VisorCentral.com - MS Trial

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Posted by na2rboy on 06-12-2000 06:44 PM:

Actually, I'd rather you explain it to me. Exactly how did Bill Gates sabotage a competing software product?

As far as your malicious code question, I am not sure of the relevance. I would say throwing a brick through a window and writing a virus that deletes files off a hard drive both fall under the golden rule of philosophy: "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

[This message has been edited by na2rboy (edited 06-12-2000).]

Posted by Winchell on 06-12-2000 08:11 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
You could probably fill this page with links to editorials that do the same. It is hip to be anti-MS.

That may very well be.
But, have you actually read the article in question?

I own a Wintel machine. The thought that I will no longer be given a Windows installation disk when I purchase a computer with Windows installed really makes me angry.

But bringing this back on topic - the timing of this is interesting. The fact that Microsoft would do this at a time when they need all the goodwill they can get does argue the case for insitutionalized corporate arrogance.

Posted by John Nowak on 06-12-2000 10:41 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Actually, I'd rather you explain it to me. Exactly how did Bill Gates sabotage a competing software product?

To quote the judge involved:

Judge Jackson professed great respect for Microsoft, calling it "a phenomenally successful and in many ways beneficial economic enterprise."

But he said he's convinced that the software giant continues even now to engage in the actions that brought it to trial. He cited as an example new evidence -- an e-mail from last year by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates that was introduced by the government late last month. In the e-mail, Gates suggested altering some of his dominant software in a way that would disadvantage users of the Palm line of handheld devices, which are made by a competitor.

(From ZDNet, and the Wall Street Journal.)

To me, there's three possible interpretations:

1) Ronald Reagan appointed a socialist as a Federal judge.

2) The email is forged (although MicroSoft has not made this claim).

3) Bill Gates has suggested sabotaging the software of competitors.

Posted by JHromadka on 06-13-2000 01:37 AM:

quote:
Originally posted by Winchell:
That may very well be.
But, have you actually read the article in question?

I own a Wintel machine. The thought that I will no longer be given a Windows installation disk when I purchase a computer with Windows installed really makes me angry.[B]

I couldn't believe that MS would get rid of the software cd. I wouldn't be surprised if piracy increased because of this.

One of the first things that I generally do with a new PC is format it to get rid of all of the AOL/Earthlink/Bob/whatever junk on it. That will be very difficult to do now. I know that I'll be guarding my Win98 CD very carefully now!

------------------
[b]James Hromadka
VisorCentral.com
Personal Website: http://www.Hromadka.com

Posted by na2rboy on 06-13-2000 04:10 PM:

Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.

As far as your interpretations:

1) Not socialist, but with a liberal view of monopolies. The federal appeals court in Washington has consistently sided with MS in these types of trials. Ronald Reagan/George Bush/Bill Clinton/whoever must have appointed fascist judges.

2)There is no reason for MS to claim it is forged. How many e-mails are exchanged in ANY company that deride competitors and try to come up with ways to push those competitors down while simultaneously pulling their own company up? I know it happens all the time where I work. Welcome to business practice in the US.

3)See above.

Winchell, yes I read the editorials. If you don't like the policy, show MS with your dollars that you don't. Until this policy has a detrimental effect on me, I am not going to get angry about it. Mr. Gripe Line and myself (and I would wager you, also) know very little about the specifics of MS's recovery CD/ partitioned backup plan. Judgement should probably be witheld until the specifics are known.

[This message has been edited by na2rboy (edited 06-13-2000).]

Posted by Winchell on 06-13-2000 07:38 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, yes I read the editorials. If you don't like the policy, show MS with your dollars that you don't. Until this policy has a detrimental effect on me, I am not going to get angry about it.

Oh, I've already decided that my next computer will either be a Macintosh or a Linux box. Especially Linux, there is an appeal to an OS that comes with the source code, so you can custom re-program sections of it to your liking.

As far as "having a detrimental effect on me", I've already undergone a hard drive crash that would have left me with an unusable computer, had I not a Windows installation CD in my possession.

Be that as it may, time will tell if you can maintain your Microsoft anaxiphilia when you finally do run afoul of one of Mr. Gate's policies.

Posted by na2rboy on 06-13-2000 08:03 PM:

As a matter of fact, I have run "afoul" of one of the dreaded Mr. Gates' policies. I have installed MS Office 2000 three times on two computers. After the first two times, I had to call MS Support (the registration screens gave me the number, it was easy) and ask them to give me a code to install it a third time. But you know what? Who cares. I can sacrifice 3 minutes.

As far as your hard drive crash, do you know for a fact that MS's recover CD would not have worked?

Posted by John Nowak on 06-13-2000 08:21 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.
(edited 06-13-2000).]

So you do agree (now that you've actually read something about the trial) that MicroSoft has deliberately sabotaged the software of competitors?

