Microsoft v. DOJ, 10 years later: Did it make a difference    
May 19, 2008
Source: Google

Ten years ago today, the United States Department of Justice 
filed a landmark antirust lawsuit against Microsoft. Six months later, Google incorporated in Menlo Park, Ca. 

The proximity of those two dates raises a delicious "what if." Knowing how the subsequent decade turned out, do you think the Justice Department would still have gone after Microsoft in 1998? 

Former DOJ antitrust chief, Joel Klein
I'm obviously asking a rhetorical question. Short of a H.G. Wells' time machine, Joel Klein and his trustbusters had no way to accurately predict tech's Google-centric future. But given the course of the technology industry in the subsequent decade, it's clear in retrospect how little the court battle mattered. 

When the government and 20 states filed their antitrust lawsuit, they charged Microsoft with exerting a ''choke hold'' on rivals while denying consumer choice. The lawsuit we filed today seeks to put an end to Microsoft's unlawful campaign to eliminate competition, deter innovation, and restrict consumer choice. In essence, what Microsoft has been doing, through a wide variety of illegal business practices, is leveraging its Windows operating system monopoly to force its other software products on consumers." 

That reads like a blast from the past. I spent the better part of two years watching lawyers for Microsoft and the trustbusters argue before the bench. Beyond the day-to-day, though, this was fundamentally a 
debate about the future of the desktop at a time when the Windows operating system was under challenge from the Internet. 

Bill Gates and his closest managers truly feared what would happen to Windows if Netscape's browser became the preferred conduit to the Internet. The court ultimately found Microsoft guilty of predatory behavior, but the company avoided potentially crippling, worst-case sanctions. 

If they ever sat down for a frank off-the-record conversation, maybe Klein and Gates might agree that their fin de siecle confrontation was less significant than it was cracked up to be. All the while, the bigger challenge to Microsoft was being put together in relative obscurity by a couple of Stanford geeks named Sergey Brin and Larry Page. 

Microsoft considers alternative Yahoo deal
May 19 , 2008 
SOURCE: TNN

Microsoft Corp said on Sunday it has reached out to Yahoo Inc about an alternative deal that would not involve a full acquisition, in a move that could save the web pioneer from fighting a proxy battle with financier Carl Icahn. 

Microsoft said it was not proposing to make a new bid to buy all of Yahoo "but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative" depending on discussions with Yahoo, shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft, 
or other third parties. 

Icahn launched a campaign on Thursday to replace Yahoo's board with directors who would reopen talks with Microsoft, saying Yahoo had acted irrationally in refusing the giant software company's $47.5 
billion bid. A source familiar with Microsoft said that Microsoft had not held discussions with Icahn about Yahoo. 

Microsoft did not disclose the nature of its contact with Yahoo in a short statement it issued "in light of developments" since the company withdrew its Yahoo bid two weeks ago. The company had said 
repeatedly that it had moved on, but the statement said the two sides had been in contact again. 

Microsoft emphasized that a deal might or might not result. Microsoft said it is continuing to explore and pursue alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. 

Mono offers open-source spin on Silverlight  
May 18, 2008 
SOURCE: REUTERS

The Novell-led Mono project this week made the first, though incomplete, public release of Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in that competes with products such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, and Apple QuickTime. The project has received Microsoft backing as part of a controversial 2006 intellectual-property 
arrangement between Novell and Microsoft. 

Mono, directed by Novell employee Miguel de Icaza, is aiming to create an open-source, cross-platform set of tools compatible with Microsoft's .Net programming framework. 

Moonlight is the project's upcoming implementation of Silverlight, a plug-in first introduced in September 2007, which supports rich Internet media such as animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback. (CNET News.com's Martin LaMonica got the early word on Moonlight last month.) 

Silverlight supports Windows and Mac OS X, and Microsoft has planned support for mobile devices, but the software does not support Linux operating systems. Moonlight supports the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux, de Icaza said in a blog post Tuesday. 

Users can install a downloadable version for Mozilla Firefox on Linux that does not include media codec support, or can compile the software from source code, de Icaza said. Firefox 2 and 3 are supported, he said. 

The release is not yet feature-complete, and is intended for developers who want to contribute to the project, according to de Icaza. Missing features include components in media codecs and the media 
pipeline. The release also features about 70 known bugs, he said. 

There are also some problems with recent changes to Firefox 3 that stop Moonlight from working and which require a workaround, de Icaza said. 

The release supports "windowless" mode, which allows Silverlight content to blend with other HTML elements on a page, but this is supported only in Firefox 3, according to de Icaza. 

The final version of Moonlight is to use audio and video codecs provided by Microsoft, as part of a wide-reaching and controversial intellectual-property deal between the software giant and Novell in 
late 2006. 

The support of proprietary media codecs, such as those used in Silverlight, has caused some controversy within the open-source world, with Tristan Nitot, the founder of Mozilla Europe, recently warning that companies building Web sites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.