Gerald - that was the point I was trying to make in one of my previous posts. The activities that all these sob sisters are crying about are "business as usual" for any successful high tech company. They only become illegal if the company is a monopoly, when they have to play by different rules.
MSFT contended they were not a monopoly. The DOJ successfully portrayed the market as "Intel-architecture desktop computers" - a market where MSFT has had almost complete domination since 1982. So the DOJ could presumably have used this definition and tactic to paint MSFT as a monopoly any time over the last 18 years.
Of course, that definition ignores the MAC, Unix workstations, handheld devices... and of course, servers and network devices. If we consider all general-purpose computing devices as the market, the DOJ's definition looks pretty silly. Still, the DOJ was clever enough to get the Judge to accept a definition where MSFT had a monopoly, and that made MSFT's actions illegal.
The impact of the PC over the last decade has clearly been pervasive, and it is pretty simple for most people to separate out the client machines from the rest of the computing world. Of course, nothing in the DOJ's case to date even addresses server operating systems, or the workstation market - i.e. Windows 2000 - but in the popular press, and on this thread, those products are included. I doubt that the law would support such a view based on the original charges, evidence presented, or finding of fact.
So when the know-nothings in the press talk about breaking up MSFT into a "windows" company and other companies, they must be talking about Win98, right? Since NT and its children were never addressed in the current legal action, they can hardly be included. So what happens to Windows2000? Do we see that going with the OS company, and if so why, when MSFT clearly has less than 40% of the server OS market on a units basis, and less than 20% on a revenue basis? Or do we have a "baby bill" company based on the Win9X code line - a company which would then probably seek to keep that code in the market (since that would be its only product) even though we all know this is really the great-grandson of DOS and practically defines "suckware"?? How is that good for anyone?
This soap opera gets more stupid every day. |
