Appeals Court Overturns Ruling on Windows 95 nytimes.com
The good gray Times seems to think that the consent decree ruling has a lot to do with the broader case, but they're just trying to sell advertising. Still, it doesn't look good for the trustbusters.
The appeals court's ruling Tuesday struck down a preliminary injunction that Jackson issued against Microsoft in December after the Justice Department had argued in a separate case that Microsoft was illegally using its monopoly in operating system software to gain an unfair advantage in the market for browser software.
But in its ruling Tuesday, the appeals court said that Jackson had "erred procedurally" by issuing a preliminary injunction without giving Microsoft a chance to present its case, and "substantively" by misinterpreting the intent of antitrust law.
Stating a principle that legal experts say would clearly apply to the new antitrust suit as well, the court said that Microsoft had the right to determine what features and functions to include in its operating system as long as the combination "offers advantages unavailable" if a consumer were to purchase separate software products and combine them to achieve similar capabilities.
That one has me scratching my head. MIcrosoft gets to throw in the kitchen sink and a ham sandwich, as long as doing so gives them an unmatchable advantage? Very pro competition, I'd say. The kitchen sink/ham sandwich approach is still bad software design, anyway.
"Antitrust scholars have long recognized the undesirability of having courts oversee product design, and any dampening of technological innovation would be at cross-purposes with antitrust law," said the text of Tuesday's decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Oh dear. Microsoft must be free to imitate, I mean, innovate! Maybe it is all beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, at least those in the thrall of the much dreaded Chicago School. Been there, I don't care to go back.
"We suggest here only that the limited competence of courts to evaluate high-tech product designs and the high cost of error should make them wary of second-guessing the claimed benefits of a particular design decision," the text said.
On the other hand, I have some problem with the apparently limited competence of a certain company in producing a certain "high tech product design" that inevitable falls to pieces over time, but Windows 98 is supposed to suck less. We'll see.
Cheers, Dan. |
