From: kitchin@lf.hp.com (Bruce Kitchin)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
Date: 23 Dec 1992 16:42:02 GMT
Organization: Hewlett Packard Santa Clara Site
NNTP-Posting-Host: eden.avo.hp.com
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Randall A Helzerman (helz@ecn.purdue.edu) wrote:
: 
: I _still_ don't understand why anybody thinks that Microsoft has an obligation
: to make life easy for its competitors.  Do you feel an obligation to reveal
: all of your trade secrets in order to make a "fair" playing field for
: _your_ competitors?

There are two issues under discussion.  Only one of them is mentioned in
the recent announcements about the FTC.  That issue is whether Microsoft
is using its muscle with PC manufacturers to make it very difficult for
other opsys manufacturers (Novell DR DOS, IBM OS/2, clones of UNIX) to
get a chance to compete.  The questions is not whether they are having
trouble due to technical excellance or ability to satisfy customers, but
whether they are making deals with other companies to unfairly inhibit
the ability of their opsys competitors to compete.  I haven't read the
details of turn-of-the-century anti-trust cases for a while now.  However,
as I remember it, companies like Standard Oil with gasoline and DuPont
with gunpowder were determined to be using sharp business practices which
inhibited the ability of a free market to work.  It appears that the FTC
has found the Microsoft is engaging in the same types of practices that this
country, nearly a century ago, decided was bad for the public good.

The other issue that I've seen discussed relates to the applications vs
opsys divisions of Microsoft.  Since Microsoft is the current leader
in delivery operating platforms for PC's, they determine what capabilities
that producers of Word processors, spreadsheets, etc have to use in building
their applications.  It is being alleged that Microsoft is allowing their
applications groups to have an unfair advantage in building applications
by letting them in on secret information about what can be done through
DOS or Windows that isn't being made available to all developers.  The
recent book Undocumented Windows shows that there are features being used
that are not documented (some by Microsoft and others by other companies
who evidently reversed engineered the product).  One of the big problems
here is time to market.  I know from personal experience that when DDE
and OLE were brought out, there wasn't that much time for the producers
of word processors and spread sheets to add this capability to their
products in time for the release of Windows that supported them.  However,
Microsoft products were available on or before the release of the
pertinent version of Windows (DLL's were made available that allowed
using the features with the previous version of Windows).  By reducing
the time to market of Microsoft products using inside knowledge of the
operating platform that was not available to competitors, it is alleged
that this is an unfair business practice since the application competitors
are forced by market forces to develop for Microsoft operating platforms
and Microsoft applications get the information much more quickly to allow
them to get out sooner (not because of technical excellance or good
work, but by secret knowledge).  There is a story that DDE was actually
designed by Microsoft Applications and added to Windows for their
benefit.  Do other application producers get this advantage?  None of
this is hard fact.  However, there seems to be enough smoke to look to
see if there is fire.  

In most other industries, you do not have a situation where a competitor
controls another segment of the market that is able to give them an
advantage and you a disadvantage.  Attempts to do this have usually 
brought the FTC around and resulted in changes by the company doing it.
Whether the case has merit or not is yet to be seen.  But I believe
that it is to the disadvantage of us the customers if we return to the
days of the robber barons and uncontrolled monopolies.
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy