"DTJ" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
>
> This is misleading. Dell sells far more systems than IBM could ever
> hope to sell, so IBM should pay more.
>
True but what matters with these volume agreements is how many purchases are
made in each lot. No OEM will negotiate an open-ended deal, they are going
to
commit to a certain minimal number of preloads.
For example Dell may sell 200,000 systems and IBM may sell 100,000. But
both
are going to purchase MS licenses at 25,000 a pop - because neither wants to
get
stuck at the end of the year with a commitment to MS to purchase 100,000
licenses
and have only sold 90,000 systems. And it is worse when the OEM's offer a
choice of preloads - for example Win XP Professional vs Win XP Home on the
same system. So neither really knows if they are going to be getting 4
25,000 lots of
Win XP Home, or 2 25,000 lots of XP Home and 2 lots of XP Pro.
And of course when you stir in licenses that are localized to different
countries,
it makes things even more complex.
In any case, as you ought to know, MS already had a grudge against IBM with
OS/2 which may have factored in even more.
And the situation with Dell was even worse because they were not only doing
it
with OS, but MS Office 95 as well. For some time MS OEM'd Office Pro 95
to only Dell for like $50 a copy or some rediculous sum, as a "reward" for
them
not preloading anything other than Windows, and also forcing all purchasers
to
buy Windows when they buy a system.
> >Microsoft was very arbitrary on the costs to the OEM of Windows. It
> >was not based on volume or anything like that, it was polically based.
It
> >was no different than if a Negro-owned business that sold 500 tractors
> >a year had to pay $10,000 per tractor, (less shipping) while a
White-owned
> >business
> >that sold 50 tractors per year only had to pay $7,000 per tractor (less
> >shipping) for
> >the same tractor.
>
> The same as every other company.
> Pricing is based on the relationship
> between the customer and the sales person, not on volume. If the
> customer can negotiate better, they get a better price.
>
> This is not an argument to suggest that IF someone bases price on race
> that would be acceptable, but it is an argument that companies are
> legally able to set pricing based on the perceived value of their
> customer.
>
The problem is that this claim is dangerously skirting a lot of legal
abysses.
For starters, "perceived value of the customer" only has meaning in a
competitive
market. For example, you sell cars. One customer comes in and spends 2
weeks
of your time selecting a single car that costs $1000. A second
customer spends 3 hours of your time, which we will assume is the industry
standard,
selecting a car that costs the same amount. Neither customer will be in the
car market for the next 5 years in the future after they buy your car.
Obviously the first customer has much less value to you because while
they are burning up your time, your competitors are selling lots more
cars, and you are losing market share.
Now, in a non-competitive market (ie: monopoly) such as water or sewer
or phone service, (to name a few obvious monopolies) the seller DOES NOT
have a competitor that will be making use of the time they are burning up on
the 2 week customer to gain market share, because the monopoly provider
owns the entire market.
Thus, "perceived value of the customer" has absolutely no relevance in a
monopoly market, which is what Microsoft was ruled to be.
Secondly, thirdly, forthly, and so on, if anyone can prove so much as a
smigen that price variance is taking placed based on any of the prohibited
discrimination factors, (ie: race, sex, religion, etc.) by even a
non-monopoly
business, that business is going to have itself sued out of existence.
And last I haven't even touched on the markets that have artifical
pricing such as farm goods, steel, textiles, tobacco and so on, not to
mention the many last lawsuits that have been won on "product dumping"
I think that you are probably a libertarian or very conservative Republican
that has this image that the US market is an unencumbered, pure
capatalist market. The market today in the US is _extremely_ restricted
by many, many, laws. Sure, smaller businesses and individuals that are
selling stuff on Ebay can play at being a pure lasse-fair market, but this
just isn't reality for big businesses.
There is just simply no legal basis for the argument that that all
companies are legally able to set pricing based on the perceived
value of their customer, for anything they might sell at anytime they
might sell it.
> So what is
> the problem. They took the time to discover the function, they should
> test it.
>
It isn't that a non-Microsoft company cannot test a NEW version of Windows
and discover what changes might have been made in return codes from
undocumented functions, or some such, and thus release patches. Of course
they can.
The problem is that without access to what Microsoft's OS developers are
planning, the non-Microsoft applications company cannot even get STARTED
doing this until the next version of Windows is released. So they are
always
at risk of lagging behind Microsoft's applications group, if they make use
of
the same undocumented fuctions that Microsoft's applications developers
are using.
>
> Yes, but for a small business network, NetBeui is superior to TCP/IP,
> as it is much faster. TCP/IP is overkill for less than 10 systems,
> and yes, not everybody has or needs Internet access.
>
Well consider that Microsoft is arging that the Internet Explorer web
browser
components are a REQUIRED part of the Windows OS (that is why they
can't distribute a version of Windows without IE, remember) and consider
that IE is a TCP/IP application, now what is going to happen when none of
the TCP/IP networking components exist? ;-) Seriously, how can they
maintain the fiction that the web browser which requires IP is a required
part
of the OS then spend a lot of effort keeping non-IP networking going?
