The ongoing cat-fight between Google and Microsoft is a perfect illustration of what happens when an economy becomes over-regulated: participants stop competing in the marketplace and start competing in the courtroom.
Google on Monday called on a judge to extend part of the US government’s four-year anti-trust oversight of Microsoft, intensifying a lobbying battle that has seen the arch-rivals turn to anti-trust enforcement machinery to try to limit each other’s power.The intervention came in an unusual legal manoeuvre, as Google went over the heads of the Department of Justice and US state regulators to appeal directly to a Federal judge to impose greater restrictions on the software giant.
However, Microsoft’s legal camp claimed that the approach was part of an untested procedure that falls outside the bounds of US oversight of its operations.
Google’s intervention follows Microsoft’s appeal to anti-trust regulators to block its rival’s planned purchase of advertising technology company DoubleClick, a deal which is before the Federal Trade Commission.
Blah blah blah. The real problem underlying this case is that Google and Microsoft are fighting their battle with lawyers instead of products and services. Consumers should pick winners, not judges or juries, but the companies in this case have a strong incentive to litigate their differences because it's cheaper than actually competing. Unfortunately, the outcome of a legal battle won't always benefit consumers the way marketplace competition will.
On the other hand, I certainly would not say that the unrestricted monopoly enjoyed by Microsoft led to the best set of technologies for the consumer. It lead to platform lock-in; designed-in incompatabilities between eg. versions of MS Office, web browsers that willfully ignore the standards etc. Nothing that would be technically hard to solve, but it was chosen not to be. The result is a raft of annoying every-day problems we all now must live with, purely for microsoft's benefit.
Not to mention microsoft lobbying a tax on PC's, even if the customer does not want microsoft.
Would you disagree with any of that? I've yet to see a good defence of microsoft's behaviour.
jez: I wouldn't argue that Microsoft's software is the best conceivable, but there is lots of competition that can't measure up to Windows in various ways that consumers deem to be valuable. Linux, for instance, is a mature OS that has high penetration for certain applications (web servers, for one) but doesn't appear to be well-suited to others. Is MS a "perfect" company? No, but you're mistaken to call them a monopoly, and the dominance they have is largely due to their superior product and sophisticated marketing.
Well, I'm not arguing that their software isn't high quality. I use windows for some things. I'm specifically referring to the willful incompatibilities that have characterized their products, and, for example, forcing retailers like Dell not to support alternatives (intel is similarly guilty, I think). Can you defend either of these things?
These practices seem to me to be monopoly protection, an attempt to ensure platform lock-in. These things are anti-competitive. In my opinion the legal action against Microsoft is mostly to do with restoring competition in this sector.
jez: All companies take steps to stymie their competition. Success in the marketplace gave MS more power to block competitors, and the process snowballed. However, Altavista as the biggest search site on the internet a few years ago and now my spell-checker doesn't even recognize it... companies come and go. If I remember a statistic I just read correctly, only 25% of the companies on the S&P 500 were there 30 years ago (something like that). Companies rise and fall, it's not something to sweat over.
Sorry to harp on (honestly!)...
It's not microsoft's longevity nor the success of their apparent attempts to protect their monopoly that annoy me as a customer: it's the side-effects of those perceived attempts! It's endless hacks around incompatabilities in documents, even between different versions of MS Word; having to rewrite css to accommodate IE; having to ingeniously work around exchange server etc. -- these are just the things I've had to deal with this morning!
None of these things would be difficult, far less impossible, for MS to solve, but they choose not to. Instead they try to create lock-in by eg. surreptitious adding proprietary extensions to java.
Since the antitrust actions, MS has done a few things I like, such as taking an open approach to .net -- cos that's a product for developers maybe they would have been open anyway, but possibly the pressure encouraged it.
jez: Remember, they're still struggling with architecture paradigms from the 1980s :) (Similar to what you mentioned about makefiles.)
Yes, they could do better, but they're not a charity and I think they do pretty well. More competition would be nice and might smooth out some of the rough edges you mention, but remember that MS makes money from users, not developers, and users won't care about any of the things you mentioned.
Oh, I'm happy to let go the legacy issues which I understand and prefer to more breakage. I don't understand why MS office can't even be compatable with itself. Ever opened a Word '97 document in office XP? Was it fun fixing it??
These are absolutely things that users should care about. Editing old documents and spreadsheets, publishing a web page, reading email, these are all things that users do. If a user doesn't use Outlook and wants to hook up with an exchange server, his options are few.
Anyway, I agree that companies litigating against each other like this is not ideal, my point is that the result of less restriction through the 80s and 90s was not entirely positive. Microsoft does run a de facto monopoly (eg. they appear in wikipedia's entry for "monopoly"). There are positives coming from that: I don't think hardware would be so cheap if there weren't a single stable OS to support, for example. But i think continuing unrestricted was out of the question.
The big problem is the way large companies through money at the legal process. It takes way too long and consumes too much effort. See the gmail trademark case http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/04/2218253
the legal and moral arguments are obvious, but google persists just because they think the other guy will run out of money and drop charges. That, imo, is the real problem. It's legitimate and necessary for there to be some small amount of market regulation, and inevitable that some disputes will resort to courts, but it's the companies that blow it out of proportion not the regulators.
jez: I too would like to think that there's a way to reduce "frivolous" lawsuits, but what looks frivolous to you and me may be a matter of life and death to someone else. How could you institute a "laugh test" that wouldn't be abused by the strong players?