Microsoft v. DOJ, 10 years later: Did it make a difference?
,----[ Quote ]
| When the government and 20 states filed their antitrust lawsuit, they charged
| Microsoft with exerting a ''choke hold'' on rivals while denying consumer
| choice.
|
| The lawsuit we filed today seeks to put an end to Microsoft's unlawful
| campaign to eliminate competition, deter innovation, and restrict
| consumer choice. In essence, what Microsoft has been doing, through a
| wide variety of illegal business practices, is leveraging its Windows
| operating system monopoly to force its other software products on
| consumers."
|
| That reads like a blast from the past. I spent the better part of two years
| watching lawyers for Microsoft and the trustbusters argue before the bench.
| Beyond the day-to-day, though, this was fundamentally a debate about the
| future of the desktop at a time when the Windows operating system was under
| challenge from the Internet.
|
| Bill Gates and his closest managers truly feared what would happen to Windows
| if Netscape's browser became the preferred conduit to the Internet. The court
| ultimately found Microsoft guilty of predatory behavior, but the company
| avoided potentially crippling, worst-case sanctions.
`----
http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9946945-60.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Recent:
Is Microsoft Now Banned from EU Contracts?
http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=697&blogid=14
Microsoft accused of stacking ISO committee
,----[ Quote
| In a memo sent following his last meeting as head of the working group on
| WG1, which is handling Microsoft’s application to make the Word format an ISO
| standard as ECMA 376, outgoing Governor Martin Bryan (above), an expert on
| SGML and XML, accused the company of stacking his group.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1777
Software wars
,----[ Quote ]
| Allegations of committee-stuffing, the outcome of votes overridden by
| political appointees, a final decision that many involved consider tainted:
| this may sound like a discredited election in some third world country. But
| it is actually a description of an ugly fight over international technical
| standards that wrapped up this week. Microsoft came out on top, but at the
| cost of tarnishing its reputation and the credibility of an important
| back-room process that oils the wheels of many global industries.
`----
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c9743360-01a8-11dd-a323-000077b07658,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fc9743360-01a8-11dd-a323-000077b07658.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerworlduk.com%2Ftool
The Art of Being Mugged
,----[ Quote ]
| The four options presented were:
|
| * Option 1: Submitter's responses (Ecma's) are all automatically
| approved.
| * Option 2: Anything not discussed is not approved.
| * Option 3: Neutral third-party (ITTF) decides which Ecma responses are
| accepted
| * Option 4: Voting (approve + disapprove) must be at least 9 votes.
| Abstentions not counted.
|
| We were told that these options are not in the Directives and that were are
| given these choices because ITTF "needs to act in the best interests of the
| IEC". I don't quite get it, but there appears to be some concern over what
| the press would think if the BRM did not handle all of the comments. One NB
| requested to speak and asked, "I wonder what the press would think about
| arbitrarily changed procedures?". No response. I thought to myself, why
| wasn't ITTF thinking about the 'best interests" of JTC1 when they allowed a
| 6,045 page Fast Track submission, or ignored all those contradiction
| submissions, or decided to schedule a 5-day BRM to handle 3,522 NB comments.
| Isn't it a bit late to start worrying about what the press will think?
|
| We break for lunch.
|
| After lunch and after more discussion, the meeting adopted a variation of
| option 4, by removing the vote minimum. I believe in this vote the BRM and
| ITTF exceeded its authority and violated the consensus principles described
| in JTC1 Directives.
`----
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/art-of-being-mugged.html
Related:
Martin Bryan: we are getting “standardization by corporation”
,----[ Quote ]
| A November informative report of Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34
| WG1 highlights the fallout of the ECMA-376 fast-track process for ISO. He
| says he is 'glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible'
|
| [...]
|
| In what is an astonishingly outspoken report, Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC
| JTC1/SC34 WG1 has given us insight into the total mess that Microsoft/ECMA
| have caused during their scandalous, underhand and unremitting attempts to
| get - what is a very poorly written specification {i.e. DIS 29500 aka OOXML,
| AR} - approved as an ISO standard. …
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-30107/martin-bryan:we-are-getting-standardization-by-corporation
Dysfunctional ISO - Courtesy of Microsoft
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2007/12/dysfunctional-iso-courtesy-of-microsoft.html
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