California sues Microsoft for antitrust...again

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Thanks for the lesson, but you didn't answer

Thanks for the lesson, but you failed to adequately answer the question. You sure provided a lot of information, but unfortunately most of it was irrelevant and -while related to the subject- had nothing to do with the DOJ case in question or the court ruling that was imposed.

MS was found to be a Monopoly not because of the territorial agreements that it had made. Every major manufacturer of ... well pretty much anything ... has agreements with vendors, distributors, and retailers just like that one. That's nothing new; It's been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time thereafter. Example: Car dealers. You can get a pickup truck for thousands of $$ less in the South than you can in the Northeast. Dealers in the South get a better discount from the factory than Northeastern dealers get.

Here's the reason that apparently very few people really know about:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

Specifically, check out paragraph 33. Essentially what it says is that American companies are not allowed to become too successful. You are not allowed to make a product that is so successful that everyone wants it, is willing to pay any price for it, and makes you a large amount of money. That and nothing else. Read past all the rhetoric, all the legal mumbo jumbo, and take a CAREFUL look at this. Despite what everyone else apparantly thinks, there were no predatory findings, the case had nothing to do with software quality, nothing to do with having a lot of cash on hand, nothing to do with partnerships with other companies (which are VERY common). These urban myths that MS doesn't open its source code is not mentioned anywhere (AOL has used IE for years as the foundation of their browser, for example). The nonsense about MS buying companies to stifle competition - don't even get me started on that. EVERYONE buys small companies. That's part of growth. There is no single large company out there in ANY industry that I can think of that hasn't bought some other related company at some point. It's simply good business, and both sides agree to these mergers. It's simply urban myth to believe that companies are being "bullied and forced" to merging with other companies. Anyone that's taken a couple of upper college classes in business practices can probably cite dozens of examples.

The point of my post is that, while everyone apparently has no problem finding fault with MS for whatever (personal) reason they may have, or for just plain being a mindless TV-zombie, or a lemming as I like to call it, they simply don't know. They just follow the crowd, throw in some stupid unrelated argument, and don't do any thinking on their own. It's amazing to me to have grown up in these last couple of decades - these last twenty some years where it used to be hard to find any useful information (frequent trips to the periodicals section in the library), to now where we are literally bombarded with information. Unfortunately, the substance, the usefulness, and the plain old truth of a lot of this information has simply become degrading to us consumers. I must have heard about the MS lawsuits and monopoly about a zillion times on TV, radio, and print by now. But I had to go out and find this information myself. Why didn't any of these TV personalities, these experts of information provide this information in the first place? Could it be that they simply didn't know themselves? Lazy reporting? Or just Lemming consumers? Think about it.

Posted by: rock06r   Posted on: 08/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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