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Gary Edwards

Microsoft Bad. Judge Jackson Worse. - Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine - 0 views

www.slate.com/1007917

antitrust Microsoft Dahlia-Lithwick Slate

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jul 10
     
    Microsoft today won the skirmish, the battle, and--in light of the leanings of a Bush/Ashcroft Justice Department--probably the war, in its fight against the pesky antitrust suit that's been nipping at its heels. With much of the decision accusing the behemoth of violating the Sherman Act exploded, Microsoft may now go down in history as the Little Monopolist That Could. In the short run, they've bought more time. In the medium run, settlement is probably inevitable, and in the long run, they have almost no possibility of a breakup. Not a bad day's work for a busy monopolist. (Full disclosure: Microsoft publishes Slate.)
Gary Edwards

Two Microsofts: Mulling an alternate reality | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/n-alternate-reality-7000016916

Microsoft microsoft-monopoly Judge-Thomas-Penfield-Jackson

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Judge Jackson had it right. And the Court of Appeals? Not so much
  • Judge Jackson is an American hero and news of his passing thumped me hard. His ruling against Microsoft and the subsequent overturn of that ruling resulted, IMHO, in two extraordinary directions that changed the world. Sure the what-if game is interesting, but the reality itself is stunning enough. Of course, Judge Jackson sought to break the monopoly. The US Court of Appeals overturn resulted in the monopoly remaining intact, but the Internet remaining free and open. Judge Jackson's breakup plan had a good shot at achieving both a breakup of the monopoly and, a free and open Internet. I admit though that at the time I did not favor the Judge's plan. And i actually did submit a proposal based on Microsoft having to both support the WiNE project, and, provide a complete port to WiNE to any software provider requesting a port. I wanted to break the monopolist's hold on the Windows Productivity Environment and the hundreds of millions of investment dollars and time that had been spent on application development forever trapped on that platform. For me, it was the productivity platform that had to be broken.
  • I assume the good Judge thought that separating the Windows OS from Microsoft Office / Applications would force the OS to open up the secret API's even as the OS continued to evolve. Maybe. But a full disclosure of the API's coupled with the community service "port to WiNE" requirement might have sped up the process. Incredibly, the "Undocumented Windows Secrets" industry continues to thrive, and the legendary Andrew Schulman's number is still at the top of Silicon Valley legal profession speed dials. http://goo.gl/0UGe8 Oh well. The Court of Appeals stopped the breakup, leaving the Windows Productivity Platform intact. Microsoft continues to own the "client" in "Client/Server" computing. Although Microsoft was temporarily stopped from leveraging their desktop monopoly to an iron fisted control and dominance of the Internet, I think what were watching today with the Cloud is Judge Jackson's worst nightmare. And mine too. A great transition is now underway, as businesses and enterprises begin the move from legacy client/server business systems and processes to a newly emerging Cloud Productivity Platform. In this great transition, Microsoft holds an inside straight. They have all the aces because they own the legacy desktop productivity platform, and can control the transition to the Cloud. No doubt this transition is going to happen. And it will severely disrupt and change Microsoft's profit formula. But if the Redmond reprobate can provide a "value added" transition of legacy business systems and processes, and direct these new systems to the Microsoft Cloud, the profits will be immense.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Judge Jackson sought to break the ability of Microsoft to "leverage" their existing monopoly into the Internet and his plan was overturned and replaced by one based on judicial oversight. Microsoft got a slap on the wrist from the Court of Appeals, but were wailed on with lawsuits from the hundreds of parties injured by their rampant criminality. Some put the price of that criminality as high as $14 Billion in settlements. Plus, the shareholders forced Chairman Bill to resign. At the end of the day though, Chairman Bill was right. Keeping the monopoly intact was worth whatever penalty Microsoft was forced to pay. He knew that even the judicial over-site would end one day. Which it did. And now his company is ready to go for it all by leveraging and controlling the great productivity transition. No business wants to be hostage to a cold heart'd monopolist. But there is huge difference between a non-disruptive and cost effective, process-by-process value-added transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform, and, the very disruptive and costly "rip-out-and-replace" transition offered by Google, ZOHO, Box, SalesForce and other Cloud Productivity contenders. Microsoft, and only Microsoft, can offer the value-added transition path. If they get the Cloud even halfway right, they will own business productivity far into the future. Rest in Peace Judge Jackson. Your efforts were heroic and will be remembered as such. ~ge~
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13
     
