If I believed MS was a "coercive monopoly", I would agree with US/EU chasing the MS pot of gold for a payout, under the guise of anti-trust laws.

To me, this always smelled like sour grapes from one side of the room that MS was stomping on, and "show me the money" from the government side.

If recent times have shown us anything, is that there is clearly room for competition regarding all MS products via other vendors (RHT, MySQL, GOOG, Apple, etc...). The barriers to entry are simply not there... they never were.

Then again, maybe I read too much Milton Friedman in my past life. ;-)

@ Roy Russo, Matt:

How would you defend /this/?

'That DirectUI is a Windows API is shown by the presence of formal
internal documentation in the form of web pages, marked “Internal Only�'

'Microsoft’s source code also uses the term “undocumented API,� e.g.
folder.c (SHGetSpecialFolderPath) and drawicon.'

'A number of Microsoft ex-employees and certified developers have
referred to much of Microsoft’s formal documentation as “undocumentation�'

http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/comes_v_microsoft/Supp_Rpt_Andrew_Schulman.pdf

So, over the years, Microsoft has used hidden APIs and flawed documentation, which is market abuse. There are thousands of other memos from Comes vs. Microsoft which show this behaviour to be consistent. I apologise for being devil's advocate in this blog.

Further to my previous point, bear in mind that Microsoft's protocols were described as "too trivial to be patentable". But it's worse; much worse. Microsoft actually took these protocols from the open source community and 'extended' them in a way that did more harm than good. This included delibrate back-dooring, which is costing the industry billions of dollars nowadays. I can provide references to support this.

So all that paper points out is that they use closed APIs and hide their docs. How is this different from most proprietary software companies? In most industries, this is called competitive advantage. (Maybe I dont understand the paper... Matt's the lawyer) ;-)

As for patents... I think we all agree that the US patent system is broken and lends itself to extortion acts. MS lawyers may have hijacked some tech, much like Unisys, and others have. So they don't play nice, and know how to game the patent system, but I still fail to see how the gov't (US/EU) can come after them with such anti-trust arguments.

At the same time, we can point to our own government monopolies on gambling, armed power, and in some places public utilities, airports, seaports, etc... Can the government then sue itself on anti-trust violations?

My problem is more with anti-trust laws being used when its convenient, rather than anything else related to MS.