JC - re: You're sounding like a M$ attorney.
I'm not any kind of attorney - just an engineer who has had a pretty much universally disappointing experience with every aspect of the legal system when applied to technology.
First of all, I didn't say "NT". I said 'desktop OS with integrated browser'.
Unfortunately, the law does not work logically - at least not intuitively. You and I may think that the leap from a bunch of testimony about integration of browser and desktop code in MSFT's Windows OS, and a finding that such linkage contributes to monopoly control, logically leads to the assumption that the current desktop product is just the next generation of that product, and ought to be considered for similar remedies. But my sense is that the law does not work that way.
The case was built around the notion that MSFT developed a monopoly position because of their control of the consumer desktop, DOS through Windows. NT existed for much of the period under review, but had almost no desktop share until very recently. It still has no share in the consumer market.
I just don't think that either the judge or the DOJ gave any thought to including NT in the "desktop OS with integrated browser" category.
Corel has a stable of engineers who's job it is to reverse engineer Windows and sleuth down the APIs just to come up with an 'office' product that can be competitive. To say that the APIs are documented appropriately runs in sharp contrast to the labor of a lot of folks who have to hack backwards into the M$ OS just to be able to compete with the monopolist in the application space.
Here again, you need to read what I said more carefully. The APIs for Windows are and always have been a partially documented mess, and I never said otherwise. The source code for Windows has been available to a variety of people, including almost all of the major OEMs, going back to the '80s. The reason for that is precisely because the APIs are such a mess, and the code often does not execute to the published APIs. MSFT has always been able to get the users of their products to do most of the support and much of the development as well... Corel is hardly unique in having to "reverse engineer" Windows. CPQ had to pretty much write and debug Windows386 in 1986 - otherwise they would have had no OS for their launch of a 386 based PC aside from the 286 version. One gets the sense from the press that the same thing was going on in the 64 bit space, that's why MSFT was so upset when CPQ pulled the plug on Alpha NT...
Why *shouldn't this shift to W2K? Some basic sense of fair play?
My position is that a basic sense of fair play would INCLUDE W2K, but the law has nothing to do with either fair play or fairness at all, it has to do with how carefully the lawyers on each side can constrain the testimony on each side, and the law that gets applied to that testimony.
Many years ago, my company developed an innovative design which eliminated an entire level of hardware in a process application for General Motors. In the course of developing that product, we talked with a BIG hardware vendor about a joint venture, since we were too small to go after the whole market for the technology. They spent a lot of time talking, then decided not to do a deal with us. 6 months later they came out with a substantially similar design which included not only information we had given them, but also information we had given only to GM. We sued them ,and sued GM in a separate action - apparently there was no way to link the two actions legally since one was an IP dispute and one a contracts issue. The court testimony clearly showed that early design work provided to GM under NDA was included in the other company's design. The law which applied allowed us to recover some small damages from GM for violation of terms of their NDA, but gave us no recourse against the hardware company who had stolen the ideas, aside from a nominal royalty which quickly expired after they did a "clean room" version to cut out the leaked material. To ice the cake, GM gave all of the follow-on to the original contract to the other vendor. Don't make me laugh about "fair play" and the court system.
Later one of the GM people we had worked with said GM liked the idea and knew that we could not grow fast enough to meet their needs... so they made a simple pragmatic decision... "life in the big city" was his comment..
We all know what this is about. It's about to be remedied.
We all know what this is about. But I think you will be surprised and disappointed in the remedy... |
