- Sunday, 8 November 2009
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It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar - Jerome K. Jerome
Bush administration lets Vole off hook
BY FAFFING ABOUT, the Bush administration has effectively allowed Microsoft to escape unpunished for acting like an anti-competive bully, despite lingering complaints from the seventeen Vole-bitten states of the Union.
Bloomberg draws attention to the fact that some of the States have tried to bring Microsoft to book, but have been left hanging by a Federal administration that can't be bothered.
A lawyer told a federal judge last week that the states were unable to investigate a complaint that Microsoft had violated the settlement without federal help, which was not forthcoming.
"They walked away from their biggest victory in 25 years," lawyer Stephen Houck whined.
The case against the Vole was originally brought as a set of consolidated civil action suits under the Clinton administration.
In 2001, an appeals court ruled that the software firm had indeed acted illegally by maintaining its operating systems monopoly.The firm was supposed to stop strong-arming partners into ignoring competing offerings and its bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows was seen as unfairly restricting the market.
Now, the Justice department has said that it is no longer going to stop Microsoft from being able to ask computer manufacturers not to promote rival software.
And any action the states want to take against the rapacious Vole they'll have to do it on their own.
Or leave it to the EU. Or wait for Obama. ยต
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Like have said all along MS worked with the FEDS on their OS's especially Vista. The government can secretly hack any windoze machine they want and for doing this MS gets a pass against legal action for their illegal business practices.
Why do you think MS is the only one who will not go open source? Think about it.

AT ADDS: Your black helicopter will be along shortly, citizen.
With the us heading in to a economic depression it would make good sense to leave one of your biggest multi-national companies which bring in bags of cash from all over the world alone! Just a thought
MS really couldn't win here,
who cares if there is a internet browser in the OS, apple does it, linux comes with its own, you can install a different one if u please,
it would be a monopoly if u couldn't install a diff one, or you couldn't remove IE , that would be a monopoly.
Microsoft is being punished for restricting what computer manufacturers could do. Sure, the end user could change the default browser, but Microsoft wanted to prevent computer makers from changing the default browser.

Computer makers can change the default browser for Linux, and the computer maker for Macs (Apple is the only one) can technically set whatever default browser they want to as well. Only Windows computer makers were prevented from changing the default browser.

It difficult to quantify exactly what benefit, if any, Microsoft got from such an insignificant contract restriction. I can't see how this harmed competition much; but Microsoft presumably received a benefit worth defending with many expensive lawyers.

Microsoft tested the legal waters with some trivial bait. It looks like government isn't interested in punishing "trivial" monopolistic practices, even though they believe in the power of deterrence in other areas of the law. It will be interesting to observe which laws the U.S. government chooses to enforce in the future.
You cannot actually uninstall IE, e.g. it is a monopoly.

If you choose to delete IE, "uninstall" it from the "add/remove programs" option & then "add/remove windows components" and after that go a step further and delete the relevant directories...guess what? it's still there!

Just open a windows explorer window & instead of "desktop" type "google.com" & like magic, the disease you thought was cured still lingers!!!

Is microsoft a monopoly? IS THAT EVEN A SERIOUS QUESTION!?!
The bundling objection over browsers was allowed in lieu of failure to object to bundling Office - i think. Which seems far more anti-competitive than bundling a browser, which nowadays *should* be part of an OS. Feds may figure (correctly?) that Vole has been flea-bit enough, and did not want to encourage those European union fleas, which carry the plague. Who's to dictate the extent of an OS? Fleeting bits. If Obama's on about the states getting to profit share, Pharmaceutical, Insurance, and especially Energy companies should be anti-trusted profit robber-barrons to be targeted from the git-go. And Banish Halliburton forever.
ooh. I better get back under my rock.