Do you consider it normal for Company A to intentionally break the products I have purchased from Company B?

Posted by Winchell on 06-13-2000 09:00 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
As far as your hard drive crash, do you know for a fact that MS's recover CD would not have worked?

What recover CD?

I might be one of the poor unfortunate computer purchasers who got home and discovered that I had a hard drive based recovery image system as my back up.

"Well, first you have to re-format your bad drive, then insert your Windows installation CD and... Oh, you don't have one? Tsk, tsk."

Posted by na2rboy on 06-14-2000 04:31 PM:

Nowak, I have read plenty about the MS trial, thanks. I disagree that MS broke the products of any other company. My last post was sarcastic. MS is not satan incarnate. I recently read an article that sarcastically mentioned AOL/Time Warner (parent of Netscape) being asked to join NATO. Get it?

Winchell, you may not be one of those that receives a recover CD. Or you may be. I am fairly certain that if you purchase a computer from a reputable company and your hard drive goes bad, they are not going to leave you hanging with no operating system.

Posted by Gameboy70 on 06-14-2000 06:06 PM:

I won't claim to know how future Windows recovery CDs will work, but I do know that the recovery CD that came with my Tosiba laptop did not restore my OS when my hard disk crashed. I eventually had to restore Windows 98 by borrowing a friend's copy of the full Win 98 CD, but only after wasting a full weekend working with the recovery CD. Based on this experience, I have absolutely no confidence that any "medialess" versions of Windows are easily restorable.

Now it's possible that I didn't know what I was doing. I consider my computer saavy slightly above that of the average consumer, and I know that if I have data recovery problems, they can only be worse for the average Joe. For all the problems I've had installing Linux (and helping others install it) the one thing I've had to fall back on is having the physical CD of the complete OS, not just a "recovery" CD, to perform a reinstall in a worst-case scenario.

But Judge Jackson is right about Linux. If anything, Linux competes with Windows 2000 and other distributions of Unix, not Windows 98 or MacOS 9. MS isn't a monopoly in the enterprise market, it's the consumer market where the company exercises exclusive control. Try walking into Best Buy or CompUSA and find an Intel or AMD box with anything other than Windows on it.

I admire Bill Gates' business acumen and his sheer versimilitude in building such a vast success, but he crosses the line when consumers like me get caught in the crossfire. Back in 1997, I had Netscape installed on my machine, but I wanted to give the new IE4 a try. So I downloaded it, didn't like it, and uninstalled it. For a week afterward, my Windows 95 crashed continually, and by the end of the week it simply stopped working altogether. I tried to get help on a newsgroup, only to find that hundreds of people had a similar experience with IE4. The browser is threaded so tightly into the registry, that it essentially "rips" the registry when IE4 is uninstalled unless you know how to manually edit it first (this didn't happen with IE3). The point is that MS was so determined to prove to all parties involved that the browser is part of the OS, that it ceased to matter how the consumer was affected.

So maybe it's an exaggeration to say that MS is the root of all evil. That doesn't mean we shouldn't look each new MS "innovation" with suspicion, especially one that deprives us of a physical copy of the software when things go wrong.

Posted by Winchell on 06-14-2000 09:03 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, you may not be one of those that receives a recover CD. Or you may be. I am fairly certain that if you purchase a computer from a reputable company and your hard drive goes bad, they are not going to leave you hanging with no operating system.

Oh, I see. I get to take my OS-less computer to the dealer where I bought it, and leave it there for the week or two it takes for their repair technicians to work their way through their queue and re-install the recovery image on my machine.

The same image that Microsoft has expressly forbidden me to back up, since copying it is high piracy, which coincidentally is the excuse they offer for this silly policy in the first place.

Not that having the recover CD will help me if I do something silly like upgrade the motherboard.

Nope, thanks but no thanks. This is the straw that will send me back to the Macintosh.

Posted by Winchell on 06-14-2000 09:12 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Gates wanted to disadvantage a competitor? Holy crap. What unfair business practices he has. If only that evil overlord would be nice to his competitors like the other multi-million/billion dollar companies out there.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the "But gee, Mom! Everybody else is doing it!" defense is even more worthless in matters of Federal law than it is in matters with your mother.

Granted, corporations want to disadvantage rival corporations but US law draws some strict limits on the methods they can use. Microsoft violated those limits rather flagrantly.

Microsoft violated the law of the land. If you disagree with the law, I suggest you take it up with your congressman.

Posted by yardie on 06-15-2000 02:12 AM:

Anyone who believe that Microsoft is innocent should take their head our of the sand. If there was a charge for making and selling defective software to people they would have been guilty too.

Even when they got caught with their pants down, they showed no remorse for what they did. I often get the impression that they feel that they are above the law.

This being said, I still don't think that MS should be broken up. I really don't see the point of this. What the DOJ should have done is force them to make the OS open source, and force them to make software for other operating systems.

What do you all think?

