This says it all:

[mdlbear]

"U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Friday that she rejected harsh antitrust punishments for Microsoft because they would unfairly benefit its competitors." (from ZDnet news)

So, let me get this right: their punishment for competing unfairly is to get a "settlement" that basically tells them to stop doing the things that drove their previous competitor out of the browser business, while doing nothing to stop the unfair competition they're engaged in now.

As they say, in the US you get all the justice you can afford. Microsoft can afford a lot.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure here.

For one thing, I was running the tech side of an ISP at the time of the browser wars, and it was cheaper for us to invest in the development of our own browser than it was to pay the $3 a copy that Netscape wanted just to distribute the free download version of their application to our subscribers.

Netscape certainly didn't do anything to help their market even before Microsoft offered IE 3.0 (I don't count IE 1.0 and 2.0 as they were, err, awful). Their pricing model was terrible, and their ISP relations (certainly in the UK) were even worse. The whole ISP market depended on speculative distributions on magazine cover CDs - which if Netscape had their way would have cost us $250K a month... Which wasn't economical for both sides - especially as we would have been able to pass them anything up to 11,000 $12 registrations...

And then there was Netscape's initial flouting of the W3C processes even in their first releases... remember the blink tag?

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

yes, NS screwed themselves over and yes, WordPerfect and Lotus and others did the same by refusing to develop for Windows when the market wanted it (the Windows version of 1-2-3 was based on hobby code abandoned on a server after the author quit Lotus in disgust, WP for Windows ignored the whole WYSIWYG and OS control of peripherals model; Office succeeded by actually being quite good vs the competition) but to my mind, the real problem with MS isn't the one that the states took to court. You can't unpeel IE from Windows because of the way it's written; they could have written it in a segmentable way but they didn't. They've even got better on the vicious Windows licensing to PC manufacturers. But what they don't seem to get is the code quality and benefit analysis you need to run big teams.