Justin, Could you fax this for me please.
Honorable Judge J. Frederick Motz,
I thank you and your staff for your time. I am faxing this document
in response to the recent Microsoft class action settlement . I personally
feel that the settlement does not punish Microsoft in any way for their
dishonest actions. The settlement does not address the issue that
Microsoft has performed criminal actions and will perform them again, if
not checked.
I also believe that the settlement will help Microsoft in the long run
instead of hindering their unacceptable actions. They will have access to
the country's youth in a setting that moulds young minds. I believe that
this will help solidify Microsoft's monopoly by inundating our young people
with product placement and advertising.
Furthermore, to illustrate how this company, and its leaders cannot be
trusted, and are absolutly monopolistic, I will provide some classic
examples of their past deeds.
Back a long time ago, when IBM had decided to open the market for the
software for their Personal Computers, they had 2 prime candidates Microsoft,
and Digital Research. Bill Gates (microsoft) had found out what Gary
Kildore(sp?) (digital research) was planning on selling his OS (operating
system, the software that makes the computer work). and offered his (bill's)
for much much less (DR DOS= $250, MS-DOS=$50). These prices were to be
"locked in", to stableize the price of the PC. The were the only companies
that had the chance (or were available at the time) to offer an operating
system to be sold with the PC. Nowadays (and for many years) If you want a
copy of windows (windows 95/98/2000/ME) You will need to pay $179 for your
new computer, since there really was no competition (DR DOS died off within
a few years), Microsoft could/can charge whatever they wanted undisputed.
Airlines have used this same model to run out small airlines, and were
caught and fined, and laws were written to protect the smaller airlines from
such brute force monopolistic tactics/policies.
Just prior to a big boom in the PC market (around 1992 or so...) Microsoft
went to several computer manufacturers (Compaq, Packard Bell, Leading Edge,
...) and sold them on a contract that would save them %50 on the cost of
windows 3.1/DOS package, at the time there was only OS/2 as their
competition, and it wasn't as popular as window, so they thought it would be
a great deal for their customers, however they were fooled into signing a
contract that stipulated that they pay bill for windows/DOS for each computer
they built, not every computer they sold with windows/DOS, so they had to
pass this cost onto the customer, even if they wanted OS/2, and not
windows/DOS, OS/2 sales failed misrebly because the bulk of the market was
the companies that had to pay for windows, and could not compete if they had
to pay bill, and pay for OS/2, even when they only sold the computer with
OS/2.
Those 2 instances made the biggest influence on the computer software
market, prettymuch locking bill's product (which would not work with anything
else (this is called proprietary, which is anti-competitive)).
That alone would be enough, but wait, theres still more. Bill became even
more greedy, he began bullying other software companies, he had the money to
buy them outright, or drive them out of business. One specific company that
comes to mind is the one that made a product called "Stacker" It enabled DOS
users to utilize softare compression to get more disk space (at the time,
hard disk storage was the predominant media, and pretty expensive ( about
$!/Megabyte) and if you can spend $40, to get the utilization of a 400
megabyte hard disk, with your 200 megabyte hard disk, it was quite a boon.
nowadays its less of a big deal, and hard drives are relatively cheap, and
this compression technique is not used so much, however, back in 1994 it was
a big deal. Bill just had to have this, he couldn't stand someone else making
a buck in his field, so he tried to buy the company (I cant remember their
name off the top of my head right now, but they were based in Massachusetts)
anyway, They simply were not interested in selling their business, it was
doing great, and they had no desire to have anything to do with this nasty
man that had been gobbling up software companies, and bullying the entire
industry. Bill couldn't buy their company, so he stole it (he got a copy,
reversed-engineered it, changed the code slightly (enough to say its not
exactly the same as theirs, and thereby not theirs). Unfortunately for
millions of unsuspecting Microsoft customers it had backfired in bills face,
you see the parts he had changed did make the software unstable, and millions
of people lost the contents of their hard disk drives (BTW, I did own stacker
at the time, and I really got a kick out of bills tactics catching up with
him!). There were law suits between the owners of stacker, and microsoft, but
in the end, the makers of stacker went out of business, since bill was giving
their product away for free with the newwest version of DOS (i think it was
6.0) Microsoft was able to fix the code, and eventually had a usable
compression scheme, nowadays i think its called drivespace3.
Bill did the same thing with Microsoft Internet Explorer, and it worked
pretty well, If you check webserver logs (I do system administration, I see
these things all the time...) you will notice that about 90% of the website
traffic comes from Internet Explorer. Microsoft got it from a company Named
Spyglass, which got it as Mosaic from the NCSA (this is where the Mark
Andeersen (sp?) Co-Founder of Netscape helped develop it Mark Is one of the
people that are responsible for creating the graphical based web browsers
that are practicly a necessity these days. You might consider consulting him
on what he thinks of microsoft, last I heard he was starting up a company
called "Loud Cloud". I hope it goes well... He did make a fortune with his
product, but once bill found out, bill ran him out of business by offering
Internet Explorer for free, just to run down Netscape (at the time, one of
the few companies other than Microsoft making some real money.
Please forgive my long windedness, These are only a few of the many many
examples of Microsoft's bad deeds, he is a scoundrel. should be held
responsible for his actions, and never trusted, like the story about the
scorpion and the frog, its his nature, not a isolated incident that could be
confused with an accident or oversight. I personally would like to see bills
money taken away from him (give it to the poor, or non-profits or something),
his company shut down forever, and bill make to do a lot of community
service, ohh. I know that would never happen, but I can dream cant I?
Sincerely
Jamie Paul Chamoulos, aka [EMAIL PROTECTED]
end transmission
> I thank you and your staff for your time. I am faxing this document
> in response to the recent Microsoft class action settlement . I personally
> feel that the settlement does not punish Microsoft in any way for their
> dishonest actions. The settlement does not address the issue that
> Microsoft has performed criminal actions and will perform them again, if
> not checked.
>
> I also believe that the settlement will help Microsoft in the long run
> instead of hindering their unacceptable actions. They will have access to
> the country's youth in a setting that moulds young minds. I believe that
> this will help solidify Microsoft's monopoly by inundating our young people
> with product placement and advertising.
>
> While the counter-offer by Redhat Corporation may not be the perfect
> answer, I believe it is a step in the right direction. Microsoft needs to
> be punished, not reprimanded and given free advertising. Please consider
> Redhat Corporation's counter-offer. Not only does Redhat's proposed
> settlement benefit our schools far more than the Microsoft settlement, it
> also punishes the software giant for their actions.
>
> Sincerely,
> Justin Bengtson
>
> (The views in this document do not, in any way, reflect the views of
> Petersen-Arne, it's associates, business partners, customers or employees.)
