Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Steven D'Aprano]

Yes, I know, they can do whatever they want, it's not a crime,
etc. However when they use their market position to disallow
competition, it sounds to me like they're worried about something, and
trying to squelch it.

But that's the whole point: they *can't* do whatever they want, and
certain behaviours *are* crimes. Just because Microsoft executives wear
business suits instead of torn jeans or dirty sweatshirts doesn't make
them beyond the law.

 

[joe]

But that's the whole point: they *can't* do whatever they want,

They've been pretty much doing just that for a long time. The "it's
not a crime etc" part was to deflect parenthetical arguments that
confuse the issue. In other words, I was recognizing that a lot of
people don't think what MS does is a crime, and until MS gets
convicted of a crime, it's a matter of opinion. I was trying to say
something else.

and certain behaviours *are* crimes. Just because Microsoft
executives wear business suits instead of torn jeans or dirty
sweatshirts doesn't make them beyond the law.

Maybe, but good lawyers might

Joe

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Heck, I dunno. Like you, I don't even really care all that much.

You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

In 1988, there were something like ten or a dozen word processors
available to choose from, and they were competing on price and features
like crazy. That was then, now there is just MS Office. The most
innovative things Microsoft has added to Office in the last decade? Clippy
the paperclip. An XML wrapper to their binary file format. And the
incredible disappearing and reappearing menus.

You don't care that the cost of OS and office software has risen, rather
than fallen, because of the monopoly power of Microsoft?

You don't care that because of Microsoft's neglect, there are millions of
zombie PCs running their sub-standard OS across the world, sending
hundreds of millions of spam emails? I can tell you, even if you are lucky
enough to not be receiving spams, you are still paying for it in higher
ISP costs, because *they* certainly are receiving those spams and trying
to block them.

It must be nice to be so free of cares...

Maybe they were trying to protect themselves against all the market
momentum they'd created around 0S/2. They'd been big fans of it
right up until Windows 3.0 took off.

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

In other words, I was recognizing that a lot of
people don't think what MS does is a crime, and until MS gets
convicted of a crime, it's a matter of opinion. I was trying to say
something else.

And again, they HAVE been convicted of crimes, plural, and not just in one
court, but in multiple, in the US, Japan, Europe, and in civil suits in
front of juries.

Apologists for Microsoft like David Schwartz seem to be taking a
three-prong argument:

"They haven't done the things you say, and even if they have, they aren't
illegal, and even if they are illegal, they shouldn't be."

The first two points are factually wrong, and the third is an opinion
based on the concept, as far as I can see, that Microsoft should be
allowed to do anything they like, even if those actions harm others.

 

[John Wingate]

That would be a good guess, except that Microsoft's predatory and illegal
behaviour began long before OS/2 was even planned. It began in the mid
1970s, with MS DOS.

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

[slaps head]

Of course it did.

 

[entropy]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

Nitpick: MS-DOS first appeared in 1981.

[slaps head]

Of course it did.

The first thing I ever bought of Microsoft's, in 1982 or so, was a
CP/M board for my Apple IIe.

CP/M, whose programmers to this day defend sticking with 8-bit CPUs
because 'they can't find a 4-bit chip they like'. Yeah, there's some
desktop innovation for you.

OS/2 1.0 was released in 1987, but the "selling" of it started in
1985 or so by IBM and Microsoft. It was a 286 OS.

IBM seems to have had a history of squeezing out competition in the
same way Microsoft has, if I recall correctly.

 

[Not Bill Gates]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

You don't care that innovation in desktop software has been crippled by
the actions of the monopoly player Microsoft?

You need to first prove innovation in desktop software has been
crippled, don't you?

 

[Martin P. Hellwig]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

You need to first prove innovation in desktop software has been
crippled, don't you?

How about their "java" implementation between 1998 and 2004?
Sure killed the _easier_ write once run everywhere mantra, of course
they where not alone in the killing, SUN helped a great deal.

 

[David Schwartz]

No it is not their "right"! That would be a discriminatory practice,
not to mention an anti-competitive practice. Totally.

Businesses have the right to be discriminatory and anti-competitive in
this way. McDonald's won't sell a Burger King their burger patties. This is
both discriminatory and anti-competitive, but also perfectly legal, moral,
and proper.

You only run into a problem under United States law if the company is a
monopoly. And I've already addressed that issue in this thread.

DS

 

[David Schwartz]

I'm hesitant to get into this, but I keep wondering why, if there is
no other competing OS, or not one worth worrying about, the MS
business agreements are so draconian? Why would a company come up with
such heavy handed agreements if it wasn't worried about competition?

