“The Department of Justice issued a news release this morning saying, ‘competition and consumers have benefited from the final judgments entered because of the Department’s antitrust enforcement efforts against Microsoft,'” Benjamin J. Romano reports for The Seattle Times.
“The Justice Department was joined by a handful of states. But several others, known as the California group, disagreed,” Romano reports. “As reported by Bloomberg News, antitrust regulators from California and five other states said in a filing today that Microsoft still maintains a monopoly over personal computer operating system software and some provisions of the settlement have yielded ‘little, if any, tangible pro-competitive results.'”
“The Justice Department cited several examples of middleware competitors — including Web browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, and Apple’s Safari; and multimedia players from Apple and Adobe — to support its assertion that the final judgment has protected competition,” Romano reports.
“It’s important to note — and the Justice Department does — that the settlement was only aimed at preserving competition in this middleware software category. It was not an attempt to roll back Microsoft’s monopoly in operating system software,” Romano reports.
Full article here.
Yet another travesty atop the travesty.
In the autumn of 1998, Apple’s recovery under Jobs was still fragile, its relationship with Microsoft forever precarious. If the DOJ had any prayer of persuading the company to throw caution aside and sign up for the trial, [Gary Reback, lawyer and antitrust specialist,] was clearly the man to see. In the mad scramble for fresh evidence and plausible witnesses, whatever lingering resentments Klein harbored toward the monomaniacal lawyer had receded. Reback was simply too useful, too plugged-in and switched-on, to be ignored. In a series of phone calls that September, Klein told Reback that he desperately wanted the Apple story to be part of the trial – and he wanted Jobs to be the one to tell it. Though the DOJ’s witness list was shaping up nicely, Klein was concerned that it lacked star power, featuring as it did only one big-name CEO – Jim Barksdale. Klein told Reback, “We have an Übermensch problem.”
Jobs was certainly Über, but no one had ever accused him of being a mensch. Visionary, volatile, volcanic, and vain, Apple’s CEO had made no secret of his skepticism about the DOJ’s capacity to prosecute Microsoft. “The government is bullshit! The government is bullshit!” he’d barked when a government lawyer visited him that spring to ask for his help in building the case. “You guys have done nothing, you haven’t figured it out, you’ve been too slow, you’ll never change anything. This is an incredibly sensitive time for Apple. Why should I jeopardize the future of my company when I have no faith that the government is going to do anything real?”
To Jobs, “real” meant one thing: breaking Microsoft up. For all his doubts about the DOJ’s competence, he was now grudgingly impressed by the government’s progress. In late September, after several lengthy talks with Reback, his friend Bill Campbell, and a number of DOJ intermediaries in the Valley, Jobs agreed to have a conversation with Klein about the possibility of testifying. When the two men connected by phone, with Jobs on vacation in Hawaii, he wasted no time in getting to the point. He wanted to hear Klein’s thinking on remedies.
Are you going to do something serious? Jobs demanded. Or, he asked, “Is it going to be dickless?” – Wired, “The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth,” Issue 8.11 – November 2000
MDN’s deft headline writer deserves to be well compensated. Impressively clever.
Citing Safari as evidence of competition in Windows middleware is a bit off. It has just been introduced from another platform. Why don’t they mention how smoothly the various middleware apps work under Windows? Has Microsoft stopped writing the OS specifically to cripple other vendors’ middleware?
Somehow, someway, something’s got to be George Bush’s fault in all of this, I mean, it’s just gotta be his fault. It’s also cloudy at my home today, which is probably due to global warming, which is all George Bush fault as well. I also work on a Dell at my job, which is also George Bushs fault… Man, once “Her Thighness” takes over the world will just be a perfect tax me up the rear paradise!
Light up them flame throwers and begin the carnage!
> It was not an attempt to roll back Microsoft’s monopoly in operating system software…
Vista will do more to “roll back” the Microsoft OS monopoly that anything the U.S. Justice Department has done.
“It was not an attempt to roll back Microsoft’s monopoly in operating system software,” Romano reports.”
Oh I see, that’s a different issue – got it – I think.
What I wonder is, how much did MS have to pay for this little song and dance. Even with billions you would think that MS would eventually run out of money.
The bigger “Mission Accomplished” was Alberto Gonzales kicking himself to the curb. Bush cronies are just dropping like flies out there. Good times!
Weird metrics:
Citing Safari as evidence of competition in Windows middleware is a bit off. It has just been introduced from another platform. Why don’t they mention how smoothly the various middleware apps work under Windows? Has Microsoft stopped writing the OS specifically to cripple other vendors’ middleware?
