The History of Microsoft's Anti-Competitive Behavior

jabjoe writes "Groklaw is highlighting a new document from the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (PDF) about the history of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Quoting: 'ECIS has written it in support of the EU Commission's recent preliminary findings, on January 15, 2009, that Microsoft violated antitrust law by tying IE to Windows. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the issue of Microsoft's patent threats against Linux have been framed in a context of anti-competitive conduct.' The report itself contains interesting quotes, like this one from Microsoft's Thomas Reardon: '[W]e should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take more advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.' It also has the Gates 1998 Deposition."

Brings me back

[mc1138]

I remember one of my first computer courses in school where we were taught computer history. I still remember the professor telling us about the early days of Microsoft and how it didn't take long for them to start ripping off ideas, only to then buy the company that was suing them.

Re:Anyone else notice

[jabjoe]

Listen-to/watch him on the 1998 Deposition. No amount of charity PR is going to make me think he is a good honest man. He is not someone to admire or even respect. It's not ok to do anything you can get away with to make money. Becoming rich doesn't make everything ok. If I was religious man I would point to old text on camels, the eye of needles and damnation, but I'm not, but what I'll say is society couldn't function if it was filled with people like this.

Re:Bundles-schmundles

[vivaelamor]

I don't think you needed to 'get over' the point because you missed it.

There is no problem with microsoft bundling a browser, the problem was the inability for anyone else to bundle a browser that could compete with Microsofts turf. As long as the browser was tied to the operating system it was both advantaged by the fact that you could not remove it and even if you did remove it you would not be able to tie another browser to the OS. This arguably led to Netscape's demise as they wanted to bundle their browser via OEMs.

Linux by virtue of being open source would struggle to do anything remotely similar. Apart from there being no good reason to develop a crappy API for open source software, you could still write your own API and completely replace the crappy one.

It's similar to the accusations Microsoft have faced about putting undocumented hooks in their programs to disadvantage competitors.. except that in this case it was obvious as you can't hide the fact that you won't let anyone uninstall your browser.

Re:Anyone else notice

[jank1887]

I thought MS Office was their biggest profit item. no?

Re:WOW... this is breaking Shocking News...

[recoiledsnake]

I think they ARE aware of that. After a while she starts defending the guy, not unlike the pro-MS posters here on Slashdot that you swear must be shills except they're probably not actually getting paid. Seriously, those people just can't understand that Microsoft is not your buddy, when you stick up for Microsoft like a loyal little sycophant it's not like they are capable of appreciating it, they are a mindless faceless corporation without any sort of feeling.

I think you're confusing MS fanboys with people who like to point out inconvenient facts. Some uninformed people start ranting about some DRM in Vista or other untrue crap and how can you label the people refuting them arguing facts as MS fanboys? There's a lot of stuff to bash MS on, there's no need to make up BS and then call the people who point it out as 'pro-MS posters' or sycophants. Slashdot is losing credibility because of anti-MS zealots. And the mainstream media is catching on too. Just read this article [arstechnica.com].

Re:And now for the cloud

[American Terrorist]

Maybe, just possibly, because people were worried, and therefore monitored what MS was doing, and made sure MS wasn't allowed to leverage their desktop monopoly advantage?

Or maybe, just possibly, because Microsoft's internet apps all sucked, and therefore no one used it, and made sure to tell all their friends to use Google, Youtube, and Wikipedia.

I live in China, Youtube here was blocked recently. I saw a bunch of references to Susan Boyle lately so I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. I tried to view her video on MSN's version of Youtube. Couldn't do it. All I got was MSN's coverage of her, not the original song. If they can fuck up such a basic service so badly then I'm not worried about them gaining market share in things I care about anytime soon.

I ended up having to download the torrent because that's apparently the only thing that works as expected these days.

Re:Brings me back

[CyberLord Seven]

Apple stole the gui idea from Tandy I believe.

The GUI and the mouse both came from Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Apple demonstrated this tech with the Apple Lisa which kind of bombed but did lead the way to the first Macintosh which was an incredible success. Too bad I didn't have that kind of money back then.

