Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
I don't agree with any of this of course. But anyway, Microsoft has changed since this time, haven't they? I hope so.
As for the OS thing, Apple isn't dominating enough of the market for people to care.
Microsoft has not changed. Read my comment on the xbox. As long as they benefit from proprietarity, they will try to undermine anything not theirs. It's because proprietarity opens up various strategies besides just improving a product, which is usually the hardest way to gain market. It allows you to take advantage of exclusivity and your existing powers (market share).
Except that Apple is expending effort specifically to break efforts at compatibility. It appears to me that they are intentionally preventing competition, and as a long time Apple customer that upsets me.
Apple isn't dominating enough of the market for people to care
Claiming that bad behavior is okay so long as you only hurt a few people is a pretty weak argument. I own three Apple computers, have spent a boatload of money with them and as a customer I care about how they conduct themselves as a company.
No I don't mean it's okay. I'm simply stating why there isn't a fuss about Apple.
I don't disagree that Apple seems to get away with quite a bit. I imagine it's also because people like to think of them as the scrappy underdog who just does what's necessary to keep up with MS. The shame of it is that it's got to be easier to change ingrained anti-competitive corporate mentality before a company gets big enough that the mass protests start.
The only way to fight it is to endorse open source free software but unfortunately on the consumer side it's not really gaining traction.
Apple does not prevent competing products from syncing with an iTunes library--in fact they provide a mechanism to do so. The issue there is Palm using iTunes to do so. Hijacking another company's product to support yours isn't really in the spirit of healthy competition. I mean, fixing bugs in your own software shouldn't be called "preventing competition" just because your competitors happen to be exploiting those bugs.
It would be trivially easy to pop-up a message saying something like "You are using an unsupported device that looks similar to an iPod, but it's not. Some features may be missing or not work properly. iTunes is only exhaustively tested in combination with other Apple products. Be advised Apple will not support you in case of problems with this product or iTunes when connected to it"
And that would be the right thing to do.
I, personally, would add a "Please, don't complain to us if it blows up or eats your music collection. You are using this thing at your own risk", but that would be my own sense of humor.
Why? Why is it "right" to add a feature that specifies you will not support what the user is about to do? Why not just not support things that you don't support?
It's not like iTunes is the only media player you can use to sync your non-iPod players.
And, if you decided to buy DRM'ed music that was explicitly tied in to a specific player/platform/program/manufacturer, isn't it your fault?
Look... I am not telling you Apple is a nice company. It is not. I am not telling either that the fact there is one Apple makes it right for Microsoft to break the law. What I am saying is that there is not only one bad Apple (pun intended) in the basket.
Why the double standard?
From what I understand, Microsoft was sued because of its anti-competitive behavior with Netscape. It lost the case because there was enough evidence against Microsoft - in that it tried to squeeze Netscape out of the consumer market by deliberate force, leveraging the power they had over the OS market.
Apple hasn't done anything like that. If Apple tries to engage in any anti-competitive behavior, then it may become target of the Anti-Trust division of US DoJ.
Apple today is very much like IBM was 30 or 40 years ago. Only, Apple is far more hip and savvy than IBM ever was, which is rather scary.
Regardless, the iPhone is not yet a monopoly, though it may well be soon enough.
People need to stop anthropomorphizing these entities into friends and enemies.
But they shouldn't. Apple's anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior is cute when viewed in the context of, say, their tiny share of the PC market. But there may come a day when Apple dominates a market (it's certainly looking that way for smartphones) and when that day comes people will almost certainly regret not having payed more attention to Apple's dark side.
Given the opportunity Microsoft would absolutely erect a walled garden ecosystem of DRM'd media and 'blessed' hardware. Hell, they tried. Several times (with varying levels of success). Even in the midst of their anti-trust problems.
And given the opportunity, Apple absolutely would lean on its partners and conspire against standards the way Microsoft has in the past. They also have tried (with varying levels of success). Several times.
The only difference between Apple and Microsoft is that they can only afford to put their interests ahead of their customers in the fields they dominate, which, by definition, are different fields.
Making something proprietary isn't, on it's own, illegal, it's a business decision.
Using your proprietary technology to crush competition is, well, anti-competitive behavior and is illegal.
For instance, Apple owning the lions share of the digital music player market with their proprietary iPod isn't illegal. However, making it so all iPods can only play Apple's proprietary song format and offering only that format in the iTunes store, effectively rendering any other digital music player on the market useless, would be illegal.
The burden isn't on Microsoft to play nice; the burden is on you to come up with a better product and unseat them.
Sure, they make it difficult, but I will reference you to the success of Apple and Google alone as indicators that it can be done. Firefox is another example. *sp
No. He was never one of us. I think it is safe to assume folks here have high ethical standards, something he has repeatedly shown to lack. High ethical standards cost money, cost business and market share. It's not easy to keep them, but, I am sure most of us here do it regardless of the cost to the business, for not doing so has a much higher cost in out consciousness.
When you command a group, be it a company, a department or a bunch of kids, people will do what you want them to do and do whatever your behavior and apparent standards enable them to. If you are ruthless and have little regard for law or quality of your products, so will your team. If you are willing to break the law, they will do it for you. Many times out of loyalty.
As a leader, it is nothing but your duty to take full responsibility for the acts of your people for you are the one who enabled them.
They're also paying for CoD4:MW2 exclusives.
