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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (108718)	4/30/2000 11:40:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571927

Dan3, RE:"There are too many critical functions in a complex technical society to permit unregulated monopolies. No that's a novel idea! Dan, have you ever heard of O P E C?

To: Dan3 who wrote (108718)	5/1/2000 12:07:00 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571927

RE:"Whether or not Microsoft established a monopoly and then abused that monopoly is open to debate. But if they did, IMHO, it is very definitely the responsibility of the government to stop them" I haven't seen a lot that the government hasn't screwed up trying to fix. With the speed of the technological revolution. A monopoly today can be gone tomorrow. Just look at what is happening to Intel...by AMD, without government intervention. On the same note, Intel would seem at least as quilty as Microsoft. They incorporated the math coprosser into the 486 and put Weitek and a couple others right out of the business. They try sucessfully to control the standard making it very difficult for others to compete. If Rambus and Intel are successful raming Rambus down everyones throat...might be some anti trust there. They gave Microsoft preferential pricing to get in the X-box...essentially killing 3D-NOW! in favor of SSE. So now the could dictate that standard? Even then AMD has found a way. So why does the government need to do SUNWs, AOLs and Netscapes dirty work for them? Maybe they should have found a way. As far as Microsofts inclusion of application software in the OS...I must say I was very pleased when they did include things because I didn't have to go out and get gouged by other software parties. I'll give you a few examples... PC tools...about $90...Microsoft incorporated compress (defrag) etc. Scandisk etc. Winfax Pro...a real hog. $100 At least MS gave me a choice. Netscape and other browsers...why is it the version I always had wasn't supported by the software I happened to want to run or view from the net? I tried to use Netscape...but eventually switched to IE 5...fast and pretty flawless. Free too, thanks Microsoft. Wordpad and other MS word processors...I was sure glad not to see the Word Perfect blank screen. I used to use Aldus Pagemaker...$395. Publisher does fine. $99. Even get it bundled in some way shape or form at times. Net meeting...well I tried 13 other Internet Telephony programs. Netmeeting was free and the sound quality was the best. Thanks again Microsoft. I'm not the average computer user but I have taught a lot of people to use one. I will say that without the ease of use or the integration of these types of programs it would be a lot less easy and there would be a lot less people enjoying their computer experience. New computer users are scared to death of a computer. Now the Government wants to protect them by making them go out and buy and load a bunch of programs when they just learned how to turn the thing on. Something tells me Microsoft has more people on their side than the DOJ thinks. Jim

To: Dan3 who wrote (108718)	5/1/2000 1:00:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1571927

Dan, JH: Since when was Microsoft officially declared to be the monopoly? D3: The consent decree (agreed to by Microsoft) dates back about 2 or 3 years as best as I can recall. They didn't admit anything but the time at which they accepted the consent decree seems like a reasonable date to me. Not to me. I think it has to be explicit. Back in the AT&T days, if you asked the CEO of AT&T if they were a monopoly, and if they had to obey the special rules, he would clearly say yes. Joe