A singular monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's monopoly is singular, though. Few companies outside of government-authorised monopolies own more than 90% of their particular market, and very few indeed have such a share of a market which people are so dependent on. You may have a government-monopoly water company, but the government calls the shots, and you call the government's shots, at least in principle. You currently have an MS-monopoly computing industry, and only MS and its major shareholders get to call the shots. Either the monopoly has to be broken to allow consumer choice and therefore a drive for companies to listen to their consumers, or the government has to get a say in how MS is run as a way of ensuring they listen to their consumers.

As a specific example, Microsoft still ships products which perform certain kinds of statistical analysis wrongly, and those products may be calculating your insurance premiums and taxes right now. Due to their monopoly, there are probably few places that your insurer or local government can go for an alternative, and due to their disregard for standards, it's possible that MS offers no easy means for them to migrate to that alternative. So you're stuck with the MS product, and unfortunately you don't get any say in the discussion of whether they should finally fix the stats handing in the next release.

People bring up Apple all the time, but if you don't like their vendor lock-in, you can go to another company. Even their biggest monopoly, in MP3 players, is only about 70%. Microsoft has something like a 95% market share in operating systems, and that's after a couple of years of drooping.

Re:Brings me back

[aoteoroa]

BTW I still stand behind the principle that having IE with Windows is not anti-competative. If that were the case then Red Hat, Apple OS, and others would be anti-competitive. . .car companies are anti-competative because they come bundled with radios,

You can remove and replace the stock radio from your car and it wont break the car. The problem with IE wasn't just that it was available for free but you could not remove it.

Re:Stacker / DBLSpace / Lawsuit

[myxiplx]

Exactly, Microsoft's behaviour killed the market, removing a damn good product from us customers. Sure, Stac made some money out of it, but we'll never know what we lost as a result.

I used to use Stacker regularly after finding that it coped with disk errors better than Microsoft's FAT filesystem, or Microsoft's Doublespace. Errors that would routinely loose entire disks with Microsoft's code were quietly fixed with Stacker, allowing me to move data to new disks. I was even able to recycle known bad disks since Stacker could handle the bad sectors just fine.

In contrast, Microsoft's Doublespace could loose data on good drives, it was truly, truly awful.

Microsoft's behaviour effectively removed one of my favourite software tools from the market, and they've done it many, many times since to other programs. I may be a Windows network admin, but I am definitely not a fan of their business practices or their software.

Re:Brings me back

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse yet, it wasn't all that long ago that Microsoft's contracts with OEMs specified that alternate browsers could not be shipped with the PC (at least in the US.) Clearly this is anticompetitive.

Also, the grandparent should understand that trying to reduce competition is generally okay as long as you aren't a near-monopoly. The problem with Microsoft is that they're virtually synonymous with computers in the minds of most people these days. There's not much competition at all, and thus when they do something to try to further stifle competition, that's considered bad.

Re:Brings me back

[stewbacca]

It isn't "misattributed", because he did utter those words. It can be argued that they were "misconstrued", however, because people attribute meaning to the statement that wasn't the intent of Gates' statement.

Re:Brings me back

[Noren]

Which Disney was involved in the passage of the Copyright Act of 1790, which allowed 14 years with an optional extension for a second 14 years if the copyright holder was alive? Or the Copyright Act of 1909, which doubled that to 28 years renewable for a second 28? Blaming everything on Disney is /. trendy but ignores history.

Re:Brings me back

[Erris]

He's probably talking about the Disney that's had a hand in every copyright extension in the 20th century aftery your 1909 case. 28 years + the posibility of renewal is not nearly as bad as 90 years + DMCA and other absurdly broken laws we have now. People are waking up to the tyrany around them and they won't tollerate ACTA and further foolishness.

None of it really matters now. Broadcast is dying and their little file clerks at M$ are going down with them. Good riddance to bad rubbish, it's all downhill from here.