One year, Microsoft pumped $650 million into our judicial system. That same system clearly settled that Microsoft holds monopoly power over the desktop operating system market.
From the federal district court of the United States.
"Microsoft possesses monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems."
From the federal appeals court of the United States.
"... we uphold the District Court's finding of monopoly power in its entirety."
Oh please! I had lost faith in the system when victims mostly gets screwed and the accused gets off lightly. And that doesn't count either. The real truth is the one with the most bucks usually wins. Did anything ever change with Microsoft, no not really after the ruling.
And even if you believe in the system, do you believe the judge and jury is going to understand anything about geeks and lines of code? One in a thousand might, but that is the bright side of things.
It is as plain as day to me, that Microsoft appears as a monopoly because Microsoft's competitors are whinny cry baby morons! They can't program their way out of a wet paper bag! And because they are so bad, they blame not themselves, but because Microsoft did it to them. Judges and juries like hearing this. But they are totally clueless when it comes right down to Microsoft competitors are nothing more than just plain old clueless idiots. And that makes Microsoft guilty? I think not!
Case in point. The court had ruled that McDonalds was at fault because hot coffee was hot. Yes the coffee was at 190 degrees like hot coffee should be. But the stupid lady was too dumb to know that hot coffee was hot. So McDonalds had to pay like 3.5 million dollars to this dumb ass lady. Yes I'm sorry she was a dumb ass, but I am not sorry enough for dumb asses to give them 3.5 million dollars or whatever it was. Now because of this, McDonalds now has a warning that hot coffee is hot. Are you getting any of this now, John?
Maybe to solve Microsoft's so-called monopoly problem, maybe MS should add a warning that its competitors are nothing but morons. Yes that's the ticket.
____________________________________________ Bill (using a Toshiba 2595XDVD under Windows 2000)
Read the stories about how Netscape destroyed itself. The company had incompetent management from day one. Its Navigator succeeded only because there were no competitors; as soon as there were, it failed. It's a great case study in truly bad management.
Microsoft didn't always own the operating system. Even so, it managed to succeed. Others can do the same, but they must be at least as well managed as Microsoft.
That has nothing to do with applications. Borland hit the skids because of poor management. Netscape failed because of poor management, too. There are many examples.
It's something that an unbiased observer can scarcely ignore.
It is true, and they don't want to know anything else.
What geeks fail to understand is that most people see computers as appliances--something they must use to accomplish some other task. Usually the task is much more interesting than the tool. They have no emotional attachment to their computers, or to the software running on their computers. They don't care about "choice," any more than they care about the colors available for the agitators in their washing machines. It doesn't matter to them. They use what's there, they get the job done, and they live the rest of their life, the life they have away from the computer. That's how the real world works.
Nobody "suffers" from the current arrangement except a handful of geeks who hate Microsoft, and a handful of companies who are too incompetent to compete with Microsoft and try to replace legitimate competition with endless legal harassment.
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
Perhaps but it's not unusual for the 'engineer', or geek type, who often like to 'build the best', or so they believe, and then blame limited acceptance on the 'stupidity' of the buyer, or a market conspiracy.
If they don't run the company then it's 'stupid management'.
But 'best' includes more than just the technical.
On the other hand, I'm not so sure it was Apple's closed box approach that was so much the 'mistake', after all, they all were at that time, as it was IBM's mishandling of the PC, which threw it open to a flood of clones, along with Microsoft providing the missing link of a competent O.S.. Although, if Microsoft hadn't someone else surely would have because that became too big a market to ignore.
But Apple might have fared much better if the market had remained proprietary system vs proprietary system, as it had always been.
A market leader completely loosing control over their product simply hadn't happened before.
"Kind hearted engineers?" hehe Well, there certainly are some but there are some real SOBs too ;)
But I'm not quite as willing to blame it all on 'corruption' as I am on the complexities of large hierarchical organizations populated by imperfect human beings. You don't have to be 'corrupt' to screw up ;)
On the other hand, a well established path to corporate doom is for the entrepreneur who started it to try running the whole she-bang as it grows beyond the ability of any one person to manage.
While there was certainly some of that involved I think it's more complicated.
From what I understand IBM held the BIOS proprietary and expected that to 'protect' the PC from copies but Award reverse engineered it and that was all she wrote. So, from IBM's perspective, all the prior PCs were technically a 'violation' of their proprietary rights.
There are some serious flaws in that logic but I can see IBM convincing themselves of it.
