[NTLUG:Discuss] Microsoft - US DOJ -- Final Order

[Steve Baker]

al wrote:
> 
> I hope MS in its rush to appeal ends up disturbing the court enough
> to make the court decide to go with the 3-way instead of the 2-way

Well, whatever happens, this decision is only a preliminary one.
You can be sure it'll be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

What'll be interesting will be (a) whether they get fast-tracked
to the Supreme Court - and (b) whether the Supreme Court even
decides to accept the case...as I understand it, they don't have
to.  IANAL though.

I don't know whether I care very much about a 2-way versus a 3-way
split.  What concerns me is that this is a split along product
lines...I would have preferred a split that would have produced
two identical halves to the company.

Microsoft's history of ignoring court injunctions leads me to
believe that they'll skirt around the restrictions on the
two companies doing back-door cooperative ventures - which
could mean that we simply end up with two monopolies instead
of one.

A split in the other direction would have produced instant
competition between the two halves.  The existance of two
separate copies of Windoze out there would force the existance
of Open standards for portability.

Right now, the OS part can still force hardware vendors to do
things like supporting Direct3D instead of OpenGL - and changing
the D3D specification drastically with each release.

Still, it's great to have all these legal types confirming
what we've all been saying about Microsoft for the last
ten or more years.

So, how long do you think it would be before the new
Applications company would start to churn out Linux
versions of M$-Office?
-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)