Re: The Microsoft stranglehold on its users....



On Tue, 15 May 2007, BMJ wrote:

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

This is the next step, after the one about 2 years ago when they put very large ads in all the trade rages about who was going to indemnify whom in case of patent infringement and it was major intimidation to get customers to buy into MS instead of the competition with shallow pockets. There was a lawyer (Lee? Rosen) who wrote a lot of "Geeklaw" columns in Linux Journal also about 2-3 years ago about how Linux really could be vulnerable to litigation from MS (no names were mentioned) and it is serious. And, by extension, it would have to apply to BSD, which also means OS-X, and that means MS could have Apple by the balls, too.

Where SCO ran out of money (and public sympathy), MS could become the new Roman Emperors. While Steve Jobs may or may not have thought about it, it could be another unpublicised reason for going to x86 architecture (to make it possible to run MS OS and aps), as well as head off in a new direction away from computers altogether for the benefit of Apple's survival.

There was still a technical reason for that. The story I heard was that the PowerPC processors that Apple wanted for, I believe, a line of laptops wasn't going to be available within a reasonable time. The Intel chips, however, were and they didn't produce as much heat.

They were much cheaper, too. but, it would be nothing for Macs to run Vista now.

The PowerPC was originally developed as a joint collaboration between IBM, Motorola, and Apple in the early '90s. Motorola got out of the semiconductor business by creating Freescale a few years ago. Possibly that had affected Apple's production schedule, though Freescale is still producing PowerPC chips.


Where the case gets weak is that it would be an anti-competitive move by MS and the courts may not want to see what is already a monopolist position by a robber-barron corporation become even stronger. Little guys like us are not the target; its IBM and Oracle and Red Hat.

At some point, thinking about our obligation to obey the law, I remember a WSJ article about how courts decide cases if juries don't like a law. Or, if a defendant is guilty but the law is bad, it is OK for the jury to deliver an innocent verdict. Going back to prohibition, they found out that the law was unenforceable and IIRC the law was withdrawn. considering that MS has a more than ten year history of being a robber-barron (eg. many years of battleing in Europe over this), it is further evidence of what is in the criminolgy books about "habitually criminal" corporations.

In terms of "rebelions" and revolts, I would expect hackers might go all out for MS payback.


<snip>

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