Does makes one wonder, though, why they didn't simply 'upgrade' the BIOS to the 'new and improved' V2.0 with new proprietary code, and stop issuing source, once they realized it had been breached but, who knows? Sure seems simple enough.
But after IBM's debacle with issuing BIOS source one can surely see why Microsoft doesn't do it.
Again, I think it's more fundamental. I mean, a 'soaring success' is often started by a 'great idea' but markets change, products mature, competitors move in, so where does the next 'great idea' come from? It isn't as if they're a dime a dozen, you know ;)
Microsoft does almost all its business in operating systems and its Office suite. It has very little competition in both domains. It does not and cannot compete in any of the other thousands of application domains for PCs in the world, and even if it tried, it would be up against a lot of well-entrenched competition. The concerns about monopoly are thus exaggerated and not always well placed.
Microsoft will eventually self-destruct. The golden age of the company in terms of development was over a decade ago. Revenue trails development by some years but it is notable that the stock price of Microsoft is no longer on the rise. The company is increasingly concerned with maintaining the revenue stream and making money generally, and less and less concerned with actually doing business in the computer industry. All companies go through this, especially after their founders retire or after an IPO, and it is their eventual downfall.
So those who hate Microsoft need only be patient. Although it probably won't help much, because people who need to hate other people always manage to find new targets for their hate when the old ones disappear.
Sometimes, yes. It's hard to make money on it as a separate product. It's not a very good office-automation suite.
Not necessarily. A lot of public utilities are run as regulated monopolies, because that's the only practical way to provide certain goods and services. In the case of computer operating systems, the overwhelming dominance of one operating system provides standardization and stability that hugely increases the number of available applications and encourages development and innovation in application systems, because it provides a very large, guaranteed market for any application written to run with the majority operating system. If there were five equally popular operating systems running on PCs, there would essentially be five different universes of applications as well, none of them completely adequate to address all the needs of the entire market. A lot of people would have to have multiple PCs just to run all the applications they might need.
Some parts do, some parts don't. We don't have competition for the military. We don't have competition for first-class mail. In any given area there is virtually no competition for telephone service.
Sometimes monopolies serve society better. Usually they have to be heavily regulated if they are turned over to private concerns in order to prevent abuse, though.
Programmers don't always know what they are talking about.
From whom? Not ordinary consumers.
They are extremely meaningful to the companies that produce them.
Without a single dominant platform for applications, many applications would never see the light of day, because there simply would not be enough of a market to recover their costs of development. The larger the market, the easier it is to make money developing an application for that market. You see far more applications for Windows, and far more specialized and obscure applicatons for Windows, than you do for, say, the Mac, precisely because of this phenomenon. A lot of unusual applications that you can get for Windows will never exist on the Mac, because the market for the Mac is too small to cover the cost of developing (or even porting) the application.
Why just Microsoft? Lots of companies are just as successful as Microsoft. What property do you propose to seize from them? Why aren't you complaining about Intel, for example?
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
His arguments seem a lot more objective and less emotional than most that one hears on USENET.
All large companies tend to commit certain abuses at some point in their lifecycles, but contrary to widely held misconceptions, in the greater scheme of things their abuses rarely make much of a dent in their success or anyone else's failure. In order to do such things to begin with, they need to have a dominant position, and if they have a dominant position, doing bad things doesn't make it much more dominant. And if they are poorly managed overall, they will go down with or without abuses, as unethical practices alone will not save a company that is fundamentally incompetently managed.
This has been proven again and again historically.
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
Yes, and that's what many companies competiting with Microsoft try to do. They can't compete in business, so they try to attack in the courtroom.
Yes. Of course, sooner or later, someone smarter will come along, and then Microsoft will start its downward slide. That could be tomorrow, or forty years from now. Some people talk about Google, but I'm not convinced that Google is any kind of threat right now. Two different businesses.
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
No, most people aren't interested because they aren't geeks, period. They have lives outside of computers. They care no more about their computers than they care about their telephones or toasters. They use computers to accomplish some specific task, and then they are done. Their are neither frustrated nor pleased by computers--they are indifferent.
I'm not frustrated with current technology. It all seems to work very well.
Non-disabled people don't need easier access. Who should pay for special accommodation of the disabled, and how much should they pay, and which disabled people should get which proportion of the money?
Nobody is clamoring for speech recognition. Most people don't use computers that much and don't care. They are no more interested in speech for their PC than they are in speech for their DVD players.
Which things?
