MS Office for Linux?

[Mike Bilow]

The law is fairly clear on this point: although one may obtain a monopoly
through entirely legal means, it is unlawful to engage in anticompetitive
conduct in order to sustain or expand that monopoly.  The court found
today actual "conscious predation," which implies but is far worse than
merely prohibited exclusionary conduct.  I think you would have to go
back to the 1911 Standard Oil case to find a court decision this damning
against a major American corporation, and that ended up as the poster
child for structural remedies.

It is pretty obvious from reading the court decision today that the judge
is not thinking in terms of whether Office will run on Linux; the court
already ruled in November that Linux was in no position to threaten
Windows market dominance either now or for a reasonable time into the
foreseeable future.  The court certainly would have the power to force
Microsoft to support Office on Linux, but the meat of the ruling is the
"middleware" issue involving web browsers and Java, and that militates
toward splitting off the operating system division as a separate company.

My guess is that the judge was heavily influenced by the extreme position
taken by Microsoft as a legal defense: denying that operating systems can
be a market segment, denying that a monopoly position exists in Windows,
having a chairman who gave a horrifyingly evasive deposition where he
denied even knowing the people who report to him, and memorably faking a
demonstration introduced under oath which could not be replicated once the
fakery was caught.  By the time you are cross-examining the medical
examiner, you may as well concede that the body autopsied is really dead.

-- Mike


On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Derek Martin wrote:

> No such condition exists with software.  The lack of competition is due to
> Microsoft's relentless pursuit of their competitors, the end result of
> which is a kind of modern-day, "civilized" version of genocide... of
> software companies.


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