5 ms·

I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on thei

by Gunax 6y ago

I don't agree with the article at all. I think it's equating two very different anti-trust cases. Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Just offering a free software should not be considered anti-trust. For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? Now if Microsoft had restricted users from installing another browser in Windows, then I would agree it's anti-competitive. And this is much more akin to what Apple is doing. The author wants to paint MS as hypocritical, but aside from being accused of anti-competitive practices, there are no similarities. And second, I despise how one's deposition attitude plays so much into the media's narrative. It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude, agreeable or flippant, sloppy or well-dressed. The only that that matters are legal facts.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tus88 6y ago
> Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Well apart from the OS installed on the device you are buying from an OEM.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Between secureboot disabling, mokutil, and Microsoft signing Ubuntu and Red Hat kernels directly, I think it's pretty clear there's no desire for lock-in and that it's actually a security feature.
  - tus88 6y ago
    I'm talking about the 90s.
robotresearcher 6y ago
> It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude The legal system is made of people, and people are exquisitely sensitive to social stuff. It's just not expedient to ignore that.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  On that front, you could argue that using tone and posture could be used as a deflection. Discussions around the case will often dedicate some of the time discussing this tone and posture. This makes it easier to claim that the opposition is biased against Gates over something that shouldn't matter.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? There was a reason it was browsers. At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat. So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables more web developers to target IE instead of open standards. The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free and non-standard and the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight. The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.
  - clooless 6y ago
    It's easy to say that now in hindsight. Wasn't that clear back then.
    - listenallyall 6y ago
      Of course. But it strengthens the argument. The govt's job is not to guess what might happen or how the market will react to new technology. It should only intervene as a last resort, when there is absolutely no market-based solution possible. It wasn't like the AT&T antitrust suit, where the defendant had existed, mostly unchanged, for 50 or so years.
listenallyall 6y ago
I agree. Microsoft's strongest argument was that the features of an "OS" are fluid, ever-evolving, and un-definable. OS'es were all text-based, until one day they weren't and the GUI dominated. Win 95 had no Winsock or TCP/IP stack built-in, 98 did. File Explorer. Start Button. And as you say, the presence of MS Paint and the Calculator and Solitaire show that exact inclusions/exclusions are arbitrary. MS could have argued that it was it's responsibility -- obligation even -- to add new features and abilities to its OSes. Force the govt to "prove" that a browser is definitely an application and somehow cannot be a core part of the OS (otherwise there's no "bundling"). They wouldn't have been able to do that.
- dep_b 6y ago
  I think 3.11 still needed a third party TCP/IP stack, not 95.
jtbayly 6y ago
You must not have had a Mac in the IE era. Many websites were inaccessible to those who did. The web was not open in those days.
- logifail 6y ago
  > The web was not open in those days (Genuine) question: is the web open now?
dekhn 6y ago
Nearly everybody I know who lived through that trial and works in the internet biz has eventually concluded that MSFT did the right think bundling IE in the OS. (I've had that discussion with a lot of people after somebody asked me point blank exactly what was wrong with including a DLL that did HTTP GETs and showed the results graphically on screen in an OS). Another thing I've learned is that modern CEOs are now expected to both be sucessfull businesspeople, and also humane enough to look good in a deposition and be skilled at deflecting questions.
specialist 6y ago
"...then I would agree it's anti-competitive." Using dominance in one market to muscle into another is bog standard monopolistic practice, and nominally prohibited. Conflating bundling with other anti-competitive strategies is unhelpful.

by Gunax 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tus88 6y ago

> Apple maintains control of what its users can install on their own devices--Microsoft never did that. Well apart from the OS installed on the device you are buying from an OEM.

freeone3000 6y ago
Between secureboot disabling, mokutil, and Microsoft signing Ubuntu and Red Hat kernels directly, I think it's pretty clear there's no desire for lock-in and that it's actually a security feature.
- tus88 6y ago
  I'm talking about the 90s.

robotresearcher 6y ago

> It doesn't matter if Gates was kind or rude The legal system is made of people, and people are exquisitely sensitive to social stuff. It's just not expedient to ignore that.

Aerroon 6y ago
On that front, you could argue that using tone and posture could be used as a deflection. Discussions around the case will often dedicate some of the time discussing this tone and posture. This makes it easier to claim that the opposition is biased against Gates over something that shouldn't matter.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> For one, browsers have been unfairly singled out. Why not ban MS Paint or notepad too? How about solitaire? There was a reason it was browsers. At the time there was rather a lot of software written against the Win32 API and nothing else. It was a moat. You needed that software, so you needed Windows. The web threatened to bridge the moat -- if people write web applications for Netscape, and Netscape runs on not only Windows but Mac and Solaris and everything else, no more moat. So the strategy with Internet Explorer was to make it the dominant browser on Windows (which was 90% of desktops), and then add all kinds of IE-specific features and get web developers to use them, so their web pages only worked in IE. Then the user gets a dependency on a web page with an Active X control that runs on Wintel but not Mac/PowerPC or Solaris/SPARC, so they have to use Windows. And they have to use IE, which enables more web developers to target IE instead of open standards. The problem wasn't that it was free. The problem was that it was free and non-standard and the non-standard bits were tied to Windows.

listenallyall 6y ago
That's a pretty poor argument for govt intervention. Why? Because all of that Windows-only stuff existed, and the market ultimately rejected it. ActiveX controls? Yeah I remember those. Same with Java applets, Flash, Silverlight. The government didn't need to get involved in getting rid of any of these.
- clooless 6y ago
  It's easy to say that now in hindsight. Wasn't that clear back then.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    Of course. But it strengthens the argument. The govt's job is not to guess what might happen or how the market will react to new technology. It should only intervene as a last resort, when there is absolutely no market-based solution possible. It wasn't like the AT&T antitrust suit, where the defendant had existed, mostly unchanged, for 50 or so years.

listenallyall 6y ago

I agree. Microsoft's strongest argument was that the features of an "OS" are fluid, ever-evolving, and un-definable. OS'es were all text-based, until one day they weren't and the GUI dominated. Win 95 had no Winsock or TCP/IP stack built-in, 98 did. File Explorer. Start Button. And as you say, the presence of MS Paint and the Calculator and Solitaire show that exact inclusions/exclusions are arbitrary. MS could have argued that it was it's responsibility -- obligation even -- to add new features and abilities to its OSes. Force the govt to "prove" that a browser is definitely an application and somehow cannot be a core part of the OS (otherwise there's no "bundling"). They wouldn't have been able to do that.

dep_b 6y ago
I think 3.11 still needed a third party TCP/IP stack, not 95.

jtbayly 6y ago

You must not have had a Mac in the IE era. Many websites were inaccessible to those who did. The web was not open in those days.

logifail 6y ago
> The web was not open in those days (Genuine) question: is the web open now?

dekhn 6y ago

Nearly everybody I know who lived through that trial and works in the internet biz has eventually concluded that MSFT did the right think bundling IE in the OS. (I've had that discussion with a lot of people after somebody asked me point blank exactly what was wrong with including a DLL that did HTTP GETs and showed the results graphically on screen in an OS). Another thing I've learned is that modern CEOs are now expected to both be sucessfull businesspeople, and also humane enough to look good in a deposition and be skilled at deflecting questions.

specialist 6y ago

"...then I would agree it's anti-competitive." Using dominance in one market to muscle into another is bog standard monopolistic practice, and nominally prohibited. Conflating bundling with other anti-competitive strategies is unhelpful.