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Of course Comcast, et ilk don't want Title II regulation. "Hey, just because we've divvied up the turf so that we've got geographical monopolies doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to leverage our monopolies into new monopolies." But the big cable companies got where they are by buying up community-granted and regulated monopoly utility companies. As part of consolidating those markets, the soon-to-be-gnormous cable companies, lobbied to get community regulation weakened and here we are with the FCC, with the cable companies now acting as ISPs too, which is straightforward telecommunications provider service, and these guys want to be able to charge a premium to the big internet content companies for fast-service after their ISP customers have already paid for fast service? So they can slow down the competition for their own content services.  Heck, yes, FCC. No one forced Comcast and crew to become telecommunications providers. Make 'em live with telecommunications regulation like all the other telcos. They are government-created monopolies and they should be regulated as such.   

Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th

Apple desktop and iPhone support of Microsoft Exchange is not support for Microsoft, as some think.  It's actually a strategy to erode Microsoft's desktop monopoly.  It's also part of a longer term plan to thwart Microsoft's hopes of leveraging their desktop monopoly into a Web Server monopoly. Excerpt: Apple is reducing its dependance upon Microsoft's client software, weakening Microsoft's ability to hold back and dumb down its Mac offerings at Apple's expense. More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community. In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape's web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That's what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft. As Apple takes over the client end of Exchange, it similarly gains market leverage. First and foremost, the move allows Apple to improve the Exchange experience of Mac users so that business users have no reason not to buy Macs. Secondly, it gives Apple a client audience to market its own server solutions, including MobileMe to individual users and Snow Leopard Server to organizations. In concert with providing Exchange Server support, Apple is also delivering integrated support for its own Exchange alternatives in both MobileMe and with Snow Leopard Server's improved Dovecot email services, Address Book Server, iCal Server, the new Mobile Access secure gateway, and its include

Good charts based on Net Market Share Stats.... excerpt: After nearly a decade, Microsoft's reign as a monopoly is over. The consent decree in U.S. v. Microsoft expired last month, officially removing Microsoft from antitrust scrutiny by the United States Department of Justice. And the latest real-world data on web usage confirms that Microsoft's once-dominant position in the world of personal computing is crumbling. For the past four years, I've collected semi-annual snapshots of web usage from Net Market Share. The data for the first half of 2011 tell an ominous story for Microsoft. See for yourself:

I'll need to read the proposed rule, but this doesn't sound good. the FCC majority tries to spin this as options still being open, but I don't recall ever seeing formal regulations changed substantially from their proposed form. If their were to be substantial change, another proposal and comment period would be likely. The public cannot comment on what has not been proposed, so substantial departure from the proposal, absent a new proposal and comment period, would offend basic principles of public notice and comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act. The proverbial elephant in the room that the press hasn't picked up on yet is the fight that is going on behind the scenes in the Dept. of Justice. If the Anti-trust Division gets its way, DoJ's public comments on the proposed rule could blow this show out of the water. The ISPs are regulated utility monopolies in vast areas of the U.S. with market consolidation at or near the limits of what the anti-trust folk will tolerate. And leveraging one monopoly (service to subscribers) to impose another (fees for internet-based businesses to gain high speed access) is directly counter to the Sherman Act's section 2.   http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2

In depth technical discussion about Flash, HTML5, H.264, and Google's VP8.  Excellent.  Read the comments.  Bottom line - Google has the juice to put Flash and H.264 in the dirt.  The YouTube acquisition turns out to be very strategic. excerpt: The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks-so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf.  But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all.  But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let's be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened. Flash became popular because of its power and flexibility.  At the time it was the only option for animated vector graphics and interactive content (stuff like VRML hardly counts).  Furthermore, before Flash, the primary video options were Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime: all of which were proprietary, had no free software encoders or decoders, and (except for Windows Media) required the user to install a clunky external application, not merely a plugin.  Given all this, it's clear why Flash won: it supported open multimedia formats like H.263 and MP3, used an ultra-simple container format that anyone could write (FLV), and worked far more easily and reliably than any alternative. Thus, Adobe (actually, at the time, Macromedia) got their 98% install base.  And with that, they began to become complacent.  Any suggestion of a competitor was immediately shrugged off; how could anyone possibly compete with Adobe, given their install base?  It'd be insane, nobody would be able to do it.  They committed the cardinal sin of software development: believing that a competitor being better is excusable.  At x264, if we find a competitor that does something better, we immediately look into trying to put ourselves back on top.  This is why

