MS Office for Linux?

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Gordon, Seth wrote:

> > From: John Chambers [mailto:jc at trillian.mit.edu]
> > 
> > Heh. Maybe you should ask a few lawyers. The is a great deal of legal
> > precedent for governments doing this sort of regulation. For example,
> > if I buy a package of light bulbs with the usual sorts of screw  base
> > that  you  find  here in the USA, I can screw it into an outlet in my
> > house and, aside from an occasional "sample defect",  it  will  work.
> > This requires all sorts of standardization...
> 
> Yes, the government can *legislate* all sorts of standardization.
> 
> However, it seems unlikely that the *judicial arm* of the government, in the
> course of enforcing an antitrust law, would order a software company to port
> a particular software package to a particular operating system -- especially
> since this software package and operating system were only tangentially
> involved in the original antitrust lawsuit.

There is certainly precedent for this judicially.  The IBM consent decree
in 1956, one of the cornerstones of modern anti-trust practice, dealt with
a very similar issue of "gratuitous icompatibility," originally in the
guise of plug-compatible printers.

I don't think the court will concern itself with whether Office is ported
to Linux.  The court ruled today -- you can read the decision yourself at
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/ms-conclusions.html -- that Microsoft engaged
in actual "conscious predation," which implies exclusionary conduct in
much the same way that murder implies assault.  This is not quite what
Microsoft wanted to hear, and would tend to support those arguing for
structural remedies (that is, splitting up the company).

That said, there have been persistent rumors that Microsoft is funding a
development effort in India to port Office to Linux.  I have no idea
whether this is true, nor what the motivation would be if it is true, but
it would be entirely consistent for Microsoft to have one division not
knowing what another division is doing.  Microsoft does not rise to the
level of idiocy attained by IBM where the PC hardware division refused to
sell OS/2 pre-installed, but it is capable of acting like any big company.

-- Mike