Safari is available for Windows.
wouldn’t waste the match.
Vista will do more to “roll back” the Microsoft OS monopoly that anything the U.S. Justice Department has done.
Priceless!
We can only hope that it comes to pass!
Yes, Safari is available for Windows. It has just been introduced. It has been available for only a few months. It is not a new browser but has been introduced from another platform (OSX) where it developed. So, is Safari a good metric for how middleware friendly Microsoft is?
Ricky Bobby – George Bush’s illegitimate retarded love child with Condoleezza Rice. G.W. is going to make him the new Attorney General. Ya gotta take care of family.
@Lord 1776…
I assure you, Condoleezza Rice is the Final Frontier. She is truly where “no man has gone before”.
Were the Feds serious about weakening Microsoft’s hold it would have opened up its own procurement. But while Justice had them in court, they were mandating Windows and Office in their own contracts. Even today some of our in house web sites will pop up an error advising they only work with Internet Explorer. Waivers to install alternatives like Firefox are denied.
As it happens, by limiting the scope of the trial, the Government was limited in its penalties. The new administration came in with its “sweetheart” deal to settle the case, and all that was left was a monitoring scheme. Caldera potentially could have done much more damage because they had a mountain of dirt against Microsoft. THAT was a trial I would have paid to see. But they settled two weeks before trial. Caldera got a few hundred million, but was required to destroy that dirt so no one else could use it.
But after all the billions Microsoft has paid in settlements, the threats remain. The biggest? Apple.
@ Ricky Bobby,
Seriously?
I see what you did there… You premised your joke on Hillary Clinton’s being a woman. Very clever, old chap, very clever.
@Weird metrics,
I agree with you… Safari should not even be in that heap for comparison of mid-ware that showed the justice depart that healthy competition was still alive.
At the time, Apple was somewhat forced – yet agreed to install Explorer as the default browser. Apple agreed because Microsoft saw Office Sales for Mac as a HUGE income.
Plus, I really love how Apple FINALLY unwinded and got out of the Internet Explorer agreement. Or rather JUST moved on and away from it when OSX matured. Safari, was Apples’ saviour to this trouble… Apple competed cos it was being strangled!!!!
Yes – Safari 3 is available on Windows in BETA still – as it is for Mac. Equal performance I believe for both platforms. Yet, the proparitary nature of JAVA etc. that MS uses in Explorer may infact aid in the overall better performance and preferred use by Windows Users. Good for them… so they LIKE SONY and how they do business too.
hahahahahha – open-source is great. THX to open-ness.
j
Mission Accomplished!!!
That’s great news, but could anyone predict the years-long Microsoft Insurgency to follow?
Great. Just great. We all know what Mission Accomplished means these days. It means that the mission is not accomplished but we are going to say it is anyway.
“It’s important to note — and the Justice Department does — that the settlement was only aimed at preserving competition in this middleware software category. It was not an attempt to roll back Microsoft’s monopoly in operating system software,” Romano reports.
Oh really? Did DoJ finally admit that there is no punishment for Microsoft’s abuse of their monopoly? You can abuse your monopoly anyway you want and destroy people’s lives and when you are caught, you are not responsible for all damages nor nor past actions. You just need to stop doing a Bad Thing(TM) and everything smells roses.
Mission Accomplished. Like in Viet-Nam.
Look, I HATE Microsoft with a passion, but ANYONE that thinks the DOJ should have broken them up is an absolute idiot. First off, the US economy would have taken a MAJOR hit, and secondly, it probably would have done Microsoft a favor anyway.
Apple has been more successful during the last 5 years than they were at any time during the entire decade of the 1990s, so it’s hard to argue with the results in the marketplace. Microsoft does NOT have the strangehold on everything like they did in the ’90s, and consumers are all better off for it.
The US is a free market country and not a socialist haven like the EU or Canada. Left alone, the market will take care of itself without the government’s involvement, and this case involving Microsoft is clear evidence of that fact.
Two things:
1. Look at the artificially high prices of Windows Vista (and M$ Office) sustained only by having an illegally leveraged monopoly.
2. Track how M$ changed it’s political donations as the “K-St Project” matured. They went from balanced to very heavily Republican — and it bought them a pass from the Bush “Justice” Dept.
As Raymond points out, the biggest threat to Microsoft now is Apple. (See Fake Steve today for his thoughts on a rumored Microsoft-RIM merger, and why it doesn’t matter.) And Microsoft can pay off the Justice Department to get what they want, but they can’t pay off Apple.
(I’m going to master two-thumbed iPhone typing if it kills me…)
“THE BIG LIE”
Darkness,
Thanks for the chuckle.