Let's also not forget that what is now named "Verizon" used to be named Bell Atlantic, one of the seven Baby Bells that were spun off by AT&T by government order during antitrust proceedings.  In other words, this is one of the companies rate-payers financed through a heavily-regulated analog telephony absolute monopoly. But Verizon wants to spread its wings and escape the chains of regulation as a telecommunications carrier. While having its cake and eating it to, according to this article. The FCC has poised itself through a proposed rule with the flexibility to postpone a decision on net neutrality.  AT&T famously was allowed to keep its R&D arm while being freed of the expense of upgrading the U.S. telephony network from analog to digital and from copper wire to fibre optic.  And pay for those Baby Bells to make that transition we did. I remember monthly bills for a two person office running as high as $1,100 a month for calls all carried from Baby Bell to AT&T and back to another Baby Bell. All at state-regulated rates with FCC looking the other way. But now Verizon, Comcast (the originally munipally regulated cable television monopolies) and the few other "competing" survivors of that broadband rollout, having had their infrastructure paid for by the ratepayers, want to fly off and begin charging us at the other end of the pipe,via charges to content providers that will be passed on to us. Leading to the squeezing out of Mom and Pop internet businesses by the big content providers that can afford the charges and pass them on to us. This is looking more and more like another massive rip-off of the customers who already paid for that infrasture. Is that banksters I smell, privatizing a enormous public utility in the name of free markets?      

Microsoft claims that WordPerfect fell into disfavor because it came late to Windows; Novell, which owns the WordPerfect Office technology (after selling the rest of the company to Corel), claims that Microsoft unfairly used its knowledge of Windows APIs to give itself a competitive advantage. There's one very solid piece of evidence in Novell's favor - a 1994 email from Bill Gates that states: "I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have away to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage . . . We can't compete with Lotus and WordPerfect/Novell without this."

Charlie nails it in this analysis of Microsoft's future.  Most interesting is Charlie's explanation of how Microsoft so totally missed the needs of their corporate business user base - the heart of the monopoly!  Windows 8 is a disaster for productivity.  Great analysis! excerpt: Microsoft is in deep trouble, their two main product lines are failing, and the blame game is intensifying. Steve Sinofsky gets the blame this time for the failure of Windows 8, but the real problem is the patterns that are so clearly illustrated by these actions. Microsoft is largely irrelevant to computing of late, the only markets they still play in are evaporating with stunning rapidity. Their long history of circling the wagons tighter and tighter works decently as long as there is not a credible alternative, and that strategy has been the entirety of the Microsoft playbook for so long that there is nothing else now. It works, and as the walls grow higher, customer enmity builds while the value of an alternative grows. This cycle repeats as long as there is no alternative. If there is, everything unravels with frightening rapidity.

