Judge Jackson is right, MS should be split up.
If MS is split up in an OS- and Apps-Division the other developers would at least have a fighting chance.
My remarks about MS ways of doing things:
1) That Microsoft bundles software with the OS is not bad, but doing it in such a way that it hardly can be undone certainly stifles competition. (E.g. tying in IE with the GUI.)
2) MS makes the OS, so who has a headstart with apps development for the new OS? If you are late to market, you don’t get much marketshare. Ever
wonder why MS brings out a new (or restructured) OS every few years? Keeps others safely behind.
3) MS doesn’t want fair competition. If a good standard comes along, they invent a ‘better’ standard, which they own (COM vs.CORBA) or try to subvert it to their own wishes (Java). Ofcourse when this fails, they revert to scenario 1 (C# vs Java).
4) MS has gained market dominance with inferior products. E.g. MS Word97 has given me more support trouble in 2 month after rollout than WP 5.1 and 6.1 in two years. Recently we suffer a lot of Word97 crashes for no apparent reason…
How did MS gain dominance? By using their marketing clout in every possible way! In the first trial MS managers suffered from amnesia abouttheir talks how to tackle the (remnants of) competition. Of course MS’s own internal e-mail proved how these guys play hardball!
5) Since I have both MS Messenger and ICQ installed at my home PC, ICQ crashes quite often. Previously, when there was no MS Messenger, this didn’t happen (at least to my recollection). I can’t proof that this is something more sinister than just a convenient
incident (convenient for MS, ofcourse).
6) As american consumer don’t expect the DOJ under Bush to really take on MS. You have got a “big business”-government, period. As a european consumer I can only hope that the
European commission takes a more independent attitude…