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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (22916)	3/6/1999 2:40:00 AM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

This probably doesn't help ... but it's a tall order. Business Week had a pretty good summary a couple of weeks ago I believe. Rich Gray's summary: mercurycenter.com DOJ usdoj.gov

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (22916)	3/7/1999 6:34:00 PM
From: Rusty Johnson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Microsoft at Halftime mercurycenter.com But even the most detailed and carefully crafted ruling will have many obstacles to overcome before it will have any effect on Microsoft. Best of luck.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (22916)	3/8/1999 4:48:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

I don't know of such a document. On the other question, it has been traditional in the software business for the small application vendors to get screwed out of all their business eventually by the platform vendor going into their application space after a honeymoon characterized by a lot of lying about the intention to do same. This has been true for IBM, SGI, Apple, Netscape, MSFT, Lotus, Adobe, Macromedia and so forth. They grab the clients via predatory pricing of the platform, they force the smaller company wanting to develop for a platform to give proprietary and sensitive technical, financial, and marketing data up, they steal the ideas and people, and generally behave in an anticompetitive way. They pressure the makers to not provide the product for other platforms, and eventually if the product is successful and they can't buy it cheaply they clone it. Why this has not previously attracted the attention of the government is just that the wheels grind slowly, plus a little baksheesh in the right campaigns (campaign baksheesh also being the reason that warrantee laws don't apply to software, the other big reason for the lack of software quality.) But this practice has always been grossly anticompetitive and usually illegal in other ways. However, broken software entrepreneurs can't afford lawyers. And the consumers have not been represented by the government in the way they should have been, though losses from this to the public and other industries have been (IMO) in the hundreds of billions to low trillions of dollars. As one small example, Sun had some competition from the Tops networking system some time back, that let you use Macs and PCs and cheap terminals for Sun servers. This was great software that way back in the late 80's would convert Sun, Mac, and PC docs and graphics file types on the fly as they were transferred between these platforms. Sun bought them out and simply killed the product, making things much more expensive for the user, deliberately damaging interoperability, and orphaning hundreds of thousands or millions of users. Another, perhaps more appropriate example in this context, is all the folks who used to make plugins for Netscape and Adobe. The whole business of plugins has been a way for companies like Adobe, Macromedia, and Netscape to keep small competitors from creating entire innovative products that could have key new features and instead putting those little companies in a space where they have no choice but to be bought out or killed off. If they don't go along the API just stops working for them eventually. Plus the plugins download page is apt to dissappear and so forth. On a related note, look what Netscape has done to access to small innovators in the search engine space. You pay Netscape or you can't be found. And of course Netscape has started to compete with them directly. (If there are any other programmers out there who want to put a good, fast, free, automatically maintained and advertising-free search engine out there on the internet for all to use when they need to find unbiased information, please contact me via chughes@studiostudio.com. I want to do something like the Linux effort on this, starting from the free code base that already exists. Then get a grant to put it on some linux servers at a university or foundation that has a big pipe to the internet. That should not be that expensive. I am completely sickened at what commercialism has done to information access on the public Internet. Please do write. ;-) There have been many innovative graphics tools that are history now because of this destructive technique. Technique and tools in 2D graphics and photo retouch has actually gone way backward in the last 10 years because of this. This anticompetitive behaviour is precisely why there are now so few small profitable specialist software companies. It is one big reason why there is so little real competition and innovation in software now. The average startup business plan these days is 'show it at trade shows in beta, then sell out'. The folks running these little companies don't even have real production, distribution, and marketing plans any more. That's how efficient the system has become at wiping out competition. The goal is now to be wiped out, with a little profit to the founders. That the engineers and artists and other creatives worked hard to innovate matters not. Anticompetitive behaviour on this scale is more than sufficient to have reduced innovation (and quality) in the software business to the pitiful state it is in today. The government should be looking at all big and medium scale platform vendors for this, including Netscape, Adobe, Oracle, and Macromedia. Chaz