Microsoft already provides more accommodation of the disabled than any other OS publisher. How much more do you want it to do?
Within personal computing as well. But there are many types of disabilities, and they all deserve consideration, in proportion to the number of people afflicted with them. It's a question of balance.
For example, money spent to accommodate wheelchairs exceeds all other expenditures on most other, more common disabilities combined, which is a great example of enormous _imbalance_. I don't advocate that for computers or for anything else.
Uh, Microsoft is more interested in these things than any other major software publisher.
So you are doing it with special hardware, namely, a USB microphone and speakers.
Netscape crashed and burned all on its own. It did that so quickly that it's hard to imagine anything that Microsoft could have done that would have significantly accelerated the crash.
Do you think so? Try it.
I don't believe any company that makes such a claim. Microsoft is no worse than anyone else, however.
Because you say so?
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
If you're going to talk about making computers more accessible, you're going to have to offer solutions that don't require the latest, fastest, most expensive hardware available. A lot of people are running machines much slower than 400 MHz, and they cannot afford to buy new hardware. What do you suggest for them?
Why can't people use the computers they already have?
Not really. Most of these aren't running unless the user starts them.
Bigger and faster than 99.99% of all computers in the world. Hardly representative.
The only voice I see is Sam.
What built-in text-to-speech function is available on Linux? What about the Mac? What about OS/2?
I did. Works well enough to get by. If someone wants a deluxe system, he can go out and buy one (after all, according to you, he can afford a top-of-the-line PC).
Programming it to do so would be prohibitively expensive.
No, the real reason is that Microsoft servers are technically somewhat inferior to UNIX servers for most purposes. It has nothing to do with intelligence or product quality. Windows servers are of excellent quality, but they are more poorly suited to server roles than the simpler UNIX and Linux operating systems are, in most cases. Also, Windows is much more expensive, which makes a difference especially when one is purchasing thousands of licenses at a time.
So what do you suggest? Should application developers be prohibited from writing software for Windows and forced to develop software for the current underdog operating systems?
Apple should have gone out of business long ago, based on its incompetence alone. It clings to life because it has a very loyal customer base.
Summarize it, then.
Not true. I could spend it all in a year. But he gives a lot of his money away.
He has given away billions, not millions, and it has made a dent.
They are more concerned than they need to be. They could just ignore it.
There are serious security issues with such a facility, and I doubt that it was used very much, even by the disabled.
Scripting is a vector for viruses. System-wide scripting would be a security nightmare.
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
The engineer is probably right, in a sense, but that won't pay the bills. Apple has come up with many interesting innovations, but it is rather blind in its belief that its ideas are the _best_ ideas, and it's also very obstinate in not backing down on its principles. I suppose that's commendable, in a way, but it doesn't bring in business. If I truly believed Apple to be the best, I might invest in it, but although Apple is distinctive, I'm not at all convinced that it's the best, so paying a price premium for it (and spending eternity under Apple's thumb for both the hardware and the OS) isn't justified.
As I recall, I skipped Apple just because it was far too expensive. I liked the concepts and the look and feel and so on, but not enough to pay such a severe price premium. Also, at work we used PCs from the beginning for everything except secretarial workstations, because they could easily be customized to work with our mainframes, whereas with Macs, there was either the Apple way or the highway.
Point taken. I guess it's easy to find ten smart people, but much more difficult to find 40,000 smart people. Eventually, you get a lot of stupid people in the company.
Yes, but conversely, the beginning of the end for many companies is marked by the departure of the founder(s). Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM ... the list goes on and on. Notice that Microsoft has changed since Bill Gates left.
IBM had a history of publishing source, which was the norm at one time for mainframes. Microsoft never had any exposure to that.
If the first great idea was pure luck, that's true. But if it was the product of a really smart group of people, they should be able to come up with other great ideas.
Since Bill Gates assumed a background role, Microsoft has shown distinctly less innovation and much more bottom-line-style management. Steve Ballmer is a businessman rather than a geek, but he has no prior experience, and now he's in charge of a multi-zillion dollar company. Inevitably, mistakes are made, and eventually too many mistakes will be made and the company will being its downward slide. Like so many big companies, Microsoft will commit suicide; it won't be killed by the competition.
-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.
At last. I have followed this thread from the beggining waiting for the subject of Bill Gates' money to be introduced, as these fanatical Microsoft bashers always seem to reach that point in their arguments. This has been a very informative thread and I wish to congratulate the other posters on their self restraint and knowledge of the facts.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.