Blogging Ottinger (tim)Microsoft scofflaw?
What? Microsoft a scofflaw? Say it ain’t so!
Okay, we all knew they were, but when it’s Europeans fining an American business, I think we’re supposed to act shocked. I’m not. But then I tend to value justice above local loyalties… and I’m not sure M$ has been good to/for America. After the David v. Goliath days when IBM was the evil empire, I think maybe it’s been “meet the new boss/same as the old boss”.
OTOH, I do have a deep inner satisfaction when M$ gets kicked… I think it’s that they’ve gotten away with so much in the past. Still, justice demands only the penalties and only the rewards one earns and deserves. I want to see justice done, and need to sometimes swallow a sense of revenge. If they deserve less damage, I pray the courts will give less damage.
I do think they’re doing good things with the .NET stack (C#, etc) and I’m glad for that. I just don’t think they’ve been model citizens. I would rather they were innovating, and did so legally and fairly. I think that’s possible, though I don’t think it’s all that likely. There isn’t a shareholder’s balance sheet line for “plays well with others” or “takes the moral high ground”, and corporations live by pleasing shareholders (who are typically interested in selling out the stock to make money, not in owning part of an ethical business).
I hope that the ruling is just. I would hate to see even M$ treated unfairly.
Certainly Microsoft has done some anti-competitive things, but in the long run, I look at the millions of lives that they’ve enriched–stockholders, employees, and all of the other thousands of businesses that have thrived because of them, and even at the hundreds of millions of dollars endowed by the Gates Foundation (not to mention a strong voice for getting the selfish AIDS researchers to try to open up with *their* information). (How much of Torvalds tens of millions does he donate?) And Windows, as bad as it is, was largely responsible for getting us past the good ol’ command prompt days. So, add to the list hundreds of millions of users for whom the computer become accessible. Neither Apple nor Unix had any large part in that, and ultimately that’s their fault, not that of Microsoft’s.
The philosophical question is, how much more good than bad does it take? For some reason, Apple usually gets a pass, even though they were historically far more closed and proprietary than MS. Oh but wait, they appeal to the left, and that’s always about what you mean to do, not what you actually do. (And no, I’m not a member of the right.)
Where Microsoft has been truly criminal, they should be punished. Where they are just guilty of better business dealings, so be it. The EU fine over the media player was an offensive money grab on the part of European government. Let the better mousetrap win–and that may well be happening, as many others are now gloating. Ultimately, if the marketplace wants an open OS, then MS will adapt or Linux will win.
It is bullying on the part of government, to insist that a company open everything up. “Your operating system is what everyone wants to be on, so you have to open up all of your information.”
From a technical standpoint, it also seems like a poor precedent. The Windows API has always been openly published. Apparently, that’s not enough to make back office server products, which no doubt might run faster with access to internal or kernel level APIs. (Not that I know much about this, so I could be off base here. I do remember being told to never depend on those, when working closely with the OS/2 API–it’s a violation of encapsulation, if you will.) So, either new versions of the OS will break such products, or the OS is bound to the older APIs, which is bad for future growth of the product. If I were MS, I’d say, fine, here’s all the info, and it’s likely to change. Then I’d change it, and regularly. Can’t keep up? That’s your problem.
The fines are obscene, outrageous, greedy, and stifling. Whose pockets will be lined with the billion-plus dollars?
A business should have no responsibility, ethical or legal, to ensure that its competitors survive. A sensible business knows that good competition keeps them on their toes.
Re: the discussion about shareholders and their disinterest in anything but the bottom line. I’ll be the first to say that attention to stockholder interests on a daily basis is part of the problem. Yet we’ve also learned that short-sightedness is a failing business proposition, and that public opinion can cost valuable share price. MS will eventually get their come-uppance. Unfortunately, it may be on the backs of greedy governments and not the consumer’s choice.
With respect to stock markets, I wonder if they would survive without government force behind them. Get rid of the Securities Exchange Commission and all of the artificial laws they’ve created, and perhaps the stock market cannot survive, at least not the way it exists today. I wouldn’t be saddened.
Will the day come when more of us whine about the assholes at Google and their anti-competitive practices (particularly in hiring)? What other search engines does anyone use nowadays? Seems like a “virtual monopoly” to me. Or do they get a pass because they are cooler?
Comment by Jeff L. — 2008-February-27 @ 10:10
I don’t consider ‘getting past the command line’ to be MS doing, as they weren’t the first nor the best to do so. I do blame them for giving us a command line that was not only inferior to the CP/M “supersub” but also to the unix command lines that had been around for many years. If command line processing means “command.com” then it was M$ that brought the problem to us, and they’ve not gotten past that yet. I like both gui and command line, and use both, just not in Windows.
Their part of the success of the PC I see as: 1) they rode on IBM’s coattails, 2) they claimed to have something they didn’t, and then got it from an author who didn’t know it was valuable at fire sale prices, 3) they had the wisdom to own their own copyrights — a move that paid off with PC Clones, and 4) They illegally manipulated and dominated the distribution channels so that no potentially better OS had access to consumers. I admit “better” is a funny term here, because they were starved out before we knew for sure whether they were any good or not. But two out of four numbered items above are crooked (two are not).