Yes, I know, they can do whatever they want, it's not a crime,
etc. However when they use their market position to disallow
competition, it sounds to me like they're worried about something, and
trying to squelch it.

If they have a choice, should their competitors have 1% of the market or
0%, they'll choose zero. Who wouldn't? What they're worried about is a
customer going to a store because they advertise that they have Windows and
being switched to another OS.

In fact, they weren't draconian. A draconian agreement would have been
one that prohibited you from selling any other OS if you want to sell
Microsoft OSes. Instead, what they did was much less restrictive in that it
only affected discount levels rather than right to resell and only increased
the cost of selling other operating systems rather than prohibiting them.
Many other companies totally prohibit you from selling competing products if
you want to get the wholesale price on their products.

DS

 

[David Schwartz]

David Schwartz wrote:

If only 5% want another operating system, the vendor has to choose between
selling to those 5% -or- to the 95% who want Microsoft. Had it not been
for the underhanded tactics, he could have sold to *both* groups.

From a purely economic standpoint, the sensible thing is to accept that
95% and let the 5% go elsewhere.

But if *every* vendor has to make that same choice, there is no place for
that other 5% to go to buy another operating system. So the other
operating system(s) die off. And those 5% become customers of Microsoft
since there's no other choice left. And *that* is where the legal
problems start: they gained market share by preventing consumers from
finding competing products.

Right, except that's utterly absurd. If every vendor takes their tiny
cut of the 95%, a huge cut of the 5% is starting to look *REALLY* good.

DS

 

[David Schwartz]

The first two points are factually wrong, and the third is an opinion
based on the concept, as far as I can see, that Microsoft should be
allowed to do anything they like, even if those actions harm others.

Of course this alleged "harm" is simply a lack of a benefit.

Why is Burger King allowed to close at 10PM? That harms me when I'm
hungry after 10.

DS

 

[David Schwartz]

Not Bill Gates wrote:

How about their "java" implementation between 1998 and 2004?
Sure killed the _easier_ write once run everywhere mantra, of course they
where not alone in the killing, SUN helped a great deal.

It's easy to point to things you think are mistakes and claim that if
you had been in charge of the world, those mistakes would not have been
made. If you are trying to balance completely different possible paths the
universe might have taken, you need to make sure to include everything on
both sides, and that's really really hard to do.

Perhaps the desktop software is good enough that how much better it
would have been wouldn't make much difference. And perhaps the lack of
competition steered the innovators into other fields where their innovations
made huge differences. Perhaps not -- perhaps the desktop software we would
have had in a more competitive market would have made other people's lives
majorly better. Who knows?

I don't think it's possible or sensible to try to have a reckoning of
this type. There are so many variables and unpredictable possibilities.

DS

 

[Brian Utterback]

Do you think it would be immoral if Microsoft said, "we will only sell
Windows wholesale to dealers who don't sell other operating systems?"

That's the crux of the problem, isn't it? When you are a virtual
monopoly, it is at least unlawful. The Sherman Anti-trust act as well
as the various follow-on anti-trust laws essentially say that what is
okay when you have 49% of a market is illegal when you have 51%. You
have maintained that Microsoft is not a monopoly, but they clearly
are by U.S. Anti-trust law. Congress has set the definition, and
the courts have upheld it, explicitly in Microsoft's case. The courts
have declared Microsoft a monopoly in the desktop OS market, and that
decision stands.

You have said that it was unreasonable to expect Microsoft to define
the market in the manner required to make them into a monopoly, but
it was their primary market. Again, court records show that they not
only had a monopoly, they knew they had a monopoly and took steps
to preserve their monopoly. Some of those steps were illegal by U.S.
law.

Also, you have said that it was unreasonable to expect Microsoft to
know that they were in violation of the law. In addition to the fact
that the laws have been in place since the late 1800's, the consent
decree explicitly and in no uncertain terms informed them of their
violations, and they continued to violate the law even afterward.

I have read some interesting things written by some of the principles
involved that the culture in Microsoft explicitly resisted against
checking the legality of these matters, not because they wanted to
do illegal things, but because Bill Gates viewed the legal vetting
process that he saw IBM use as being the primary cause of the
inability of IBM to react to the changing market. He didn't want
his company to have the same legal baggage. Microsoft resisted
having any kind of "working within the law" type of employee
training until long after most other large companies had them.

 

[Martin P. Hellwig]

David Schwartz wrote:

It's easy to point to things you think are mistakes and claim that if
you had been in charge of the world, those mistakes would not have been
made. If you are trying to balance completely different possible paths the
universe might have taken, you need to make sure to include everything on
both sides, and that's really really hard to do.