One of the "Lessons of Massachusetts" is that the key lock-in point for Microsoft's monopoly is their iron fisted control of the productivity environment, anchored by MSOffice and the Windows local workgroup client/server system.  Key to office productivity is the compound document model that fuels every business process and business productivity system.  It's the embedded logic and database connectivity (OLE, ODBC, MAPI and COM ActiveX controls) that juice the compound document model.   Convert a compound document to another format (or PDF), and you BREAK the both the document, AND THE BUSINESS PROCESS!!!! It was the breaking of the business process that stopped Massachusetts from moving to the Open Document Format !!!! So now comes a story with consumer sales vs enterprise sales numbers that seemingly shatter the Lessons of Massachusetts.  How is that? My take is that the numbers Microsoft touts are true.  Consumers are making new purchases - NOT enterprises.  The simple truth is that, as Microsoft introduces new OS and Application Services geared to Mobile / Cloud Computing, these new systems BREAK legacy business systems.  It's still way too costly for businesses to transition to the new models. Eventually though, businesses will replace those legacy business productivity systems with Mobile / Cloud Computing systems.  And it will be a rip-out-and-replace transition; not the gradual "value-added" transition everyone hopes Microsoft will provide.   Interesting stuff. excerpt: "If Microsoft is an enterprise company, then why is it spending so much time and money on stuff like Bing, Xbox, Windows Phone, and the Surface RT? It should be going all-in on cloud computing and services. If you were to ask Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, his answer would probably be: It's a dumb question, we're both. In an interview with Jason Pontin at MIT Technology Review, he said: ""Our number-one thing is supplying products to consumers. That's kind of what we do.

Note that rip-out-and-replace to get to the cloud is a very risky strategy for MSFT because the company forfeits its vendor lock-in advantage; the question for the enterprise then becomes "replace with what?" The answer in many cases will be non-Microsoft services. And traditionally, what the enterprise uses has driven what enterprise workers use at home far more than vice versa.

"Gary Edwards on Mar 15, 8:25 PM said: There are only three apps i load at boot-up: gMail, gReader, and gWave. Ooops! Google Wave was cancelled over a year ago. Owning the end-users attention at boot-up proved to be an essential factor to the Microsoft monopoly. They built an iron fisted empire out of owning the point of boot-up. So it's very strange to see Google give up the very thing other cloud platform contenders would no doubt kill for. Very strange. Even stranger though is the perception that Google + will somehow now move to center stage? The only reason i use Google+ is because it's easy to point to an article and post a comment from Google Reader to my + circles. Other than that i have no use for +. Nicolas Carr posted an interesting comment on Google's cancellation of gReader yesterday. He tried to argue that there is a difference between "tools" and "platforms", and Google was more interested in building a platform than maintaining "tools" like gReader. So, Google+ is now essential to the Google Platform? Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant and cosmic insightful Mr. Carr, fails to make that case. Microsoft became a platform when they succeeded in positioning their OS as the essential factor bridging an explosively innovative and rapidly commoditiz'ing Windows hardware reference platform, and, he equally rapid and innovative Windows software application platform. Both software and hardware were being written and developed to the Windows OS, with features doubling and costs being halved at a rate that even Moore's Law envied. Microsoft fully cemented the emerging hardware - OS - application platform with a business productivity environment that necessitated the use of the MS Office suite of servers and apps. That lock on business productivity has yet to be broken. And even though the mighty Google Apps has made some progress convincing businesses to rip-out-and-replace their legacy business productivity systems and re write to the Google Cloud P

Incredible project exploring new methods of story telling that make full use of an emerging interactive, graphical and multimedia rich, extraordinarily visual Web platform.  Awesome use of Web technology and a great story to boot!   While the Snow Fall Project is hardly the first Visual Document, it's truly a landmark effort.  Hopefully the business process and systems editing tools for Web based Visual Productivity will not be far behind simple Visual Web publication tools. Marbux viewed the source code and pointed out the great efforts that the NY Times had gone to to provide cross browser compatibility.  That in turn reminded me just how close the world came to having Microsoft seize the Web and take control of its future.  A very close call if ever there was one.  Many thanks to Marc Andresssen and the Netscape investors for their heroic efforts to stop Bill Gates and his Microsoft monopoly.