    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
Gary Edwards

Five reasons why Microsoft can't compete (and Steve Ballmer isn't one of them) - 2 views

betanews.com/...teve-ballmer-isn-t-one-of-them

Microsoft Joe-Wilcox Google IBM Monopolist OpenWeb

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • discontinued
  • 1. U.S. and European antitrust cases put lawyers and non-technologists in charge of important final product decisions.
  • The company long resisted releasing pertinent interoperability information in the United States. On the European Continent, this resistance led to huge fines. Meanwhile, Microsoft steered away from exclusive contracts and from pushing into adjacent markets.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Additionally, Microsoft curtailed development of the so-called middleware at the core of the U.S. case: E-mail, instant messaging, media playback and Web browsing:
  • Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates learned several important lessons from IBM. Among them: The value of controlling key technology endpoints. For IBM, it was control interfaces. For Microsoft: Computing standards and file formats
  • 2. Microsoft lost control of file formats.
  • Charles Simonyi, the father of Microsoft, and his team achieved two important goals by the mid 1990s: Established format standards that resolved problems sharing documents created by disparate products.
  • nsured that Microsoft file formats would become the adopted desktop productivity standards. Format lock-in helped drive Office sales throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s -- and Windows along with it. However, the Web emerged as a potent threat, which Gates warned about in his May 1995 "Internet Tidal Wave" memo. Gates specifically identified HTML, HTTP and TCP/IP as formats outside Microsoft's control. "Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats," Gates wrote. He observed not seeing a single Microsoft file format "after 10 hours of browsing," but plenty of Apple QuickTime videos and Adobe PDF documents. He warned that "the Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI)."
  • 3. Microsoft's senior leadership is middle-aging.
  • Google resembles Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s:
  • Microsoft's middle-management structure is too large.
  • 5. Microsoft's corporate culture is risk adverse.
  • Microsoft's
  • . Microsoft was nimbler during the transition from mainframe to PC dominance. IBM had built up massive corporate infrastructure, large customer base and revenue streams attached to both. With few customers, Microsoft had little to lose but much to gain; the upstart took risks IBM wouldn't for fear of losing customers or jeopardizing existing revenue streams. Microsoft's role is similar today. Two product lines, Office and Windows, account for the majority of Microsoft products, and the majority of sales are to enterprises -- the same kind of customers IBM had during the mainframe era.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Aug 11
     
    Excellent summary and historical discussion about Microsoft and why they can't seem to compete.  Lot's of anti trust and monopolist swtuff - including file formats and interop lock ins (end points).  Microsoft's problems started with the World Wide Web and continue with mobile devices connected to cloud services.
Gary Edwards

Is productivity in the workplace possible with Surface 2 or iPad? | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/h-surface-2-or-ipad-7000022220

Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform mobile-computing business-productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 13
     