M$ were responsible for MS Windows being the dominant OS, and that by trickery mostly. I had other graphical OS that I liked better. MS killed them before they could mature. Remember how crummy the first few versions of windows were?
Ultimately antitrust made m$ back off and let retailers sell other operating systems.
The market doesn’t always choose what it wants — it typically chooses from among the options it is given. For a long time, there was only one option. I hardly call that “market forces”. Now that the market is opened up by the government, Apple, distros like Ubuntu, and even more novel operating systems have a chance.
A business does not have a responsibility to keep its competitors in business, but neither is a virtue for the company to take extreme measures to ensure the demise of partners and competitors alike. Are we agreed on that?
I didn’t say that google or anyone else was pure. Only that M$ has a history of blowing off their antitrust remedies.
I completely believe that ensuring justice falls on the government. This is not true only in personal injury and property damage (assault and vandalism) but also in commerce. Justice, by the way, means that one receives no more or less than he deserves by his actions, in punishment and reward.
Also realize that I’m not grading on a curve here. Your argument seems to me to be the moral equivalent to saying that a wife-beater is a good husband if he provides a good income and helps do dishes. I’m not looking to “average out”.
So I’ll agree with you here: “Where Microsoft has been truly criminal, they should be punished.” In particular, I will suggest that when they egregiously continue breaking the same law over and over, then the fines should grow egregiously too. I don’t see that part as being inappropriate.
I also cheered when IBM was taken down by microsoft years ago, and when “the death star” was busted. When one changes role from providing a better value to being the more vicious predator, then I think it’s reasonable.
And that’s my opinion.
Comment by Tim — 2008-February-28 @ 02:50
Hi Tim,
Good points.
> I don’t consider ‘getting past the command line’ to be
> MS doing, as they weren’t the first nor the best to do
> so.
You’re right, they weren’t first or best. My point is that Windows (and Windows 3.0 specifically) is where it all took off. That had nothing to do with “eliminating the other graphical interfaces by trickery”–millions and millions of copies of Windows 3.0 sold well before they screwed over the deal with IBM. By this time, Apple had been around long enough to try and do something on their own. What was Microsoft doing to keep Apple down?
This really was the turning point where Joe Idiot felt he could consider buying a PC.
> A business does not have a responsibility to keep its
> competitors in business, but neither is a virtue for the
> company to take extreme measures to ensure the demise of
> partners and competitors alike. Are we agreed on that?
Absolutely–I think I suggested that a wise business celebrates having competition. It’s what keeps them in business over the longer term.
Out of your four items, one is crooked with respect to antitrust–the manipulation of sales channels through their sole-supplier contracts. That’s the one about MS that annoyed me. The other one–the sucking of DOS from Kildall–is debatable. MS knew what they wanted, and they recognized more *potential* value in something that they were purchasing than the person who held it. They knew how they were going to make it successful, and Kildall didn’t. Marketing and selling a product, however evil people look at it, is often the more critical part of things–just about anyone could have invented the DOS that eventually sold hundreds of millions. Most people feel like they’ve done a good job negotiating when they get a real deal on something, not as if they’ve done something unethical.
You’re right, a few good deeds do not absolve a wife beater. But I’m often disappointed in people’s insistence on seeing punishment, and the unwillingness to forgive. MS has gotten past much of the crap they did in the 90s. I don’t agree that the EU’s case is or has ever been strong enough, particularly not to warrant such an outrageous sum. I see the evils of MS being stomped on by the evils of the EU government. That’s not right.
Comment by Jeff L. — 2008-February-28 @ 02:54
Proverbs 24:16-18 (King James Version)
16For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.
17Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth:
18Lest the LORD see it, and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.
Miss you hugely! Harold
Comment by Harold Taylor — 2008-February-29 @ 01:33
Funny that none of our debate is over whether or not Microsoft is a scofflaw.
The snakey bits were stating that they had it when they didn’t, and the one you picked up on. Buying something undervalued and selling it at a better price is not a unjust. Discovering value, enhancing it, and selling it is a pretty good model. I respectfully submit that had they not, it would have died on the vine. But convincing IBM that they had the product was hardly cricket.
MS didn’t kill apple. It did kill geos and several other good ideas I had bought into. I remember this really good multitasker I used before it went out of business, and how much lamer windows was than the old one. And they did press their OS dominance to make their other products stronger. Excel and Word came out *with* windows versions on which the competitors were not yet compatible. That always seemed an unfair advantage.
I don’t think that the apple v ms thing was ever a bad deal. Nor that it’s good vs. evil. It’s a good thing. I think apple was wise to put their stuff on top of BSD, but that doesn’t make them better or more virtuous. But they could not sell through traditional channels in the old M$ Kempin lock-down days. They had to find other ways into the public.
It’s like the labels, no? If they made it impossible to market indie bands through department stores, then indies would be really hard pressed to reach the public. Some might make it anyway, but it would be hard.
If it’s really one bully beating up another bully, it doesn’t matter which one you back. I’m not sure that’s it.
I just want to see the market continue to open up. That’s the good news to me. In a self-serving way I look forward to more openness from M$. They shouldn’t really have to be forced, because it’s what people want.
Comment by Tim — 2008-February-29 @ 02:03
Harold, you da man! Miss you and yours.
Comment by Tim — 2008-February-29 @ 02:04