When it came to her final word on Microsoft, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly turned to "The Prince," Niccolo Machiavelli's famous Renaissance treatise on power politics, for direction. Quoting the Florentine philosopher as she issued her landmark antitrust ruling, Kollar-Kotelly gave Microsoft most of what it wanted. Yet at the same time, she didn't rely on the software maker's good intentions to make sure the decision will stick.
But if her 300-plus page decision suggested Microsoft was about as trustworthy as a member of the Borgia family, Kollar-Kotelly nevertheless concluded that the stiffer remedy demanded by nine states opposing a settlement between Microsoft and the Department of Justice last November didn't fit the offense.
Looks to me like Microsoft went two for two in the legal department over the last couple weeks. First, on October 25, Microsoft escaped with only a $50 fine for plastering butterfly shaped advertising decals all over the NYC sidewalks as part of a promotion for its latest rev of its MSN Internet service. $50? You can get a $50 fine in the Big Apple for just thinking about parking next to a hydrant.
Second, and a far, far bigger deal for the folks in Redmond, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly "conditionally approved" the federal settlement between Microsoft and the Justice Department. While the legal eagles can pour over the rulings for the next couple of weeks, I'd say Microsoft escaped with a slap on the hand and maybe a little arm twist at the end.
Microsoft has been accused of many things over the years, but no one can say it's stagnant. Despite a steep downturn in the technology market and an exhausting four-year battle with the federal government, the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has continued to plow ahead with new products and services. The secret of its success: dollars, developers and endurance.
With nearly $40 billion in the bank, Microsoft has the financial muscle it needs to enter highly competitive arenas such as gaming and to stick with slowly developing markets such as interactive TV and cell phones. Meanwhile, the company's developers are steadily improving the bread-and-butter products: Office and various flavors of the Windows operating system. And its executives continue to dream up and evangelize emerging concepts such as the tablet PC and Web services.
The result is that four years after the government charged Microsoft with violating antitrust laws, the company has grown richer and more influential as it expands well beyond its PC origins.
Attorney General John Ashcroft on Friday applauded a federal judge's decision approving the Justice Department's settlement with computer software giant Microsoft in the landmark antitrust case. "The Department is pleased with the court's decision approving the department's settlement with Microsoft," Ashcroft said in a statement issued by the Justice Department just minutes after the court's ruling.
"That decision confirms that the final judgement furthers the public interest by fully and effectively addressing Microsoft's unlawful conduct and restoring the competitive conditions in the computer software industry," he said.
A federal judge Friday largely accepted a proposed settlement in Microsoft's long-running antitrust case with the U.S. Justice Department. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said sanctions against the software giant are to last five years unless extended by the court. "The court is satisfied that the parties have reached a settlement which comports with the public interest," Kollar-Kotelly wrote. The settlement "is conditionally approved as the final judgment in this case," the judge wrote. The settling parties have until Nov. 8 to refile the settlement with changes requested by the judge.
Microsoft Corp. is taking aim at the high-end storage space with features being implemented in .Net Server 2003 and Server Appliance Kit 3.0. When it comes out early next year, Windows .Net Server 2003 will be bootable from a SAN (storage-area network) and will have new host-bus adapter certifications, said Zane Adam, director of product management, at the Redmond, Wash., company's six-month-old Enterprise Storage Division. Soon after its release, it will be upgraded for iSCSI support, he said. Microsoft hopes the upgrades will enable it to meet data center managers' strict demands on servers managing Fibre Channel and SCSI storage. However, Windows will not get actual SAN management software.
Microsoft is taking spam fighting more seriously in the next version of its widely used Outlook e-mail and contact-management software. Outlook 11 will, by default, no longer grab data such as images from outside servers when previewing e-mail formatted like Web pages. The ability to send and receive e-mail formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was at one time touted as a feature in Microsoft's e-mail programs.
"We've taken a step backward, so to speak, by blocking external content when you preview e-mail," Simon Marks, Office XP product manager, said this week. Marks described the new feature as an important spam-fighting tool.
The timing of Judge Kollar-Kotelly's ruling is interesting, coming as it does just days before elections in which many of the attorneys general that backed further remedies in the Microsoft suit are coming up for reelection. In one such case, Martha Dean, the Republican candidate for Attorney General of Connecticut is demanding that her rival, incumbent Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, give up his "obsessive" legal pursuit o the software giant. "Mr. Blumenthal's bold attempt to grab Microsoft's source code shows just how extreme his position is," Dean said this week. "Note to Mr. Blumenthal: Here in America, we do not allow our tax dollars to be used to take by force the intellectual property of one successful business and give it to its competitors." Yikes. Note to Mrs. Dean: Here in America we also don't allow a company to illegally gain a monopoly which it can then use to crush competition. Or maybe you're just not familiar with the ruling against Microsoft in its sweeping antitrust case.
On Friday, Microsoft issued two important new multimedia software releases, a beta of Windows Movie Maker 2.0 for Windows XP, a substantial upgrade over the version that shipped in XP, and the release candidate for its Windows Media 9 Series products, which includes the new Windows Media Player 9. Both products are available publicly.
Windows Movie Maker 2.0 (WMM 2) is a new and completely redesigned video editing application, which Microsoft is now aiming directly at iMovie, Apple's successful video editing package for the Macintosh. The new version includes impressive ease-of-use and functionality improvements, with over 130 new video effects, titles, and transitions. Unlike other products, however, WMM 2 is designed for novices and experts alike, with simple task-based wizards and a much wider range of movie output choices than its predecessor. WMM 2 also utilizes AutoMovie technology from Microsoft Research to automatically create high quality home movies with music and professional looking titles and transitions.
The federal judge overseeing the Microsoft antitrust case will issue her decision on Friday on what sanctions should be imposed on the company, a source familiar with the case said. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will hand down her ruling soon after the stock market closes at 4 p.m. EST about what additional sanctions -- if any -- to impose on Microsoft beyond the proposed settlement reached last year by the company and the Justice Department, the source said.
An appeals court in June of 2001 upheld trial court findings that Microsoft had illegally maintained its Windows monopoly in computer operating systems. Microsoft reached a settlement with the Justice Department in November. But nine states, including California, Iowa and Connecticut, say the deal is inadequate and have asked the judge for tougher restrictions.