    Not surprisingly, Microsoft is going to pound on "productivity" as the key differential between their desktop-cloud-mobile computing products, and those of mobile-productivity platform challengers, Apple and Google. There are three platform contenders, and this article points out that it is Google Apps that is keeping Apple in the business productivity game. Very interesting insight. Especially since a recent Forrester Report has the Apple platform capturing 65% of all mobile business application development. And Microsoft with only 1%. Google weighs in with 13%. This is a stunning setback for Microsoft. The MS monopolist empire is built on business productivity, with 98% of clinet/server marketshare. excerpt: "Over time, Microsoft has tried to tilt the marketing message to position Surface as a "productivity tablet". Now that Surface 2 is out, the "productivity tablet" message is coming across loud and clear. But can what people use tablets at work for actually be described as "productive"? Surface might be new, but the idea of using tablets in business is not. Although Microsoft would like us to believe that a tablet that doesn't run Office and doesn't have a good solution for a keyboard can't be used in business, the iPad has been used in business since its release in April 2010. Mobile device management (MDM) allows enterprises to control which apps are available on both on BYOD and enterprise-supplied tablets. Some MDM vendors publish reports and surveys on what their customers' allow and disallow. This information can provide some insight into what apps people are typically using. Back in June, my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reported on a report put out by one such vendor. Fiberlink gave this list of iOS apps that are commonly whitelisted: iBooks Adobe Reader Google Citrix Receiver Numbers Dropbox Pages iTunes U Keynote WebEx Along with those apps, you also need to add that apps that come with the device - namely web browsing, email,
Gary Edwards

A Humbled Microsoft Opens Windows to Rivals - TIME - 1 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1948381-1,00.html

ge Open-Web Open-Web-Ecosystem BPOS browsers microsoft-monopoly

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 09
     
    excerpt: "Once upon a time, Microsoft bestrode the software world like a ruthless cartoon villain, gobbling up rivals and defying pleas for restraint from regulators. But the once-impregnable giant has now been humbled: following an acrimonious 10-year anti-trust battle with European regulators, Microsoft on Wednesday finally agreed to open its Windows operating system to rival web browsers in Europe." Great opening line!  But they get the story wrong.  Woefully wrong!  Just the opposite is happening.  Microsoft has moved from the browser Web application to the Web itself.  It's the platform stupid!!! No one understands platform better than Microsoft.  Control the platform's base formats, protocols, interfaces and internal messaging system, and you control all applications, services and devices using that platform.   The problem for Microsoft has been that the Web is a platform used by all, but owned by none.  It's based on open standards that no one owns or controls.  So as the Web evolves into a universal platform for converged communications, content and collaborative computing, Microsoft was facing the one fate every monopolist fears - having to compete on a level playing field! While it took them well over ten years to come up with a counter strategy and effective implementation, Microsoft has finally achieved the impossible.   They have carved out a huge section of the Open Web for their proprietary and exclusive use.  
Gary Edwards

Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office - 0 views

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi

Google-Apps MS-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 10 - Cached
  • That's certainly one reason Microsoft still holds a giant lead in market share.
  • An IDC survey in July 2009 shows that nearly 97% of businesses were using Microsoft Office, and 77% were using only Microsoft Office.
  • About 4% of businesses use Google Apps as their primary e-mail and productivity platform, but the overwhelming majority of these are small and midsize organizations, according to a separate survey by ITIC. This puts Google well behind the open source OpenOffice, which has 19% market share, ITIC has found.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The ubiquity of Windows and the popularity of Windows 7 also work against Google, as Microsoft's Office tools are likely to have better integration with Windows than Google Apps does. And since most businesses already use the desktop version of Microsoft Office, customers interested in cloud computing may find it easier to switch to the Web-based versions of Office than to the Google suite.
  • According to IDC, nearly 20% of businesses reported extensive use of Google Docs, mainly in addition to Microsoft Office rather than as a replacement. In October 2007, only 6% of businesses were using Google Docs extensively, so adoption is growing quickly.
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 10
     
