Re: FC: The Justice Department's antitrust division? Try Viking raiders(fwd)

[Christopher Pall <christopher.pall@wmich.edu>]

It's full of some great mistruths - 

---

                   Consumers also rejected Netscape's
                   vision of the future, in which a browser
                   would be the only thing you'd see on your
                   computer screen all day.

---
Pardon me? But that's been the Microsoft goal as of late, they don't understand
browsers and internet software, so all they know is browsers - what to do?
Saturate! Next thing you know, Microsoft Word, the filemanager, the desktop,
development systems, the help file system are all in browser type material.

-----
                   An early victory for the government's
                   antitrust case? Nah. It's innovation, not
                   courtoom jockeying, that's spurring
                   competition to the Windows de facto
                   monopoly.
-----
That's what the court case is about. He goes on to talk about how Linux is just
getting a GUI interface as if to say that nix didn't have GUI before windows.
Oh well. 

He also talks about how Intel is being having trouble competing with AMD. Only
somewhat true. The CPU market has become bloody as of late, and of course, the
goliath who can front the most loss is going to win (i.e., cash reserves) Intel
will win hands down this way.

----------
		   Unlike Netscape and Sun, the Linux
                   community has spent all its energy on
                   competing in the marketplace, not
                   complaining to antitrust officials about
                   unfair conduct - an unlikely charge in the
                   case of Netscape, a company that
                   practically owned the browser market a
                   few years ago.
------------
Linux is not a "competitive" product so to speak. It isn't marketed or
developed at all in the same fashion that Microsoft develops the OS. The only
reason MS hasn't been able to target Linux is because of this reason. You can't
cut off the air supply of a product which has no money supply. You can attempt
to monopolize all the press time, but Microsoft has gleefully been filling up
the trade rags with stories of their plunders. You can misinform people, but
since Linux is a people based product, it's very hard to convince someone of
something that isn't true when most Linux users are very informed computer
people already.

Anyhoo. 

Of course, I don't exactly call the 1994 consent decree "caving". The thing was
toothless. It didn't solve a single problem. Not one. I don't want to declare
that it was a pointless exercise, but I do think it made for a perfect example
of why the government needs to pay attention to the past. Allowing Microsoft to
dictate any terms of any settlement, without giving it proper thought (this
current reorganization is a front) is going to end up with us all paying the
Microsoft tax in a couple of years. (unless of course winmodems, winvga,
wintv's, winscanners, windvd, and psedo-winhard drives all disappear)

That, my friends, is the greatest threat to Linux.

Chris