Bill Gates Called To Testify In Antitrust Trial Over Windows 95; No This Isn't An Old Post
from the the-wheels-of-justice-turn-slowly dept
Thought that Microsoft's antitrust troubles from a decade plus ago were all settled and over with, beyond a little monitoring? Think again. The case involving Novell is continuing onward... and lined up on the docket to testify is Bill Gates, who's being called to explain some questionable emails he sent all the way back in 1994, which seem to suggest plans to use Windows to limit competing office productivity software offerings. Of course, perhaps if Novell hadn't been spending so much time and money fighting Microsoft, it could have spent more time actually building products people want.
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Filed Under: antitrust, bill gates
Companies: microsoft, novell
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Oh, that's right, Win95 isn't in the public domain yet because copy protection lengths are 95+ years.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Oct 18th, 2011 @ 3:48pm
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Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Oct 18th, 2011 @ 3:48pm
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Re: Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Oct 18th, 2011 @ 3:48pm
...
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ya know, i want to make a snarky comeback in response to this, but...
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there just aren't words.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Oct 18th, 2011 @ 3:48pm
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Apple?
Apple's sudden focus on lawsuits doesn't look to good in this light...
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Re: Apple?
I agree that once people start suing each other, everybody looses a bit, but I don't quite know how to take Mike's position that they should just roll over and take a screwing from MS (I mean move on, forgive and forget). If you don't stand up then its going to happen again and again and again.
Mike, do you think IBM should have just rolled over for SCO or am I misconstruing your comment?
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You imply that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust to monopolize OS market.
Since Microsoft was convicted of antitrust, as you mention at the start, how was Novell to effectively compete against ongoing unfair practices and exercise of monopoly? Neither IBM nor Digital Research could, either. You're simply saying let the behemoth use illegal means without contest. The resources that you suggest were mis-directed were in fact a part of Microsoft strategy to force Novell to use up its far more limited resources that way: double hammering.
I note a "winner takes all" tone here: libertarians have a tautology that gaining a monopoly proves that the monopolist is best, therefore there's no monopoly. Mike has several times implied approval of "natural" monopolies and disparaged breaking up monopoly merely because large. He's a corporatist at heart, outside of some mild disapproval.
By the way, it seems certain that Justice Dept got secret concessions from Microsoft to put in backdoors and various monitoring in return for a de facto monopoly. The gov't has turned into a massive surveillance state, Microsoft being a key part, and as Mike detailed just this week, even courts no longer consider judgments a matter for public view.
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Re: You imply that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust to monopolize OS market.
Your comment above is a very well put together and I even say well thought out post.
If you posted in this manner every time or even most of the time you might not catch so much hell from the other posters here on TD, myself included sometimes.
I find it refreshing to see you post this way. please keep it up and maybe we here can have some actual thoughtful discussions that don't fall to petty 3rd grade name calling and other such bullshit.
My 2 cents.
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Re: Re: You imply that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust to monopolize OS market.
I also actually agree with most of what your saying here. Not quite all of what you're saying about Mike directly but the feel of your comment.
Again,
2 pennies for you.
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Re: Re: You imply that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust to monopolize OS market.
Aww, and I thought you were heading toward a My Cousin Vinny moment there.
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Re: You imply that Microsoft didn't violate antitrust to monopolize OS market.
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"building products people want"
This is what the whole "Anti Trust" thing is about. There were products that people wanted like Word Perfect, Lotus, Quatro, remember any of these. Then there was the MS mottos, like "Windows is not done until Lotus won't run" or "cut off their air supply" What the hell do you think is in Bill's e-mails? (1) Lets build a better product than theirs so the customer will get better value, or (2) lets sabotage their products so they can't sell them and MS has a monopoly.
Now which one do you think was in the e-mails? Why would Bill be testifying if it was (1)? If you can't do any real journalism, then try some reasonable deduction.
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Re: "building products people want"
Erm, yeah, 1) Mike isnt a journalist, and 2) this is a blog, not CNN. Feel free to take your "mikey is a bad journo!" whining to whichever site it would actually apply to.
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Perhaps the emails were written from a CEO that wanted to dominate the market, but that isn't an antitrust...that's how CEO's think and work. Deal with it.
If you could think back to the Windows 95 days, do you remember what a flaming pile of shit Word was? Word Perfect ran perfectly fine on my Windows 95 box, better than Word did actually.
In this case no one has to wonder what will happen in the future if this is let go....b/c we already life in that future. Did M$ kill those products? No, they didn't. All of them are still being offered today. So, where is the antitrust?
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Second, LibreOffice is here.
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especially as Microsoft has a habit of attempting to sabotage any standardization that would let other people's stuff work when they want people using their own.
(IE's incompatability with the standards everyone else used, for example.)
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MS does not believe in 'do no evil' and if you read my post above you'll see that I say that it still matters if MS was being unfair in the marketplace.
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Using MS office products can also lock you into an OS platform.
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"there is no assurance that documents you create today, will be readable years from now"
Not sure how many years you mean but I can still open my docs from Word 2.0 years later.
"Using MS office products can also lock you into an OS platform."
Various forms of virtualization make that untrue.
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WP was a DOS product then, with no mouse support. Meanwhile, Word for DOS had mouse support. WP was on life support, with customers looking for an alternative. Word for DOS would have won eventually.
When Word for Windows came out, WP had nothing. That was when WP lost the game. Customers saw the new Word and decided, "At last, WYSIWYG."
WP for Windows was a horrible buggy mess, which shipped late. They found out the hard way that reliability is something you design in from the start, not bolt on later when you suddenly realize you have a problem. Customers do not forgive software which crashes and loses hours of work. Look at how good document recovery is in Word and Libre Office.
WP's loss of market share was almost entirely caused by management mistakes at WP. They thought they were going to get away with shoddy, but they faced a competitor who was just that crucial bit better.
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But look at how often you have to *use* document recovery in Word, Libre, etc. In my experience they all suck.
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bleh...
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When the CFO's only exposure to networking was microsoft in college he expects the server to need rebooting weekly and patches (that also require reboots) twice or more a month.
I have a Novell 4.11 server at a client that has literally been running since 1997 with only every couple of year swap-outs of hard drives in the (hardware) mirror _ever_.
It gets rebooted perhaps once a year.
It supports groupwise which they won't replace and one app that they aren't ready to re-write.
Novell's tech is far superior to Microsoft's but their marketing sucks as compared to Microsoft's
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Further facts showing /why/ Novell had to spend "time and money fighting Microsoft".
And why Mike's advice to just ignore Microsoft criminality is just his usual blatantly wrong.
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Of course, the reason it's gone on so long is probably due to Microsoft dragging it out anyway (just a guess), but the whole thing is ridiculous.
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