For where I sit its achieved virtually nothing. MS is still the bully in the marketplace in many markets, although its recent foot-shooting with Vista may to affect the way MS controls the desktop more than another 5 years of ineffective oversight.

hardly limited them. Cheesy terms like "Seattlement" come to mind.

"Microsoft is pshawing claims that it needs another five years of legal babysitting."

Huh. Let's see a few years where it becomes obvious that its conviction as a predatory monopolist is never likely to be repeated. Until then - like any other monopolist (not necessarily a bad thing) - it needs to be watched carefully.

Given that the "legal babysitting" has been completely ineffective so far, and given that the US government has basically allowed Microsoft to do whatever it wanted to do anyway, why would anyone believe that 5 more years of of this scam would do anyone any good? The US government isn't interested in competition. It's interested in making sure that the large corporations make as much as possible. If it was interested in competition, they would have busted up Microsoft, and they'd be doing something about the Autocad monopoly while they were at it.

The real babysitting seems to be getting done in Europe, where in just a few months (well, couple years anyway) they've done more for competition than the entire US legal system has managed to do in a couple of decades.

Isn't 80% or more of the market considered to be a monopoly? Netscape "monopolised" the browser market but this is apparently fine. A competitor comes along and gets slammed as anti-competitive, and the original 80% dominator falls by the wayside to what is essentially an inferior product (yes, inferior to IE. Suck those sour apples.)

If there were a dozen or more players in the field, and one of them had a huge chunk like Netscape had...fair enough. But when you're the only horse in town, you shouldn't be too surprised when you win all the horse races, as all the recent commentators seem to be in regards to Netscape's tumble.

USA can just sit back and let them do what they want. They never stopped anything anyway.

The Europeans are the parents of MS telling them what's right and wrong, and hitting them with a rolled up newspaper when they poo in the wrong place. All the US are doing is being the older sibling whinging about it to whoever might be listening.

Microsoft was slated for breakup and then George W. Bush happened. MS was nailed, but Bush's DOJ dropped the breakup in 2001 and sought a settlement that in a sense left MS in a stronger position than before the trial.

When Joel Klein was prosecuting the case before Thomas Penfield Jackson, I think it was understood among the hopeful that if the case failed (for political reasons), then the last resort would be the EU. We've been waiting for you.

Google... DoubleClick.... Monopoly...

Make a good product (Netscape was shit, many viruses caused less damge to a pc) and succeed.

Much of this is by vendors who make crap products blaming everyone else for their pityful market share. I'm sorry to say this, but Linux has historically been a techie, unfriendly mess of an O/S. However, as the product has improved, suprise, suprise, it's market share has improved. The same goes for Firefox and other browsers. Again I used early versions of FF and it was an piece of shit, not so now.

Of course MS is evil, buying up it's competitors...hold on, who are the people selling these companies, are they so innocent, after all if they truely believed that MS was the evil entity they are, why would they sell up...oh yeah, they actually don't give a toss as soon as a shed load of cash is waived in front of them.

So instead of these people relying on goverments to help them out, get off their arses and compete!

And cue the whinging fan boys......

>> So instead of these people relying on goverments to help them out, get off their arses and compete!

Not so good with economics are you Mr Reeves. The fact that Firefox has managed to claw back as much market share as it has is not that it's simply better than internet explorer but that it's a very great deal better. In a monopoly situation such a Microsoft is in, you can't compete on a level playing field.

In order for Linux to get 10% of the market it needs to be 300% better than Windows. Obviously it'll get there in time but that's no need for people like you to total mis-understand what pressures a monopoly puts on a market.

.... MS has already saved us from the likes of Netscape, let's hope they can do the same with RealPlayer (pile o crap that it is). I've noticed it's wanned a lot in recent years, kill it off, won't anyone think of us humans.

Great point, you'd rather MS were crushed and we plod along safe in the knowledge that there is no need to excel, just to be ok, not bad, pretty much the same old, same old, safe in the knowledge that should MS come out with anything better, then all they have to do is make something that's just as good and let the law makers force the crap on us. Of course MS won't bother trying to improve, as the competition will be equally as bland and dull.

Netscape Navigator anyone?

"Netscape 'monopolised' the browser market but this is apparently fine."

Yep. To be anti-competitive, a company has earn a monopoly in one market and then use it to extend their monopoly into another, by some sort of tying arrangement. There's no law against being the best.

An example would be the server market where MS don't have a monopoly. Servers have to talk to desktops though, and MS exploit their desktop monopoly by arranging for Windows desktops to speak only in undocumented protocols, which their server product supports but no-one else can. Notice that the key point is the use of these protocols by the *desktop* product, not the server product.

On the other hand, IE and WMP have always struck me as rather poor examples. If you want to run an alternative browser or media player, Windows puts nothing in your way. The only obstacle is the ignorance of the average consumer, and it is hard to see why that should be Microsoft's responsibility in any legal sense. If MS had charged money for IE or WMP *and* if they had rigged Windows so that other browsers didn't integrate so well with the shell, you'd have a case against them. However, neither is true.