Posted by Gameboy70 on 06-15-2000 02:59 AM:

Forcing Microsoft to open source Windows would create more problems that it would solve. For one thing, there's no consensus on what "open source" means. Does it simply mean that people have the right to read the code? Can they modify it? Can they redistribute it? Should the code be placed under a copyleft license like the GPL or a non-copyleft license like the BSD? I don't think there's anywhere near enough agreement on intellectual property rights (Napster, anyone?) to start tinkering with open-sourcing a proprietary product against a company's will, even if it is in consumers' best interest.

Posted by huski on 06-15-2000 07:43 AM:

How about this: I don't really know whether or not they broke the law - but I think the DoJ going after them and a Federal judge concurring suggests that maybe they did. I'll wait for the appeal decision and the postmortem to make my final call on the legality of MSFT business practices.

The question that I think most of us civilians want to answer is: is it good justice?

To me, it depends on whether they really coded things with the primary purpose of screwing up their competition's products. I don't consider an OS upgrade that makes it impossible to delete the IE icon to be an example of evilness, even though it would be annoying. However, changing things just to make Netscape NOT work is over the line.

The devil, as usual, is in the details. A lot of what happens with MSFT stuff can be explained either by evil intent or unmanegable or sloppy code. Based on my personal experience with MSFT products, I vote for it being somewhere in the middle (caveat emptor- I've been using Macs since the 512E and I only gave up and switched to MS-Word a year ago). When I'm paranoid, I think they make their Mac applications buggy so that Mac users will decide to switch to Windows. On other days I think that stupidity is a sufficient explanation.

As in Watergate, the coverup is more damning than the crime...the memo trail and getting caught with the faked software demo, along with the clueless "We did nothing wrong" attitude make me want them to be guilty.

Finally, don't be so sure about Linux being only for gearheads. On ZDTV a few months ago, they were showing that Intel decided on Linux for their Internet appliance. Remember that Windows used to be just a front end for DOS.

Posted by na2rboy on 06-15-2000 02:09 PM:

Man, it is really going to be tough defending MS against 5 people!

Winchell, you are really planning out what is going to happen when your hard drive crashes. Good for you. I hope your macintosh hard drive never crashes.

My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

I don't believe MS violated the law of the land, and the appeals process may or may not prove me right. Oh yeah, and I am pretty sure my head is not buried in the sand.

Posted by Winchell on 06-15-2000 02:27 PM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
Winchell, you are really planning out what is going to happen when your hard drive crashes. Good for you. I hope your macintosh hard drive never crashes.

Well, maybe it was a worst case scenario, but this one isn't going to be particularly unlikely nor rare.
And if my Macintosh drive crashes, so what? I just reformat it and re-install the OS from the CD-ROM, like you used to be able to do with Windows.

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

At least here we are in agreement. I don't care very much for what these other megacorporations are doing either. It's just that Microsoft is so flagrantly blatant and arrogantly unrepentant about it.
Hopefully the other corporations will also be brought to justice.

Posted by Gameboy70 on 06-16-2000 06:41 AM:

quote:
Originally posted by na2rboy:
My "everybody else is doing it" is not a defense, but a call for people who are dogging MS to open their eyes to common business practice. If you are going to hate MS for it, hate all companies for it, including the beloved Netscape/AOL/Time-Warner conglomerate. Use the same standards you are using to judge MS as for the companies you like. You may not like them anymore.

"Hate" is an exaggeration. The point of this discussion to, hopefully, come to some kind of assessment of whether or not Jackson's ruling was just.

Personally, I don't think the bifurcation solves anything, except maybe on a strictly punative level. OEMs need to have assurances that they can install other operating systems on their PCs without fear that Microsoft will refuse to license Windows to them. That's the crux of Microsoft's leverage to date, and the split doesn't change it.

To use your term, I did "hate" Netscape back in 1997 for introducing proprietary HTML tags. That was one of my reasons for downloading IE4. It was only natural that MS would retaliate with its own tags. I wasn't upset that IE was "impossible" to uninstall (it's not impossible), but that it allows the end user to go through the uninstall process, crashing the OS. End users were completely uninformed of the consequences of uninstalling the browser (at least, they were at that time). In this case, I would have preferred that it be impossible to uninstall. Destroying the registry, rendering the OS unusable, is way beyond annoying.

And I also "hate" (i.e. disapprove of) AOL for hoarding its IM protocol and blocking interoperability with other IMs. This not only affected clients of other messengers, but AOL users as well. Fortunately, the FTC has intervened as part of its audit of the AOL/TW merger. AOL has agreed to share its IM protocol. That's the best news I've heard all week, because I hate (no exaggeration) AIM. MSN Instant Messenger is much better.

Posted by na2rboy on 06-16-2000 01:57 PM:

The word "hate" should not offend you. It means to dislike something intensely, which is how many people feel towards MS/Bill Gates. No big deal.

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