    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.
Paul Merrell

Spies and internet giants are in the same business: surveillance. But we can stop them ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-harbour-ruling-edward-snowden

surveillance state NSA EU data privacy litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies. It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US. This judgment may not strike you as a big deal. You may also think that it has nothing to do with you. Wrong on both counts, but to see why, some background might be useful. The key thing to understand is that European and American views about the protection of personal data are radically different. We Europeans are very hot on it, whereas our American friends are – how shall I put it? – more relaxed.
  • Given that personal data constitutes the fuel on which internet companies such as Google and Facebook run, this meant that their exponential growth in the US market was greatly facilitated by that country’s tolerant data-protection laws. Once these companies embarked on global expansion, however, things got stickier. It was clear that the exploitation of personal data that is the core business of these outfits would be more difficult in Europe, especially given that their cloud-computing architectures involved constantly shuttling their users’ data between server farms in different parts of the world. Since Europe is a big market and millions of its citizens wished to use Facebook et al, the European commission obligingly came up with the “safe harbour” idea, which allowed companies complying with its seven principles to process the personal data of European citizens. The circle having been thus neatly squared, Facebook and friends continued merrily on their progress towards world domination. But then in the summer of 2013, Edward Snowden broke cover and revealed what really goes on in the mysterious world of cloud computing. At which point, an Austrian Facebook user, one Maximilian Schrems, realising that some or all of the data he had entrusted to Facebook was being transferred from its Irish subsidiary to servers in the United States, lodged a complaint with the Irish data protection commissioner. Schrems argued that, in the light of the Snowden revelations, the law and practice of the United States did not offer sufficient protection against surveillance of the data transferred to that country by the government.
  • The Irish data commissioner rejected the complaint on the grounds that the European commission’s safe harbour decision meant that the US ensured an adequate level of protection of Schrems’s personal data. Schrems disagreed, the case went to the Irish high court and thence to the European court of justice. On Tuesday, the court decided that the safe harbour agreement was invalid. At which point the balloon went up. “This is,” writes Professor Lorna Woods, an expert on these matters, “a judgment with very far-reaching implications, not just for governments but for companies the business model of which is based on data flows. It reiterates the significance of data protection as a human right and underlines that protection must be at a high level.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is classic lawyerly understatement. My hunch is that if you were to visit the legal departments of many internet companies today you would find people changing their underpants at regular intervals. For the big names of the search and social media worlds this is a nightmare scenario. For those of us who take a more detached view of their activities, however, it is an encouraging development. For one thing, it provides yet another confirmation of the sterling service that Snowden has rendered to civil society. His revelations have prompted a wide-ranging reassessment of where our dependence on networking technology has taken us and stimulated some long-overdue thinking about how we might reassert some measure of democratic control over that technology. Snowden has forced us into having conversations that we needed to have. Although his revelations are primarily about government surveillance, they also indirectly highlight the symbiotic relationship between the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ on the one hand and the giant internet companies on the other. For, in the end, both the intelligence agencies and the tech companies are in the same business, namely surveillance.
  • And both groups, oddly enough, provide the same kind of justification for what they do: that their surveillance is both necessary (for national security in the case of governments, for economic viability in the case of the companies) and conducted within the law. We need to test both justifications and the great thing about the European court of justice judgment is that it starts us off on that conversation.
Gary Edwards

Interview: Paul Cotton on Microsoft Participation in the W3C HTML Working Group - W3C Blog - 1 views

www.w3.org/...view_paul_cotton_on_micro.html

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • As part of a series of interviews with W3C Members to learn more about their support for standards and participation in W3C, I'm talking to Paul Cotton from Microsoft and co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 10
       
      There's the W3C version of HTML5.  And then there's the WebKit version.  WebKit HTML5 is pushed forward by Google and Apple.  The methodology is that the WebKit developers submit innovations and advances back to the W3C HTML5 groups as "proposals".  The key is that WebKit does not wait for approval.  They make the submission and move on. The problem is that waiting for a snake pit of corporate competitors to approve your proposals and include them in the next rev of the specification does not make business sense.  Especially if the competitors are legacy burdened monopolist like Microsoft and IBM.   Google and Apple have to push WebKit HMTL5 forward.  Even Mozilla is now on the WebKit band wagon!  Nokia (QT), the RiMM Blackberry and Palm Pilot webOS are also on board.  The key to WebKit HTML5's success is the incredible marketshare of mobile-smartphone computing, and the pushback across the greater Web mobile-web computing devices are having. Does FaceBook wait for W3C HTML5?  Or do they chase the iPhone with a WebKit HTML5 website configuration and enhancement? That's a rhetorical question :)
Paul Merrell