The more interesting issue to me is the accusation that Google violates antitrust law by boosting its comparison shopping search results in its search results, unfairly disadvantaging competing shopping services and not delivering best results to users. What's interesting to me is that the Commission is attempting to portray general search as a separate market from comparison shopping search, accusing Google of attempting to leverage its general search monopoly into the separate comoparison shopping search market. At first blush, Iim not convinced that these are or should be regarded as separable markets. But the ramifications are enormous. If that is a separate market, then arguably so is Google's book search, its Google Scholar search, its definition search, its site search, etc. It isn't clear to me how one might draw a defensible line taht does not also sweep in every new search feature  as a separate market.   

Summary:  It was 10 years ago this week that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Microsoft split in two as a remedy for abusing its Windows monopoly. That judgment was tossed out on appeal, but the eventual antitrust settlement has had plenty of repercussions. From crapware to insecurity, here's my wrap-up of what 10 years of antitrust regulation has really accomplished.

Whether a patent constitutes "property" in the U.S. is an issue on which the Supreme Court has apparently never ruled. However, there is no question that the nation's founders viewed it only as a government-granted privilege, not a "property" right. The U.S. Supreme Court quoted Thomas Jefferson on the topic: Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson, at 18

What a dumb ass statement: "That's certainly one reason Microsoft still holds a giant lead in market share." The SFGate article compares Google Apps lack of service to Microsoft's Productivity monopoly, suggesting that Microsoft provides better service?  That's idocy.  Microsoft's service is non existent.  Third party MSDN developers and service businesses provide near 100% of MS Productivity support.  And always have.   Where Microsoft does provide outstanding support is to their MSDN network of developers and service providers.   Google will have to match that support if Google Apps is to make a credible run at Microsoft.  But there is no doubt that the monopolist iron grip on the desktop productivity platform is an almost impossible barrier for Google to climb over.  Service excellence or not.

Wave has finally taken over gDOCS.  Entirely.  Are you paying attention Florian and Jason?  This is it.  Your ship has come in.  The final key for Google will be that of being able to work with native OOXML documents, in a Wave, without breaking them.  Round-trip of in-process compound business productivity documents is the last part of the puzzle Google needs to crack the mighty Microsoft monopoly. excerpt: "When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we're updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and seamless discussions and integrate with email in an intuitive way. Since there are a number of significant" improvements, this update is only available for newly created documents for now.

Michael Mace provides the best analysis and insight yet concerning Windows 8 and what it means to Microsoft, Windows, and Future of the Web.  Not sure i agree with the MSOffice future, but this is excellent thinking.  Glad i stumbled on Micheal Mace! excerpt: I've got to say, this is the first time in years that I've been deeply intrigued by something Microsoft announced.  Not just because it looks cool (it does), but because I think it shows clever business strategy on Microsoft's part.  And I can't even remember the last time I used the phrase "clever business strategy" and Microsoft in the same sentence. The announcement also has immense implications for the rest of the industry.  Whether or not Windows 8 is a financial success for Microsoft, we've now crossed a critical threshold. The old Windows of mice and icons is officially obsolete. That resets the playing field for everybody in computing. The slow death of Windows When Netscape first made the web important in personal computing, Microsoft responded by rapidly evolving Internet Explorer.  That response was broadly viewed as successful, but in retrospect maybe it was too successful for Microsoft's good.  It let the company go back to harvesting money from its Windows + Office monopoly, feeling pretty secure from potential challengers. Meanwhile, the focus of application innovation slipped away from Windows, toward web apps.  New software was developed first on the Internet, rather than on Windows.  Over time, Windows became more and more a legacy thing we kept because we needed backward compatibility, rather than a part of the next generation of computing. Windows was our past, the web was our future

A new report by research analyst, Forrester says that 80 percent of enterprise customers are using some version of Microsoft Office. This reflects the stranglehold Microsoft has on the office productivity market, despite increased awareness of alternatives such as Sun's OpenOffice.org suite, and the rise of web-hosted variants such as Google Docs. I had a chance to comment on this brief lament regarding Microsoft's iron grip, desktop monopoly.