Perhaps the desktop software is good enough that how much better it
would have been wouldn't make much difference. And perhaps the lack of
competition steered the innovators into other fields where their innovations
made huge differences. Perhaps not -- perhaps the desktop software we would
have had in a more competitive market would have made other people's lives
majorly better. Who knows?

I don't think it's possible or sensible to try to have a reckoning of
this type. There are so many variables and unpredictable possibilities.

DS

I agree that it is hard, nearly impossible, to make the _one_ best
decision in a situation.
However it is quit possible to not make the very obvious wrong decision.

Just that it is very hard to hit a specific tree with a small handgun
from a 2 mile distant, that is nearly impossible.
However, just avoiding your feet should be doable.

BTW, I think you are management material...

 

[Mike Meyer]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...
You need to first prove innovation in desktop software has been
crippled, don't you?

MS took desktop software through pretty much the same sequence of
offerings that the mainframe and minicomputer software industry had
been throgh: flat file systems and single-tasking OS's in a command
line environment, adding nested file systems, adding TSRs, adding a
windowing environment, adding true multitasking and finally
multiprocessor systems. This took them what - 20+ years?

While MS was "innovating" by giving us directories, others who had
learned the lessons from mainframe and minicomputer systems were
offering us desktop systems with all those features - and an office
suite that ran in the windowing systems - for a fraction of the price
of anything that was capable of running MS-DOS.

MS managed to kill off or drive into niche markets the companies who
were actually doing innovative work on desktop systems, and it's taken
the desktop software industry two decades to recover from that. I'll
accept that as crippling until a better definition comes along.

<mike

 

[Harold Stevens]

In <[email protected]> Brian Utterback:

[Snip...]

that the laws have been in place since the late 1800's, the consent
decree explicitly and in no uncertain terms informed them of their
violations, and they continued to violate the law even afterward.

It's M$ corporate DNA; they literally couldn't change and survive:

Howard University law professor Andrew Gavil said he wonders whether
Microsoft's early demands -- which would have compelled manufacturers
to distribute to consumers only Microsoft's Windows Media Player
software -- were a genuine mistake or a signal the company intends to
revert to its hardball tactics.

"It's somewhat amazing it even happened," said Gavil, who has closely
followed the Microsoft case. "It's troubling that anyone inside
Microsoft was still thinking this was a legitimate business strategy."

Well, duh. All they got was a useless wrist-slap from the dickless US DOJ
in 2002, so this is not at all surprising--just bidness as usual for M$.

More:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051020/microsoft_antitrust.html?.v=6

And any M$ apologists are just as much liars and thieves as M$ itself.

 

[Peter T. Breuer]

Businesses have the right to be discriminatory and anti-competitive in
this way.

No they don't. I'm simply open-jawed at such a statement.

McDonald's won't sell a Burger King their burger patties.

McDonald's are not in the business of wholesale distribution of burger
patties so your statement is simply sited in the wrong universe of
discourse. Coming back to the current universe of discourse, I assure
you that a McDonald's director can go into a Burger King and buy a
burger like anyone else, so no discrimination. Mind you - I'm not sure
if they'd let Ronald in. He's obviously dangerously nutty.

his is
both discriminatory and anti-competitive,

It's neither. It's simply not part of their business.

but also perfectly legal, moral,
and proper.

Dalse assumptions, hence invalid conclusions.

You only run into a problem under United States law if the company is a
monopoly. And I've already addressed that issue in this thread.

If MacDonalds were wholesale suppliers of hamburgers to the
distribution trade, then they couldn't discriminate among their
customers for the purposes of altering the competitive nature of the
market in hamburger sales to you and me across the counter. Companies
have been sued for trying that - sports shoe manufacturers, I seem to
recall. They've tried to make sure their shoes are sold only by
specified outlets at specified prices, in order to artificially manage
the market. That's illegal. Sued they got (or perhaps "suede").


Peter

 

[Not Bill Gates]

(e-mail address removed) wrote...

MS took desktop software through pretty much the same sequence of
offerings that the mainframe and minicomputer software industry had
been throgh: flat file systems and single-tasking OS's in a command
line environment, adding nested file systems, adding TSRs, adding a
windowing environment, adding true multitasking and finally
multiprocessor systems. This took them what - 20+ years?

<shrug> Being pissed off about how things could have been done
better is a losing proposition. Even so, I'm a LOT more pissed off
that we're still driving around in 25 mpg polluting gas-burners than
I am about not having Windows XP available in 1985.