Antitrust Chief Hits Resistance in Crackdown - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26antitrust.html

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 09 - Cached
  • WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top antitrust official and some senior Democratic lawmakers are preparing to rein in a host of major industries, including airline and railroad giants, moving so aggressively that they are finding some resistance from officials within the administration.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 09
       
      Predictable. Government regulatory agencies tend to become dominated by the regulated industries in no small part due to the "revolving door" that sees particular officials shuttling back and forth between working for industry and government. As former Senator Scoop Jackson said, the perennial problem with regulatory agencies is who will police the police? Now the Obama Administration's antitrust reformers hit the obstacle of regulatory agency bias toward the regulated industries. The monopolists fight back.
Paul Merrell

Trump Declares War On Silicon Valley: DoJ Launches Google Anti-Monopoly Probe | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...hes-google-anti-monopoly-probe

antitrust FTC DoJ Google

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Just before midnight on Friday, at the close of what was a hectic month for markets, WSJ dropped a bombshell of a story: The paper reported that the DoJ has opened an anti-trust investigation of Alphabet Inc., which could "present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter." The report was sourced to "people familiar with the matter," but was swiftly corroborated by the New York Times, Bloomberg and others. For months now, the FTC has appeared to be gearing up for a showdown with big tech. The agency - which shares anti-trust authority with the DoJ - has created a new commission that could help undo big-tech tie-ups like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, and hired lawyers who have advanced new anti-monopoly theories that would help justify the breakup of companies like Amazon. But as it turns out, the Trump administration's first salvo against big tech didn't come from the FTC; instead, this responsibility has been delegated to the DoJ, which has reportedly been tasked with supervising the investigation into Google. That's not super surprising, since the FTC already had its chance to nail Google with an anti-monopoly probe back in 2013. But the agency came up short. From what we can tell, it appears the administration will divvy up responsibility for any future anti-trust investigations between the two agencies, which means the FTC - which is already reportedly preparing to levy a massive fine against Facebook - could end up taking the lead in those cases.
  • Though WSJ didn't specify which aspects of Google's business might come under the microscope, a string of multi-billion-euro fines recently levied by the EU might offer some guidance. The bloc's anti-trust authority, which has been far more eager to take on American tech giants than its American counterpart (for reasons that should be obvious to all), has fined Google over its practice of bundling software with its standard Android license, the way its search engine rankings favor its own product listings, and ways it has harmed competition in the digital advertising market. During the height of the controversy over big tech's abuses of sensitive user data last year, the Verge published a story speculating about how the monopolistic tendencies of each of the dominant Silicon Valley tech giants could be remedied. For Google, the Verge argued, the best remedy would be a ban on acquisitions - a strategy that has been bandied about in Congress.
Paul Merrell

Networked Dream Worlds - Real Life - 0 views

reallifemag.com/networked-dream-worlds

internet 5G tradeoffs

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Perhaps it goes without saying that 5G promises to be highly profitable for wireless and tech companies. Some industry analysts have predicted that 5G could generate up to $12.3 trillion in goods and services by 2035, and add 22 million jobs in the U.S. alone. This helps explain why the carriers are so eager for us to share their vision for a better tomorrow — a world in which bandwidth, speed, and growth are virtues in and of themselves. Those “key performance indicators” are then sold to the consumer in the form of efficiency, inclusion, reliability, and convenience. And while these 5G speculations suggest a world of possibility and profit, they elide lots of potential risks and alternative futures. They also, unsurprisingly, fail to ask about the wisdom of entrusting the telecom industry (which has a long history of unscrupulous, monopolistic business practices) and the tech industry (newly under fire for similar reasons) to build what is purportedly the critical infrastructure for a planned global transformation.
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