This was probably as much a political decision as technical. Even Novell
is walking away from IPX.
> >
> >It also becomes illegal when you design your product to not work
> >unless the customer ALSO buys all the REST of his products from
> >you.
>
> Sure, but I don't believe that happened.
>
Well, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office don't run on Linux, so I think
that
is a good example there. ;-)
Consider also that there's probably 10-20 times the number of Linux desktop
systems online than there are Macintoshes. Now, why is Microsoft NOT
releasing
Microsoft Office for Linux, yet they ARE releasing Microsoft Office for
MacOS X, when clearly they could make a lot more money off MS Office for
Linux due to voume? MacOS X _is_ UNIX after all, how difficult could it be
to port
it over? Furthermore, when IE was ported to Solaris, there's a couple
documents
up on MS that discussed that and mentioned that the head developers on the
Solaris port also had Linux boxes in their offices at Microsoft. I cannot
believe
that a secret port of the IE web browser to Linux doesen't exist.
Based on those probably most popular apps of Microsoft I think plenty of
evidence exists for product tying.
>
> Personally, I don't believe they are a monopoly. The judge slept
> throughout he trial, so any findings of fact he made are irrelevant.
> He was at best a moron, and at worst a paid shill for the competition.
>
But that finding was reviewed by a SECOND judge, who was VERY
friendly to Microsoft.
And you really should read the actual court transcripts. It is unbelievable
what Microsoft's lawyers were saying and what Bill Gates himself were
saying, under oath. Even if you take the position that they didn't deserve
a finding that they were a monopoly because they aren't a monopoly, if
you read all the transcripts and saw all the lying under oath that was
going on, you would see that they deserved to be punished with the
monopoly finding just for that.
And besides that, it isn't like a monopoly finding is forever and ever. The
entire point of the anti-trust trustbusting process, by the way, it to have
the company come out of it NO LONGER a monopoly. In short, the
remedial actions are supposted to change the company from a monopoly
to a non-monopoly.
The sickest part of this trial is that none of the underlying conditions
that
led to the REVIEWED finding of fact that Microsoft was a monopoly,
were actually addressed by the remedial actions! Imagine! It's like
taking a drug dealer to court and proving him guilty of dealing drugs then
telling him "OK, your free to go and keep dealing drugs, as long as you
pay us a big fine!!"
This is why this trial isn't over yet. Microsoft really, really didn't want
to
be broken up. So the cooler heads decided to give them one last chance
to do their own remediation in place of being broken up. But in 10 years
if Microsoft hasn't managed to address those conditions, they are going
to be right back in anti-trust court, and next time they really will be
broken
up.
> Second, there is competition, and always has been. The competition
> has always sucked, until Linux. Even that is a problem because most
> people are not capable of installing Linux. Still, difficulty of use
> does not make MS a monopoly.
>
This is a simplification. If Microsoft ONLY was the sole-source OPERATING
SYSTEM provider, they never would have been sued. You can make
areguments all you want about Windows being superior but the facts are
that at one time there WERE competitive business office applications for
word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, etc. They don't exist now,
and a large part of that is because Microsoft initially gave their software
away
for practically nothing, subsidized by the operating system's revenue.
Then once they got into a significant percentage of businesses, they
never agreed to standardize
on a single file format, and kept changing theirs, and wouldn't release
details of how the format was constructed internally.
It would not have been difficult to standardize on something like RTF for
the base documents, then have vendor-proprietary extensions to that. Sure
you would lose some formatting when moving a document from one
vendor's office app to another, but the basic text wouldn't have been
destroyed.
And now, Microsoft has the monopoly share and notice they are removing
things from Office and making it more and more expensive. First it was
MS Access, gone. Next it was PowerPoint, now gone. Those are now
only available for significant extra money. This is exactly how a monopoly
operates, it's textbook. First they give the product away then once they
have the monopoly and everyone else is out of business, they start jacking
up the prices.
>
> How true. Most repair shops, including dealers, that I have used,
> have no clue how to use the diagnostic software. When we bought my
> wife's new car, I had to help the repair guy figure out what to do.
Which is excellent support for the idea that it is high time that the
automakers
standardize on a single kind of diagnostic interface for their vehicles.
In my opinion they could easily put an Ethernet jack on the car, and all you
would
need to do is plug in a laptop computer to it. You could put a web server
right
on the vehicle and it could have menu-driven diagnostics, as well as
suggested
repair procedures. This is being done right now, today, for many networking
devices. The idea that the computer diagnostic smarts needs to be in an
external
computer is a 20 year old idea, left over from old car computer technology
dating
from the 80's which ran on stone-age microprocessors and support hardware.
Ted