"Of course MS is evil, buying up it's competitors...hold on, who are the people selling these companies, are they so innocent, after all if they truely believed that MS was the evil entity they are, why would they sell up...oh yeah, they actually don't give a toss as soon as a shed load of cash is waived in front of them."

Er, duh. Although you will get the odd cash troll, innovating companies tend to sell up to predatory monopolies like M$ because they are handed a simple and brutal choice:

Either sell the company or its fledgling product to M$ and get at least some recompense for their hard work, hopefully seeing an evolution of it be added to Windows ...

... or simply have their company/product crushed by the sheer leverage that M$ has amongst critical suppliers/vendors/litigators and make nothing.

Other probably less obvious reasons include a small companies investors/shareholders seeing the garanteed cash from M$ a better way to make a return on investment than an innovative but risky new product, and obliging the board or directors to agree to a sale. Bloody capitalists.

"And cue the whinging fan boys......"

Yaaaawn. Pot -> Kettle.

Why is Microsoft the dominant player in the browser market? Besides IE being bundled with every system, if you want to run Windows Update and get ALL the updates available for your computer, you HAVE to use IE. Sure, the "critical" updates can come down automatically, however to update the core desktop product, you have to use another MS product! (go figure).

"Microsoft says the groups haven't provided an existing or potential protocol licensee that intends to use the license to create software for the desktop that would rely on protections given by the judgment."

Well, if MS was actually split up, there would be plenty of licensees, being all the new companies created by the split. Oh wait no, that'd take away from their profit...

What is a helmet wearing drooler, and why would one choose to use AOL rather than another internet service?

Will people stop referring to IE being 'bundled' with Windows!!

It isn't 'bundled' at all, its an integral part of the bloody operating system. IE is simply a GUI interface to wininet32.dll, which also underpins a lot of other parts of Windows itself - providing all of the HTTP/FTP/Gopher connectivity functionality.

Thats why when you 'uninstall' IE in the control panel, all that happens is the desktop and start menu icons are removed.

There seem to be people who - bizarrely - have the opinion that Microsoft dominates the market because they're just super software guys (who've never used their muscle to push other companies out of the way by dodgy means, instead of letting their brilliant software speak for itself).

A good example of how the market *should* work would be UK home computers in the early 80s, when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum had more market share than the next three most popular machines combined. Had Sinclair told retailers to stop selling Commodores and threatened them with having no Spectrums to sell, then that would have been an abuse of their power, and is pretty much what MS did to PC manufacturers.

However, at that time there were many manufacturers and models, there was plenty of competition in the marketplace, and the Spectrum prospered without dodgy strong-arm illegal tactics.

Perhaps that's where Sinclair went wrong later on, though - he could have offered car salesmen back-handers to recommend C5s over real cars... ;)

first off, ie is bundled with windows. They can make an os without an intergral web browser, we've seen it before, theres no reason why they can't do it again. There was no ie in 3.11 after all. The world wont collapse if ms were to do it again.

My favorite line in the article was that MS' competitors have achieved theirsucess fr using non MS protocols (for good business reasons) does this mean that ms' lawyers consider anyone licensng them to be making a bad business decision? Slammng indictment there.

If you have Windows, you have IE - 6, 7, whatever. It wants to be the default. You have to slap it down to make it behave and have your chosen program be the default. I'd say that's integration at it's worst. And it can't be uninstalled - no matter what the Add/Remove programs say in Control Panel. It may not be running, and it may say it's not there, but it's there. Install their OS, you get IE, WMP, and whatever other crap they want you to have.

If you need to reinstall a fresh copy of IE7 for whatever reason - a horribly corrupted copy, say - you can try to download one with firefox or opera - but if you have Vista, it will detect that and refuse. There are registry hoops to get around that one, but do you think the average user knows those? They will have to reinstall the whole OS to freshen one part of it.

Yup, thanks, DOJ.

Because Microsoft was afraid. Afraid that, as part of the then current anti-trust/anti-monopoly actions, they would be prohibited from giving away IE as a separate product, or from contractually requiring PC OEMs from bundling IE with Windows.

At that time, MS had blatantly been beating down Netscape largely by giving IE away, at a time when it was a separate product, and it seemed rather likely that MS would be called onto the carpet and scolded for such actions. MS's defense at that point was largely claiming that IE wasn't a separate product, in spite of much evidence to the contrary. This led to memorable moments like Bill G being under subpoena and claiming under oath that he wasn't sure what the prosecutor meant by the word "browser".

To put some ground under such silly claims, MS took chunks of IE and buried them deep with the OS guts, then they put things on face of the OS that required just those very page rendering methods. Important stuff (he said facetiously), like the common tasks pane in Windows Explorer and the Extended view pane for services management. Folding IE so deeply into Windows, that any flaw in IE became a flaw in Windows and visa versa. Which is nothing less than yet another reason this folderol shouldn't have happened.

All of which being nothing more than foreshadowing for what was to come when later predatory illegal monopolistic practices dragged Windows 98 into the accused's circle, causing MS to release Windows Millennium Edition, or as I like to call it, the OS Powered by the Reek of Fear.