Microsoft Antitrust Oversight Ends 289
dcblogs writes "The US Department of Justice remedies supervision in the Microsoft antitrust case ends Thursday, closing the landmark case, which began in 1998. But the questions posed by trial federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's attempted remedy remain: Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Not really,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'It has to do with the fact that open source has become such a strong force in the software world.'"
Re:i dont buy any of this (Score:4, Informative)
Do you remember the guys who invented the spreadsheet?
Yes. And they'd be the first people to say that Lotus was the company that killed them. And when MS pretty much crushed Lotus (till IBM took them over), it was karma coming back to them.
BeOS failed because there were no apps and it ws over-hyped as this "modern" OS. It was cool, for sure..
Wordperfect?!? Pft. It sucked. MS jumped on the GUI bandwagon first while WP was still pushing their very expensive backward product. Wordperfect killed Wordperfect
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
This means Microsoft can finally start doing the illegal things they've been doing behind closed doors out in the open, like strong arming suppliers without being hounded by the feds.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:When did it actually start? (Score:4, Informative)
Well said. People quickly forget that when a high profile employee speaks, hes just giving verbatim the position he'd paid to take. He's not some freewheeling loudmouth who does what he wants. Its employer/employee relationaship all the way down.
Re:i dont buy any of this (Score:5, Informative)
Please. You really have no idea how the industry works, and why some companies thrive and some die. I'll give you a hint, there's one reason, and one reason only that tech companies die. And it has little to do with Microsoft (though certainly, they have their hand in it).
That reason, is that they fail to provide a product that consumers want. Microsoft is really good at making consumers want it's products, thus it gives people what they want, and people buy it. Let's look at your examples.
Wordperfect? They sat on their laurels after Windows was released, were late with a Windows product, and that product sucked and their existing userbase did not like it. They failed, time and again, to produce a product that their customers wanted in the GUI world. They ruled DOS, but they miscalculated how quickly DOS would die, and how people would quickly jump ship to a better product. In other words, Wordperfect created suicide. Later owners of the technology didn't do a lot to differentiate it from the by then dominant Word. Then, the companies that owned the technology did not put enough money behind it, and they would sell it off again and again before it could gain traction.
The guy that invented the spreadsheet is Dan Bricklin, and Visicalc was killed by Lotus. Microsoft didn't even have a decent spreadsheet until years after Visicalc was dead.
visual programming? I don't think that term means what you think it means. I'd be interested to know what company you're talking about.
The first commercial web browser? That was Spry. They sold a product called "Internet in a box", derived from NCSA Mosaic. This product existed and died before Microsoft even entered the market. So i have to wonder exactly how it was that Microsoft killed them. Spyglass was the next, and though they licensed the name Mosaic and technology from NCSA, they never used any of the code and wrote everything from scratch. It's true that Microsoft was the cause of their destruction, but it was because Microsoft out-developed them. They had 1000 Developers on the IE team, and spyglass had 20. None of this had anything to do with anti-competitive behavior, other than that Microsoft could use it's massive war chest to out-develop everyone else, and frankly there is no law against that.
You should really read http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html [ericsink.com] as that covers it pretty well.
GEOS? Are you freaking kidding me? That was an 8086 based task switching system, no memory management, etc.. it did a lot, sure.. but they didn't have the resources to make that into any kind of major product.
Finally, we get to BeOS. BeOS was killed by Apple, not Microsoft. Ok, Microsoft may have leveled the killing blow, but apple crippled them to the point that a toddler could have killed them. Why? Because BeOS was positioning itself to be the next MacOS. They thought it was a done deal, until apple went behind their back and bought NeXT instead (just noticed, both of those have 3 capital letters and one lowercase, an e in both cases). Be had put all it's eggs in the Apple basket, and apple crushed them. In a last ditch effort, they decided to port to x86, but they were already a dead man walking and only had a handful of developers doing all the work. They couldn't support a commercial OS with that.
Re:Not true about Word Perfect (Score:3, Informative)
I'm talking about Windows 3.1, not Windows 95. Try 5 years earlier. Before Novell bought Wordperfect.
Also, no. Microsoft did NOT withdraw any API's from Windows 95 a month before it shipped. Windows 95 was RTM'd on July 11, 1995 and shipped August 25th 2005. That means it was finalized 6 weeks before it shipped. What's more, Windows 95 was basically static since December 2004, and went through extensive beta testing with only minor bug fixes and no feature changes.
That's simply not true. I'd thank you to point to an actual document, not the entire archive of comes v microsoft to support your claim.
I know what you're referring to, though. Items 75, 76, and 77 of Novell's complaint. However, the complaint contradicts itself in numerous places. For instance, it claims "In public test versions of Windows 95 released a few months before the final product shipped to consumers, ripped out these programming interfaces without warning to Novell." Ok, a few months not "a month", but let's look further.
"Thereafter, when Microsoft released Windows 95 and Office 95, at virtually the same time, Microsoft suddenly reversed course and documented the programming interfaces. Doing so voided the alternatives that Microsoft previously forced Novell to expend an entire year developing and, at the precise moment when WordPerfect needed to enter the market, forced Novell to spend additional time designing basic functions of WordPerfect all over again."
Uhh.. ok. So where exactly does the "year of development" come from? First Novell claims that "a few months" before the release, microsoft withdrew the API's, then when the release actually happened they claim Microsot then again documented them. At most, this could be, by definition, "a few months" and not a whole years worht of development, other wise Novell would have had to have started their development a year before the release of Windows 95 in order for their "years worth of work" to be voided when Windows 95 and Office 95 were released at the same time, and the API's documented.
Then there's the point that if Microsoft simply withdrew the API's and then redocumented them, all the work they had done previous should have still be valid. They didn't just "throw away the code", it was still there. If the API's suddenly start working again, their previous code would have started working again.
It all makes no sense, and is contradictory. The only conclusion one can come to is that Novell was making crap up, and they lost track of their lies. These are Novell's own words.
Then there is the claim that Novell made that they had to redesign their program because Windows 95 wasn't a pure 32 bit OS, and made the claim that 16 bit applications would not run correctly on a 32 bit OS (complete BS). This is of course a lie, because 16 bit code worked just fine, even on NT which WAS a pure 32 bit system. It's such a ridiculous claim that its laughable.
Oh, here's another fun one "Microsoft refused to publish the APIs that were used to place items on the Windows Clipboard, although its own developers had the documentation. The Clipboard provided a location for storing information until it was "pasted" into another application. Novell ultimately had to forgo this functionality in its applications because the expenditure of time and resources required to duplicate the hidden APIs was prohibitive, so Novell could not provide the same richness of data integration that Microsoft's applications could provide."
The clipboard functions were documented in 1992 When microsoft published the Win32 API for Windows NT. It was in book form, from publishers. Not beta information. The clipboard api did not change in Windows 95 in any way. Wow.
Here's another good one "Further, Microsoft unilaterally announced that OLE would be incorporated directly into Windows, instead of existing independently of the operating system as a technology to be adopted or rejected by ISVs, depending on their assessments of its technical merit."