Microsoft’s CEO is not in the mood for compromise with state and federal antitrust officials. He is in the mood to lead the company toward new vistas, and thinks it would be a crime against technology users for Microsoft to be broken up.
At least that’s what he told me over dinner the other evening. More in a special Thursday column.
Associated Press Bullies
The Associated Press is demanding that an Elian parody site be taken down (Wired News), thus proving that some journalists have absolutely no sense of humor or proportion. Sheesh.
AOL Time Warner and Competition
Leading consumer groups want to block AOL’s buyout of Time Warner (Mercury News). They have my sympathy, because this is not a good deal for consumers, but it seems unlikely that they’ll succeed.
AOL is rapidly turning into the next Microsoft — a bully that claims to be doing it all for customers but uses its dominance to run roughshod over its “partners” and the industry it leads. This buyout hastens the day when AOL will find itself across the table from the trustbusters. You can see this one coming from a long, long way off.
Pacific Bell’s Shared Resources
Those hilarious folks at Pacific Bell’s Internet services unit (PBI), who make questionable claims that their DSL connections “always fast and never shared,” probably haven’t asked their customers about the former, and they definitely didn’t check their own Web site before making running deceptive advertising about the latter.
From PBI’s Acceptable Use Policy:
PBI accounts operate on shared resources. Excessive use or abuse of these shared network resources by one customer may have a negative impact on all other customers. Misuse of network resources in a manner which impairs network performance is prohibited by this policy and may result in termination of your account.