The Accused, 1998

Summary: Microsoft is distrusted for its anti-competitive behaviour and CBS says that "Microsoft has never been a technology company"

LAST WEEK CBS made the following observation which we found interesting:

By contrast, Microsoft has never been a technology company. Instead, it has thrived on game theory, i.e., by creating arrangements and situations in which other parties found it more beneficial to cooperate with the company rather than to challenge it.

Well, actually, describing monopoly abuse as "game theory" is improper. However, we do like the part where it says that "Microsoft has never been a technology company." There is a lot of truth there. A few years ago, Microsoft's European business security product manager told the press : "Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products." Microsoft also copies many existing products and then claims them to be its own "innovations". Microsoft is a marketing/legal firm to a great extent, always finding ways of coercing/abusing laws to its own advantage. We wrote about this subject before and also gave examples.

“So for me, this is like watching a girlfriend since grade school marry a well-known womanizer.”
      --Pamela Jones, GroklawSeveral days ago we wrote about Ulteo's decision to become a partner of Microsoft [1, 2] (maybe a decision made out of certain desperation after limited success moving users to GNU/Linux by embedding it closer to Windows). Pamela Jones, the editor of Groklaw, was disappointed by this news. She wrote: "Gaël Duval, who started Mandriva, my first Linux, is co-founder of Ulteo, which became an OIN member quite recently. So for me, this is like watching a girlfriend since grade school marry a well-known womanizer. She's glowing with hope, but you're feeling pain in your stomach thinking about her likely future."

Well, "well-known wife beater" might fit better than "well-known womanizer", but one has to keep polite.

In other news, Microsoft manages to escape some wrath in Europe [1, 2], which probably leaves it more room to abuse the competition.

A group of leading technology companies announced today (11 June) that they were withdrawing an antitrust complaint that they had filed with the European Commission against Microsoft.

This is an unwise move because Microsoft is still abusing its dominant position and also attempting to extort European companies with software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. One of those companies distributes the "Ubuntu" distribution of GNU/Linux. ⬆