The Anti-Trust Case Against Microsoft :: Business Technology

The Anti-Trust Case Against MicrosoftSince 1990, a battle has raged in fall in States courts between the United States government and the Microsoft Corporation out of Redmond, Washington, headed by Bill Gates. What is at stake is money. The federal government maintains that Microsofts monopolistic traffic patterns are harmful to United States citizens, creating higher prices and potentially downgrading software quality, and should therefore be stopped, while Microsoft and its supporters demand that they are not breaking any laws, and are just doing intimately business. Microsofts antitrust problems began for them in the early months of 1990(Check 1), when the Federal make out commissioning began investigate them for possible violations of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts,(Maldoom 1) which are designed to stop the formation of monopolies. The investigation continued on for the next three years without resolve, until Novell, maker of DR-DOS, a competitor of Microsofts MS-D OS, filed a complaint with the Competition Directorate of the European Commission in June of 1993. (Maldoom 1) Doing this stalled the investigations even more, until finally in August of 1993, (Check 1)the Federal Trade Commission decided to hand the reason over to the plane section of Justice. The Department of Justice moved quickly, with Anne K. Bingaman, head of the Antitrust Division of the DOJ, leading the way.(Check 1) The case was finally ended on July 15, 1994, with Microsoft signing a consent solving.(Check 1) The settlement focused on Microsofts selling practices with computer manufacturers. Up until now, Microsoft would sell MS-DOS and Microsofts other operating systems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) at a 60% discount if that OEM concur to pay a royalty to Microsoft for every single computer that they interchange (Check 2) regardless if it had a Microsoft operating system installed on it or not. by and by the settlement, Microsoft would be forced to sel l their operating systems according to the numeral of computers shipped with a Microsoft operating system installed, and not for computers that ran other operating systems. (Check 2) Another practice that the Justice Department accused Microsoft of was that Microsoft would specify a minimum chip of minimum number of operating systems that the retailer had to buy, thus eliminating any happen for another operating system vendor to get their system installed until the retailer had installed all of the Microsoft operating systems that it had installed.(Maldoom 2) In addition to specifying a minimum number of operating systems that a vendor had to buy, Microsoft also would sign contracts with the vendors for long periods of duration