If your argument held any water at all, the DOJ would never be involved.
By stating that MSFT does a better job and that their victims are poorly run is an insult to the many companies that are adversely affected by MSFT BS that are well run.
MSFT BS is independent of whether these companies are poorly run or not. MSFT is taking out the good innovative ones with the bad ones.
Indeed, some of MSFT victims are Fortune 100 companies.
One example -
MSFT approached many printer companies such as HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark, etc about 5-6 years ago because it knew that these companies were writing Windows OS printer drivers and felt that it wanted a piece of the action.
MSFT made a pitch to these companies: support a new superior printing architecture that MSFT would author. Whoever got on board early would be a step ahead of the competition. Amazingly lucrative deals for MSFT were cut - out of fear for being left behind.
To cut to the chase, what these "poorly run" companies discovered was that by activating MSFT's software (when it finally arrived chronically late), the printer drivers did not pass their QA because the quality was too buggy and the performance was too poor. I know for a fact that the software was compiled out and bypassed in order to make shipments in many cases. In the cases where it was shipped, bitter customer complaints added to warranty costs. Customers blame the printer manufacturers, not MSFT, when their output doesnt come out right.
Unfortunately, these companies felt compelled to sign on to the MSFT initiative because of the perceived competitive threat of being left off the bandwagon of promised goods. I know of some that paid upwards of 20 million upfront for the pleasure of being screwed by MSFT on top of having to pay MSFT a per unit royalty to boot!!! My estimation is that MSFT gains were on the order of 100s of millions of $$$s ... all for diddly. Some of these companies have quietly litigated, others wrote it off. Purely out of fear because they all need to continue to partner with MSFT.
You see, Richard Forsythe, what you miss with your argument is that by controlling the desk top OS, MSFT not only officiates the game, they get to continually change the rules of the game as they go along to their exclusive benefit, leaving a wake of crippled companies in our paths.
Is Check Point Software (CHKPF), the leader in the firewall security segment poorly run? MSFT is holding back on OSM. This is screwing WIND with I2O delays. Typical MSFT BS. Is WIND poorly run because MSFT is screwing WIND?
Netscape was on the verge of eating MSFT's lunch. MSFT was not successful because they offer Explorer for free, instead they had to entice PC manufacturers with big discounts if they excluded bundling Netscape in order to thwart Netscape. Was Netscape poorly run because of this? Given the facts of MSFT's actions, did that even matter?
Nuff said,
--Ronald Paul |
