Comment by jlawer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlawer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The funny thing is the worst thing Microsoft could do to this is ignore them.... That would leave the issue unresolved, exactly what the Desktop as a Service people don't want.

I suppose the real question is if Microsoft's position on the desktop makes it illegal to do a favorable deal with On-Live? I am not aware if this would be illegal or not? One would think it would be at least against the spirit of the law to carve out a market niche for a microsoft "old boy" and protect it through their monopoly position... but it wouldn't surprise me if there is no regulation in place to stop this.

I am wondering what the shareholders think. They are refusing to license to most players in order to protect windows and office on the desktop. On the other hand they are giving up a new non-trivial revenue stream during the transition period. I would think a lot of investors would want to take the short term cash and run.

Having previously worked for Red Hat on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization support team, it always was strange looking at the VDI products that it was SO SO expensive to run the infrastructure purely due to Microsoft Licensing. Microsoft don't want to loose the grip so they make VDI licensing difficult, instead pushing mixed virtualization where you need to run windows on your desktop as well.

VDI struck me as almost purely a windows solution. If your running linux you have a range of other options to have multiple users on a single infrastructure in a workable way without having hundreds of VMs.

Why don't more Desktop as a Service organizations get together and refine LibreOffice to heavily compete against Microsoft?

It clearly works; look at other open source solutions that are a collaborative effort. Linux as a whole, Python, Ruby, OpenStack, etc.

LibreOffice's codebase is enormous and complicated. It's being cleaned up, but it may still be hard to maintain. It's doable, of course, but if you implement too much Office compatibility, you risk Microsoft suing you for some frivolous patent they keep just for the purpose of crushing LibreOffice when it becomes a threat.

It's interesting how the downvoting of comments critical to Microsoft is time-related (down trends around noon and midnight UTC, up trends shifted about 6 hours). One day I'll have to write a bot to check up/down votes and relate them to sentiment.

The demographics may prove interesting.

to say nothing about downvoting of comments that are made to the wrong comments ;-)

That should teach me not to post right before going to bed.

The biggest problem is that clients WANT Microsoft Office. You can offer them something else (Apple iWork, Lotus Symphony, Open Office, LibreOffice, KOffice). It can do everything they need and they will still argue that MS Office is what they want because of a myriad of factors (training, familiarity, computability, etc).

Some people might be able to shave off some customers, but you are going to have to have some killer feature (even if it is price).

I like your idea but you'd have to do some hard marketing work to get customers to use it in my opinion. That might not be cheaper than this lawsuit ;p

Well, I'm pretty sure all the money of those companies would not be enough to get LibreOffice to become 100% compliant with MS Office formats in a timely manner. Those formats represent decades of features, bugs, fixes and quirks that would have to be replicated in order to make sure that LibreOffice can replace MS Office in all its uses.

Let's assume it costs $5/month per instance of Office 2000-Whatever. It's really more than that with the MS ASP licensing, but let's use $5 for round number sake. Let's also assume they have 500K users using Office, also what I would consider a conservative number.

That's $2.5 Million/month in licensing costs alone. That pays for quite a bit of developer time.

The real question is, could Office be cloned for less than the user cost of Office? It almost certainly can't be cloned for less than Microsoft's cost to make Office.

Has Linux cost more than Windows Core to build? In dollars or time?

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

No, but clearly people are wanting Microsoft to take the bait.. This is being backed by the Desktop as a Service providers who want to be able to deploy this.

Unlike trademarks to my knowledge there is nothing that devalues their offering by NOT suing, and instead suing other providers, at least until it gets large enough. Hell they even make money on each windows 7 license they need.

On the other hand, I really don't expect Microsoft to do this. It might take them years to bother to sue, but I see them taking it on simply because they can't turn a blind eye to piracy.

15 USC §1:

"Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal."

Such is the very first sentence of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Getting convictions can be a pain in the ass, and there are many things that could be violations but are not usually treated as such in practice, but the statute in theory is very broad, and the general principle is that actions which seriously harm competition in a market are unlawful. The acts do not have to be specifically enumerated in advance.

I am unfamiliar with many of the details of US laws, but does signing a special deal to offer a new product with 1 exclusive partner mean you have to offer it to everyone?

In the physical world many companies have patented processes that they don't offer to others.

I am not a lawyer, but I think unless there is existing case law there will be enough points for the case to go on for many many many years making the point moot.

The rules are different if you are a monopoly. If not then you certainly can do things like that.

> I am unfamiliar with many of the details of US laws, but does signing a special deal to offer a new product with 1 exclusive partner mean you have to offer it to everyone?

If the deal hurts competition in a market, the deal may be illegal, yes.

> In the physical world many companies have patented processes that they don't offer to others.

Which may or may not harm competition in an identifiable market. Compulsory patent licensing regimes are sometimes forced upon companies in the US as a result of antitrust action, and other countries sometimes have general compulsory licensing schemes that are always in effect.

Are you confusing "harming a competitor" with "harming competition"? They're not the same thing.

> I am not a lawyer, but I think unless there is existing case law there will be enough points for the case to go on for many many many years making the point moot.

Major antitrust cases always take years. Any major litigation takes years. The first AT&T antitrust case in the late 40s/early 50s took 7 years to settle, and the second one, which broke the company up, took eight. Those didn't even go to trial.

The lawsuit will take years while microsoft will make sure the litigants go bankrupt.

Unfortunately there primary businesses are based on selling Microsoft Software Services, and while it would almost certainly result in Microsoft being fined eventually... I am pretty certain they will do the same thing in the 90s and just kill the vendors who are going after them. Raise a few SKU prices for that kind of market, make the companies unprofitable.

You're very confused about how antitrust cases usually shape up, and how bankruptcy works.

First, assuming a private antitrust lawsuit is brought against Microsoft by a company that then enters bankruptcy proceedings, it is very possible the case would continue long after the company ceases ordinary operations. A lawsuit doesn't become moot just because one party is "dead".

Second, "the litigants" could ultimately end up including the US Department of Justice, various state attorneys general, the European Commission, and possibly other competition authorities around the world. These are entities with vast powers and resources, and the risk to Microsoft is potentially billions of dollars, if not its very existence.

Sure, I understand that it can happen... but at the end of the day who is the one still standing. Microsoft gets fined, the investors who stuck through the bankruptcy get paid... but the competitor is DEAD.

Is it more expensive then buying a company... most likely, but it stops the entire market space moving forward. Microsoft knew they were violating anti-trust with the browser but they still did it. In doing so they delayed any move towards the "Networked computer" model that everyone was saying was the future.

To protect the crown jewels (windows + office) I am pretty sure Microsoft will sacrifice it all to maintain that monopoly. Like Nero in Rome, they will let it burn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com