs.
tj
cite?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by rjung *
**
No, I am referring to a very recent incident that occurred only a couple months ago. Note that I said MS has continued its predatory monopolistic behavior SINCE the verdict, and this was my example. Microsoft is doing everything it can to kill Quicktime. RealPlayer will be next.
But that Quicktime “knife the baby” incident was probably the clincher in the trial, it was the smoking gun that proved MS’s predatory tactics.
Uh-huh.
I get new versions of IE usually the week they come out and I’ve never had a problem playing QT movies. Not once from 5.0 through (checks)6.0 and all versions in-between. I do updates for the computers at work, downloading new versions and updates for about 45 computers. Quicktime still works on them (they’re currently all on 5.5). No-one I know has a problem with QT movies.
How 'bout a cite. Or two. Or is your source a secret again (“two aging hippies”)? :rolleyes:
Fenris, eagerly waiting to find out why he hasn’t, in actuality, been watching QT movies all these years.
I was mistaken in my claim that Microsoft threatened to double Compaq’s licencing fees if they bundled Navigator. The following cites should clarify what really happened:
And here’s a freebie, straight from Jackson’s findings of fact:
How about a witness? This happened to my brother. The upgrade from IE 5.0 to 5.5 broke Quicktime. It no longer worked as a plugin.
The reason for this is that Microsoft, in IE 6, dropped support for plugins, an architecture developed by Netscape, in favor of their ActiveX architecture. Then, without warning, they included the change in architecture in 5.5, except Quicktime was the only plugin that stopped functioning.
Strange, isn’t it?
Ok, you’ve got your brother, I’ve got about 60 computers that are somewhere between 5.0 and 6.0 and all points in between where Quicktime does work.
I believe you about your brother. But the problem is that both of us are using anecdotal evidence and that’s not the way to prove a charge like this.
Fenris
If your QT files work OK on Windows IE 5.5sp2 or higher, then you are fortunate to be accessing sites that have already modified their code to conform to MS’s new demands. Many sites moved immediately to repair the damage.
If you want another cite, the authoritative Macintouch site has a special report on the issue.
http://www.macintouch.com/netscapepluginapi.html
Or perhaps a Robert Cringely article will be of interest:
Or perhaps the official announcement from Apple would be the best source:
:rolleyes:
Every good designer I’ve met would tell you right quick you want to make sure your code is compatible with both the <object> and <embed> tags. I’ve always done it in my sites. Much similar to the <NOFRAMES> tag, eh? Too bad we can’t pin frames on MS. Or JavaScript pop-up windows and Java viruses.
Bad HTML coding is not MS’s fault either. Christ.
Tejota, do you or did you work for Microsoft?