Do you have a source for that 'dumb down' claim? Because that practice would actually support your assertion.
First party games are different from buying exclusive content because making a first party game does not take additional effort to benefit the first party. Buying exclusive content is going out of their way to devalue the competition's product without directly improving their own product.
To be honest I can't find the source of the 'dumb down' claim, so it might be a bad memory. From what I can remember, the memory was associated with GTA IV, but I think it might have just been the Xbox forcing GTA IV to be dumbed down to one disc simply because of the technically inferior capabilities of the Xbox (and not because of Microsoft coercion).
And I'm still not buying your argument about exclusive DLC vs First Party games. Buying and maintaining first-party studios takes a hell of a lot of effort. And the entire goal of those titles is to increase the value of your platform (relatively decreasing the value of your competitors). It's the same thing. The only difference is that buying exclusive content for a multiplatform game is far, far cheaper and much less risky in this day and age.
Buying a developer so that they can make something exclusive is no different from buying exclusives. It is somewhat anti-competitive. If Sony does this, I'm pretty sure it's much less than Microsoft.
Buying a company after after they release a hit is different from commissioning a company to make a big hit. The former is not promoting innovation.
It would be pretty hard to create a law that bans what Microsoft did, without banning what lots of other people do, too.
This is how Microsoft can violate anti-trust laws despite usually being more open than their competitors.
Lego has nowhere near a monopoly on toys (or even on building bricks), and Apple is not in a monopoly situation on computers or operating systems.
However, Apple's traditional closedness do bring them in trouble with regard to music distribution, where the iTunes store is in such a dominating position that tying it too closely to the iPod has brought Apple in the spotlight of EU anti-trust control.
Its not that simple. Monopolies are not inherently illegal, they only become illegal when they are maintained artificially. Also, the Sherman Antitrust act is usually applied more subjectively than most statutes, with the final decision turning on whether or not the alleged violation is "harmful" (to the consumer or the market as a whole).
In other words: if your product is simply better and you have a de facto monopoly as a result, that's legal. If you protect your monopoly by making competition itself impossible, that's illegal (but hard to prove).
And I suppose we can all agree that Microsoft has a monopoly on -- what, exactly? The idea of a monopoly is inherently slippery. I could write a memo in word, or I could write it in Emacs, or I could send it via Skype, or I could use any of a basically infinite variety of methods to communicate.
Lego has a monopoly on their exact product set, a dominant mind-share in their general category, and an extremely valuable brand name -- if you define toys as narrowly as you define office software, it's easy to claim that they have a monopoly. But even if they do, the worst you can say about them is that they're keeping a large fraction of the economic value they produce. The most harm a monopolist can cause is for their product to be as good a value as the next-best product, and to extract excess profits to the extent that it's a more valuable product for which they can charge a higher price.
Which doesn't sound especially worrisome (especially since they invest the extra profits in things that ought to make us happy -- I heard a talk by a Microsoft employee who was willing to claim, in front of journalists, lawyers, and two Google employees, that Microsoft was responsible for 2-3% of all US R&D spending).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Monopoly_and_efficienc...
Microsoft has removed Billions from the economy, even above the Billions they transferred from others to themselves.
In more prosaic terms, monopolies "make articles scarce, make them dear and make them bad". All in all, not good and while it is generally recognized that Microsoft makes things shoddy and expensive compared with a free market, I find it a shame that it's not better recognised that they have limited the spread of computing technology.
I think this is incoherent, and I'm certain it's wrong. A monopoly has no incentive to "remove" money from the economy. A profit maximising monopolist in the practically impossible position of being able to price discriminate perfectly such that every customer willing to buy its product at a price above the marginal cost of selling it to them will capture all value created by its product/service, but that just means there's no consumer surplus. Value is still created, it just accrues to the company, which presumably still distributes it to shareholders, suppliers and employees.
In more prosaic terms, monopolies "make articles scarce, make them dear and make them bad".
I have no idea how many copies of major MSFT products there are but scarce is not true, and quite a lot of people obviously disagree with you on dear and bad. Office utterly dominates its market niche, and it is in large part due to quality and ease of use. Network effects help some but you can't leverage a reputation in one sector too far in another, otherwise Microsoft's accounting software would be the default, and it's not, Quicken is.
This is exactly what the Sherman Antitrust Act did. If your interest is genuine, you can always read the Conclusions Of Law document from the case.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm
If you're also curious how the conditional was met, read the Findings Of Fact.
"33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
Weren't people complaining exactly about 7's pricing?
Microsoft's "proprietary" formats are just the in-memory COM/OLE objects representing your document serialized onto the disk. They change in every release because the code changes. It's not a conspiracy (and you have a very odd definition of "evil").
It's not that odd. An evil is anything that is damaging or causes harm, (regardless of malicious intent.) Propriety formats are troublesome, so they are an evil.
To think Microsoft was sitting on a huge pile of money without lobbying with some of it would be naive at best.
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000115
1996 contributions: $251,474
1998 contributions: $1,364,821
2000 contributions: $4,628,893
While 4 million isn't a lot considering how much they made during those years, it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone. Plus, that's the money that went on the books - not the all expenses paid vacations and under the table proverbial hand jobs.
Some would say that lobbying is necessary for the government to know what its people needs - but then again they listen to the LOBBYISTS and not the people who write senators letters. Flawed argument. What a concept.