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Corrections thread | 63 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Corrections thread
Authored by: nsomos on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 10:47 PM EDT
Please post any corrections here.
It may be helpful to summarize the correction in the posts title.

Eggsample -> Example

We strive for accuracy to the source documents.
If you think you have spotted an error in transcripts,
please check against the PDFs before suggesting a correction.

Thanks

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off Topic
Authored by: Chromatix on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 01:18 AM EDT
All unrelated gunge here.

[ Reply to This | # ]

News Picks
Authored by: hardmath on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 06:27 AM EDT
When starting a new thread, please insert a clickable link to the article being
discussed (see How to post in HTML info below the Post a Comment box).

Otherwise News Picks tend to scroll so fast at times it can be hard to find the
one being discussed.

---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem
prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

[ Reply to This | # ]

Judge Motz Moves Goalposts Again
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 02:03 PM EDT

Hmmm... we're still going over this?

THE COURT: Another problem I have, which is a related issue which I mentioned before, I thought, frankly, Mr. Frankenberg had gotten there when he talked about how WordPerfect was being used for other 32-bit systems. I see absolutely no evidence -- and I am not going to allow an expert to make it up. I see absolutely no evidence that contemporaneously your client was trying to write, was trying to develop something that would have allowed it to reach all of the sources of information that it wanted on Unix or on anything else. It wanted to use Windows 95, and it seems to me that absent some evidence that -- not speculative evidence, but some real evidence that, in fact, what Microsoft did prevented you all from writing to other operating systems is a problem in your case. That's something we'll talk about at the appropriate time.

OK, now he sees that Frankenberg, not some "oik" (please pardon the vulgarity), testified that there were other OSes actively targeted. But - wait a minute - if Microsoft's actions didn't keep Novell from developing WordPerfect for Unix, then there's no harm to Novell, right? Or they could have used OS/2! Or Atari! Or something...

Had Microsoft sent a team to cut Novell loose from Planet Earth, and jettisoned the whole company into outer space, Motz would still claim that there was no harm because Microsoft didn't prevent Novell from knowing that a person could have purchased an oxygen tank at a welding shop.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Why Novell's argument is so convoluted
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 22 2012 @ 07:34 PM EDT
Obviously Novell's argument would have been much simpler if they had tried to prove that Microsoft violated antitrust law in order to crush Perfect Office and create the Microsoft Office monopoly. So why isn't their case about that? Why are they making a much more complicated argument?

The reason for the convoluted argument is that Novell didn't file in time to make the better argument. Four of Novell's original six claims were about Microsoft's Office monopoly and the remaining two were about the OS monopoly. There is a four-year statute of limitations that applied to all of Novell's claims. The clock started ticking when Novell sold Perfect Office. The antitrust trials brought by the US Justice department stopped the clock but only for what was covered in those trials. Since the OS monopoly was covered in the trials, but not the Office monopoly, the statute of limitations clock kept ticking on four of Novell's claims, but not on the other two. Based on when Novell filed, Judge Motz calculated that the statute of limitations had expired for the four claims involving the MS Office monopoly, but not for the two involving the OS monopoly. This was handled as an interlocutory order so that both Novell and Microsoft could immediately appeal. The Court of Appeals upheld all of Judge Motz order (PDF). That's why Judge Motz later said this:
It may be that Microsoft was using its knowledge of Windows 95 and restricting what it was giving to competitors, application competitors so that it could make Word and Office more dominate respectively in the word processing and the Office suite market. I understand that. But that is not the claim here. The claim here is different. It has to work to the operating system.
Novell's surviving arguments (which have to "work to the operating system") are more difficult to grasp. It's rather easy to understand how Microsoft could have deceived Novell by talking Novell into using the namespace APIs, then blocking their use. The thing is that for it to be important, Novell had to say Windows 95 was a really good OS and that the APIs in question amounted to a really cool new feature. It's clear that by crippling a really cool feature in Windows 95, they made the OS somewhat worse. It's one thing to argue that Microsoft harmed Peter (the OS) to help Paul (MS Office), but it's another thing to argue that they harmed Peter to help Peter, which is the only thing Novell can say anymore, thanks to filing so late.

Why would Microsoft harm Peter to help Peter? Well it's about harming Peter now to protect Peter in the future. Doing that would make sense to Bill Gates if he was thinking like a paranoid control freak, which may be the way to think if you are going to create and maintain an OS monopoly. Who knows what threats to the monopoly the future might bring? They only way to protect against the future is to create as many moats around your OS as you can. If you control the applications people use, that's a pretty good moat. If there aren't any immediate threats (there weren't back in 1995) it would make sense to temporarily harm your OS in order to build moats (application space monopolies) to protect your OS from potential future threats. That's what Judge Motz needed to understand.

Judge Motz may have understood the argument in the previous page, but he may have rejected it because he seemed to think that the threat to the OS monopoly had to be real and fairly immediate. At one point (PDF, page 9) he said:
[W]here is the evidence that there was any possibility, reasonable possibility, that within a relevant timeframe, I'll take it beyond '96 but I frankly don't know when it ends, but it ends sometime ... that there was any alternative operating system to which WordPerfect could have written...[where]...WordPerfect would became so popular that it would commoditize Windows 95, or ... it didn't matter what operating system [WordPerfect] ran on.
He's obviously thinking very short term compared to the way Bill Gates would have been thinking. IANAL and don't know what the law is, but for Novell to win, it must be illegal to think what Bill Gates thought and act accordingly, though, because they based their case on that. (I hope unfairly harming others in order to protect a monopoly from even imagined or far-distant treats would be illegal, but as I said, I don't know.)

I suspect Novell didn't file earlier than they did because Novell's management at that time was worried about MS locking out NetWare in retaliation. I am wondering why the US Justice department trials weren't more about MS Office, though. Even if Novell wasn't interested in helping the DoJ, by that time Novell had sold PerfectOffice, so how relevant would Novell have been?

[ Reply to This | # ]

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